Talk:disner

RFC discussion: November 2012

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for cleanup (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

---

disner

"Dinner" seems like a rather confusing gloss/definition for the Anglo-Norman and Old French words, given that the etymology suggests the word originally meant "breakfast, the morning meal", but "dinner" in English means either "the midday meal" or "the evening meal". Which meal do the Anglo-Norman and Old French words refer to? Can we tell? - -sche (discuss) 01:20, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Fair point. Mglovesfun (talk) 01:30, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Per WT:CFI, it does seem in Anglo-Norman to mean evening meal:

"Feim ad e sei e freit au soir e au disner" (modern French: faim a et soif et froid au soir et au dîner. English, approximate: hungry, thirsty and cold they were during the evening and at dinner).

There's an argument to be made for breakfast as well:

"Jeo vorroi ore qe cest nuyt feust ja passee, qe jeo feusse a disner si comme je serrai bien matyn" (modern French: je voudrais maintenant que cette nuit déjà passée, et que je sois au petit déjeuner [?] comme s'il était bien le matin. English: I would like now that this night have already passed, and that I be at breakfast as if it were morning).

Mglovesfun (talk) 01:53, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Do you have to break a fast in the morning? Religious fasts, especially Lentan ones, often restricted the faithful to a single meal per day - I don't know whether that was in the evening, though. I saw a presentation on the Holy Calendar at Tours in the seventh century, which showed that at that time, roughly half the year was assigned to one fast or other. The other question I'd have is whether assigning names to meals based primarily on the time that they are eaten is a universal practice, or a result of the regimented timekeeping that has come with modernity. Furius (talk) 04:32, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

[1] says "the main meal of the day". The verb and the noun seem to be both well attested. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:16, 1 November 2012 (UTC)