fringlespanol:

ukulelekatie:

Today while reading an article in Spanish I encountered the word burguesa and I didn’t know what it meant but my first thought was that it sounded like the word hamburguesa which made me laugh. I learned that it meant bourgeois and I started thinking about it how hamburguesa (or hamburger) was borrowed from German and named after the city of Hamburg, and then I did a little bit of research and found out that the German suffix –burg and the French word bourgeois both came from Proto-Germanic *burgz. 

So it turns out that the words actually are related, and while I didn’t make much progress in writing the Spanish paper I was supposed to be working on, I learned something new and ended up inadvertently studying for my Historical Linguistics final in the process, so it all worked out in the end.

It’s true. A “burg” is a city, and the term “burger” (or bourger or whatever), which is where “bourgeoisie” comes from, originally meant a city-dweller, referring especially to merchants and shopkeepers. Eventually the merchant class started rising in prominence with the development of capitalism and became the wealth-generating class that we know them as today.

The connection to the food hamburger simply comes from the fact that burg means city and Hamburg is a city – the city of ham, basically. So it’s really part coincidence and part etymology.