Very interesting. The connection to French is not immediately obvious as both "purchase" and "buy" would translate to "achat". However, "por chase" in French is "for the chase/hunt" which begins to resemble some definition of "purchase".

Norman/Saxon meat/animal word pairs are interesting; the saxons were the hunters and farmers, and the normans ate the meat. This led to a bunch of word pairs:

  Beef/cow  
  Poultry/chicken  
  Pork/pig  
  Veal/calf  
  Mutton/sheep

There are other areas of English vocabulary with dual Saxon/Norman words as well.

Bill Bryson has a great book that explores how English became what it is now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_Tongue It’s an easy read with lots of interesting info.

Please don’t recommend Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue. Bryson has no actual background in linguistics and there is a factual error or urban myth on nearly every page of that book. There are loads of pop-sci “history of English” books written by people who were actually competent in the subject.

Thanks for the heads up, I looked into criticism of this book and I won’t recommend it in the future.

If you happen to see this reply, would ‘Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English’ by McWhorter be a better choice for a pop-sci history of English? r/Linguistics seems to be fine with him.

In which French did you find "por chase”? (this is not aggressive, I am french and this does not mean anything but it may be a dialect or some as ancient French?)

The etymology given by Wiktionary[0] is:

> From Middle English purchasen, from Anglo-Norman purchacer (“seek to obtain”) from pur- (from Latin pro-) + chac(i)er (“to chase, pursue”). Compare Old French porchacier (“to follow, to chase”), which has given French pourchasser (“to chase without relent”).

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/purchase

OK thanks, so this is XIV-XV century French (http://micmap.org/dicfro/search/dictionnaire-godefroy/porcha...)