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What happened to the n in restaurateur?

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Re: What happened to the n in restaurateur?

#31

Post by thaumasiotes »

tetromino_ wrote: post #27
decimalenough wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term is recent. Places where you can pay for food are ancient.

I'm not sure about that. Since ancient times there were places where you could pay for food, but that was always a side business of an establishment whose main purpose was either (a) selling alcohol (or, in some places, coffee or tea) or (b) providing lodging for travelers. I suspect that an establishment whose main purpose is selling food to order may be a fairly recent innovation.

> I suspect that an establishment whose main purpose is selling food to order may be a fairly recent innovation.

It's not; every city has always had them. Food is actually far more important than alcohol is.

Re: What happened to the n in restaurateur?

#32

Post by forty »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #30
tome wrote: post #9

This is just begging the question! So "restaurateur" was first, but did "restaurant" get an "n"? Why isn't it "restaurat"? The reason is that in French (ultimately from Latin) "-ateur" means "person who" and "-ant" means roughly "ing". So a "restaurater" is someone who restores and "restaurant" means "restoring" (i.e. a restoring soup, subsequently place).

Huh, the article immediately suggests a related question to me: > BTW, the feminine version of a restaurateur was “restauratrice.” That makes perfect sense, since the feminine agentive suffix in Latin is -rix. But I thought the feminine agentive ending in French was -euse! Where did we get "masseuse"? Wiktionary suggests that -euse is an alternate equivalent of -rice, derived from Latin -osus (which has no agentive m…

I cannot really come up with a good rule, but I notice that words in -teur seem to have a féminin in -trice (restaura-teur/-trice, ama-teur/-trice, institu-teur/-trice, anima-teur/-trice) while other -eur words seem to prefer -euse (mass-eur/-euse, football-eur/-euse, arnaqu-eur/-euse).

Re: What happened to the n in restaurateur?

#33

Post by Clamchop »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #7

Do they also ask for the meaning of entree in this test? Even Miriam Webster has a note that Americans mistakenly use it for main course (completely incorrectly) because French sounds fancier. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entr%C3%A9e#:~:te...

English has borrowed French words a lot. It has often imported the same word multiple times, and they frequently have different meanings.

Including entrée, incidentally, which gave us the entrée and the entry.

Even in France, in the context of elaborate multiple course meals, the entrée eventually stopped being the very first thing that was served. Soup started to take that spot, and gave us what we now call the appetizer, which used to be chiefly soup or salad but now could be almost anything.

For those elaborate meals, the entrée was just the first course of the multiple courses that were the "main" dish.

Separate main courses have largely fallen out of fashion, and they collapsed into one plate with a serving of each. This is still the entrée in the US and Canada, and that makes perfect sense, given the history.

So no, it wasn't just that it sounded fancier.

Re: What happened to the n in restaurateur?

#34

Post by kgwgk »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #7

Do they also ask for the meaning of entree in this test? Even Miriam Webster has a note that Americans mistakenly use it for main course (completely incorrectly) because French sounds fancier. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entr%C3%A9e#:~:te...

> completely incorrectly

That meaning is also accepted by the French Academy nowadays:

Fig. En parlant d’une période de temps, d’un processus. Commencement, début. À l’entrée de l’hiver. Dès l’entrée du repas. Par métonymie. Mets qui vient après les hors-d’œuvre et précède le plat principal. Une entrée chaude, froide. Servir un vol-au-vent, un soufflé en entrée. Par extension. Plat principal. Un repas composé d’un hors-d’œuvre, une entrée et un dessert.

https://www.dictionnaire-academie.fr/article/A7E1159

Re: What happened to the n in restaurateur?

#35

Post by plaguuuuuu »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #7

Do they also ask for the meaning of entree in this test? Even Miriam Webster has a note that Americans mistakenly use it for main course (completely incorrectly) because French sounds fancier. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entr%C3%A9e#:~:te...

I had no idea it was used for main course in the US, that's wild. This would be very, very confusing for Australians (probably Brits as well)

Re: What happened to the n in restaurateur?

#36

Post by neitsa »

tetromino_ wrote: post #27
decimalenough wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term is recent. Places where you can pay for food are ancient.

I'm not sure about that. Since ancient times there were places where you could pay for food, but that was always a side business of an establishment whose main purpose was either (a) selling alcohol (or, in some places, coffee or tea) or (b) providing lodging for travelers. I suspect that an establishment whose main purpose is selling food to order may be a fairly recent innovation.

Not sure if it would fit the definition of a restaurant we have today but a thermopolium was a shop where you would buy food. I'm not sure how widespread the concept was, though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopolium

Re: What happened to the n in restaurateur?

#37

Post by forty »

cocoto wrote: post #21
hoistbypetard wrote: post #20

Damn. My French is pretty solid, and used to be good enough to do well in masters-level French literature classes at a French university in France, back when I was studying that kind of thing on a full-time basis. (I’m a native speaker of American English.) I’d have incorrectly spelled it with the N when speaking English. When speaking French, the word restaurateur, in my experience, has generally referred to someone…

No, restaurateur is often used here in France, simply for someone owning a business and working in “restauration”. When using restaurateur instead of propriétaire we are emphasizing the work, because someone can be the owner without actually managing/working in it.

Yeah I never heard "le propriétaire" especially used for a restaurant owners.

Personally this is the first definition that come to my mind when seeing the word restaurateur, before artwork/building restaurateurs.

Re: What happened to the n in restaurateur?

#38

Post by hoistbypetard »

forty wrote: post #37
cocoto wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, restaurateur is often used here in France, simply for someone owning a business and working in “restauration”. When using restaurateur instead of propriétaire we are emphasizing the work, because someone can be the owner without actually managing/working in it.

Yeah I never heard "le propriétaire" especially used for a restaurant owners. Personally this is the first definition that come to my mind when seeing the word restaurateur, before artwork/building restaurateurs.

I suppose I'm showing my age, or the biases of the space I lived/worked in, then!

Re: What happened to the n in restaurateur?

#39

Post by idoubtit »

Since about half the English words come from Latin, mostly through French, there are many cases of -ant and -ator in the English language. So I thought that most American adults knew that -ant is like -ing (see "migrant"), and that -ator is a role (see "gladiator").

Here are words of this kind, like "applicant"/"applicator":

officiant inhalant applicant aspirant fumigant coagulant communicant contaminant lubricant litigant participant refrigerant resonant radiant celebrant defoliant desiccant discriminant vibrant

This list was built with:

    grep -E "^($(grep -E 'ator$' wordlist_en.txt | perl -pe 's/ator\n/ant|/'))\$" wordlist_en.txt
The words of common English come from:

    aspell -d en dump master | aspell -l en expand | perl -pe 's/\s/\n/g;' > wordlist_en.txt

Re: What happened to the n in restaurateur?

#40

Post by fsckboy »

kristjank wrote: post #29

> BTW, the feminine version of a restaurateur was “restauratrice.” The term was used in the mid to late 18th century, but thankfully never caught on. I don't know why the thankfully was needed. It looks like a pretty word to me.

seems to me it should be restaurateuse, like masseuse is to masseur.
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