My understanding is that the difference in terms goes back to the Norman invasion, which is when a ton of French-based terms for things were carried over.

The peasants referred to everything as the name of the animal but the French nobles referred to it as porc, boeuf, etc. This is also where we got the words for venison, mutton, veal, poultry, and also apparently pheasant

Because of the Norman invasion. 1066 and all that. (edit: specifically, after a time the peasants spoke English and looked after the animals, the nobility spoke french and named the food, so we got the English words for the animals and the French words for most of the farm animals were used for the food made from them)

Chicken has Its own "Norman" word, which is "poultry".

We do in Denmark.

The english words are different because...

The farmers would call it by its english name. And the king and other fancy people would use the french.

Pig becomes porc

For example.

Eventually this meant that when the animal was alive youd call it by the english name. And when it was butchered you used the french name.

Or so i read once.

It’s because of the Norman conquest of England. Basically, the ruling nobility spoke French and the lower classes spoke English. The peasants who were in charge of livestock spoke English so pig, cow, and chicken stuck around. But it was mostly the upper classes who ate the meats so they used French words at the dinner table (beef from boeuf, pork from porc, poultry from poulet, etc.).

Tagger below explains it but also wanted to chime in that chicken is often “poultry”, but over time, we became comfortable with “chicken”.

As I understand it, after the norman invasion in 1066, generally the Saxon (Germanic speaking) people reared the animals so the names for the animals come from the German language, but the norman (French speaking) people eat the animals so the names for the meat generally derive from the French language.

• You generally never eat cow, because cows produce milk. When you eat beef, it is usually a steer.
• Sometimes English uses culinary names - pork for pig, calamari for squid, etc. The explanation for each is likely to be distinct, but e.g. for pork, that's from Latin for pig (porcus) and for some arbitrary reason it stuck around. The answer is probably always going to be some variant on "it's arbitrary", though.

Fascinating! Thank you all for the answers! I got an F in French at high school, which might explain why I hadn’t made the connection.

Adoption from French, I assume. I would say sheep for the animal and lamb for the meat, though.

Lots of more nuanced answers, but I want to say language is weird, that's why

I'm also confused as to why English-speaking people in general, at least in the U.S. and Britain, are fine with eating sheep but not goat. Goat is one of those exotic meats the foreigners eat for some reason. I've never even had the opportunity to try goat. Could it be all that different?