This is wild, I have read this word many times but never consciously noticed that there is no N there. I would have bet money that "restauranteur" is the more common spelling in practice, but I'm completely wrong: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=restaurateur%2....
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 meaning at all; it means "full of [whatever]", and transformed into a French agentive suffix by people who felt that -eur and -euse must be related because they sound so similar.
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).
I should note that in Latin the masculine agentive suffix is definitely -or. It may look like -tor, but that -t- is actually a separate element marking the perfect passive participle form. (From which agent nouns are derived.)
Most verbs have a passive participial form that includes the -t-, but in some it's been swallowed by an S. The only example that comes to mind is missus [sent], the passive participle of mittere [send]. The modern French verb is apparently mettre. I guess if the agent nouns are formed from that root, they should be metteur and mettrice? But if they descend from Latin, the masculine form might not use -tt-.
I feel pretty safe in saying that "sender" would be missor in Latin - it's an attested (though "very rare") word - but I have no instinct for what the feminine form would be. Missrix just doesn't feel right.
I don't think -sst- is a possible sequence in Latin. (Neither is -ssr-, but that one suffers from the bigger problem that -sr- probably won't work either.) Mistrix is certainly a word that could exist, but I have no knowledge of whether it would be a correct form for a female sender.
Yeah, I don't feel like there's any strong rule on these things apart from "what sounds good" unless the male ending exists like -ien
I've heard at various times in my life the various feminine endings applied to same profession - people playing around with what sounds good or a generational thing. -esse -ice -enne -euse
There's also the debate in gendered languages over whether one should never use feminine endings on professions, and keep them generic, or always use them for all professions for consistency, avoiding suggesting certain professions are male vs female, while ensuring women are visible in professions where they used to be rarer.
> There's also the debate in gendered languages over whether one should never use feminine endings on professions, and keep them generic, or always use them for all professions for consistency [...]
This is a somewhat different kind of thing. In English, there are plenty of professions with a gendered suffix rather like this. Waiter / waitress; actor / actress; steward / stewardess.
In general, the -ess cannot be used for a word that doesn't already exist; the feminist prescription for a female doctor is "lady doctor", not "doctress". You might also note that the masculine versions of those three examples have three different "suffixes".
But the agentive suffix is always -er, whether the agent is male or female. Professions are conceptually different, and better modeled as opaque words than as stem+suffix combinations.
> the feminist prescription for a female doctor is "lady doctor", not "doctress"
Being male I hesitate to speak for feminists, but I’m fairly sure at least 2nd wave ones would prefer just “doctor” and would frown on “lady” as an unnecessary qualifier.
The verb is restaurer.
Its gerund form is restaurant (ie. transforming a verb into a noun)
Restaurateur is also a noun but its the job associated with the verb, not the verb transformed into a noun directly.
If you sweat you're a perspirator, not a perspirantor -- a sweater, not a sweanter -- but you still use an antiperspirant against sweating. See how "sweating" also has an 'n' in it, but "sweater" doesn't? The -ant is just the French version of -ing.
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.
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.
I don't know your french level but perhaps you read your quote too fast because it says: "Mets qui vient après les hors-d'œuvre et AVANT le plat principal".
So the "entrée" is the dish that comes BEFORE the main dish.
Mea culpa, I did go over it.
I guess as a native speaker the idea of calling a "Plat Principal" an "Entrée" is just so foreign to me I just cannot accept it... :-)
Perhaps it is a regional difference
This just pushes the question one step further. Why did the chefs who used to be employed by aristocrats, when they started opening public eating places. Not call them auberge (french for tavern or inn) or cantine or hotel or bistrot or even cabaret (which used to mean small restaurant) but instead picked ‘restaurant’ an, at that time, medical term.
TL;DR: Apparently only traiteurs were permitted to sell meals. Restaurants were marketed as a kind of (I guess) upscale health service, originally only selling fancy broths. One of the early restaurateurs is documented as using the advertisement, "Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboratis, & ego restaurabo vos" ("Come to me, all of you whose stomachs are in distress, and I will restore you", an allusion to Matthew 11:28, "Come to Me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.")
I was thinking about that... Is there a distinction between a restaurant where you can order specific dishes (made to order?) vs a place where you just got whatever is available?
In the netherlands we use the french term ‘a la carte’ to mean that the restaurant allows you to pick a pre-defined set of dishes. As opposed to having a daily changing menu with maybe a choice between meat/fish/vegetarian which is called “table d’hote” but the latter has gotten a connotation of being less fancy. So if a fancy restaurant does table d’hote they generally call it ‘our concept’ and explain it to every guest as if it’s a unique thing.
I’m guessing the french use the same words. And maybe some english speaking countries as well? Given how pervasive french is around restaurants.
Not anymore in english, because the second went basically completely extinct except a few location- or activity-specific exceptions like food trucks and sport concessions.
I think "cafeteria" as used by outfits like S&W Cafeteria, etc. would have been somewhat close to the idea of "a place where you get what is available", but they have - as you say - mostly gone away. I suppose a "buffet" would also be close, in that you get to pick your food, but you're picking from an array of pre-prepared items with no room for variation for the most-part. As opposed to "made to order".
Or at least not completely extinct in South India. Some of my favorite childhood memories are from these messes (short for mess hall, I assume). You go there, pay what they ask, eat what they serve.
MTR, Brindavan on MG Road (though that's long gone), Iyer Mess in Malleshwaram.
What they lack in choice they usually make up for in taste.
You're right that they have a more traditional ambience and newer restaurants offer more choice, but they are definitely thriving in the parts of Bangalore that I grew up in.
Yeah sorry I intended there to be a more clear constraint on the claim I was making. It's mostly extinct in the anglosphere, so english doesn't really differentiate. But the concept itself is still popular globally.
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.
> Since ancient times there were places where you could pay for food, but that was always a side business of an establishment
I don't think that's correct: They've excavated fast-food joints from under the ashes of Pompeii. There's nothing to say a business like that needs to be a side hustle of anything else.
Street food vendors go back millennia. They’ve never been called restaurants but they’ve always been in the primary business of selling food.
The main difference a restaurant brings is the addition of a seating / dining space. I strongly doubt that extra space for patrons to eat is a recent innovation.
Haha - until reading this I thought it was "restaurauteur" like a control-freak film director who makes food. Since most restauraunts don't end up making money it could more appropriately be "restauramateur".
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":
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 who restores things like artworks or buildings. When referring to someone who owns a restaurant, we’d have *always* said propriétaire.
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.
In Linux w/ XCmpose or similar, or Hacker's Keyboard on Android, or Wincompose on Windows it is also the compose key then oe. XCompose also has a lot of customisable digraph support. See Kragen's list.
So. <compose>oe = œ
I usually bind capslock to the compose key in Linux (and Windows with Wincompose).
Hacker's Keyboard has a dedicated button.
Mostly nonsense, because a restaurateur has nothing to do with restaurants. He repairs old things that last long, whilst a chef produces new volatile things that last short. And the etymology is hand-waving
