The Many Tongues of Breakfast

March 18, 2019

• Topical

There is a banquet of words in the English language, and many of them are used to talk about food; but there are many still which we lack, words which we should be hungering for. For instance, we do not have an equivalent for the Spanish sobremesa, a word which describes the time spent relishing conversation around the table after a meal, or the Italian noun abbiocco for that post-feast drowsy feeling.

But what about breakfast? The first meal of the day, the literal breaking of the fast, is a word which we in England began using in the 15^th century – but does the word feed the concept? And how does it work in other languages?

The French petit-déjeuner, like the English, comes from the verb jeûner meaning to fast, so dé + jeûner give us the same concept of the fast breaking. Similarly, in Spanish the word for breakfast, desayuno, comes from the verb ayunar meaning to fast. Etymologically, both the French and Spanish words for fasting originally come from the Latin verb ieiunare meaning ‘to fast’. Interestingly, this is also where we get the English word ‘jejune’ which can mean juvenile, devoid of significance, or, lacking nutritional value (where its original sense was ‘without food’ and therefore akin to fasting).

What is also curious is that, over time, the word for ‘breakfast’ seems to change in meaning to towards ‘lunch’; the French déjeuner was once a word you would find in one’s mouth in the morning, now you will find it when setting the table at lunch. However, somewhat confusingly, in Belgium, parts of Switzerland, and francophone Canada, the word still means ‘breakfast’.

But in a strange twist of fate, the Italian language has enshrined its own word for breakfast in colazione, which as a meal is very light, and generally consists of caffè latte and biscotti. Ostensibly, the etymology of colazione comes from the religious term collation in Western Christianity and it refers to the two small meals which would have been permitted on days of Catholic fasting. Therefore, the modern Italian equivalent of breakfast does not share the same cognate as in the English, French, or Spanish – in fact, an Italian lunch, or pranzo, comes from the Latin prandium which essentially means first meal, so when we break our fast at breakfast in Italy they break it at lunch!

When you sit down to breakfast tomorrow morning, have a think about the link between food and language: you might just eat your own words!