| 词源 |
cattle; chattel. Capitalists and cows have much in common, cattle being a corruption of the Latin capitale, “capital or prin- cipal holdings,” a word that medieval English peasants found hard to pronounce and altered to catel and finally cattle. Be- cause the principal holdings of peasants were often livestock, especially cows, cattle came to mean what it does today, while the medieval French chatel, another corruption of the Latin capitale, entered English as chattel, our legal term for all per- sonal property. |