justsentientthoughts:

Apparently the French word for “unicorn” used to be “unicorne”, which makes perfect sense. But it sounded too much like “une icorne”, so they though “icorne” was the name of the animal, and so “the unicorn” was “l’icorne”. Then later they decided that no, “l’icorne” was the whole name of the animal, so “the unicorn” became “la licorne”. The takeaway being that French is a ridiculous language and linguistics is cool

exactly! on the same vein, a lot of English words come from Old French. For example, “gown” comes from “gonne” (and had the same meaning as it has today)

Also, there were no punctuation signs on medieval manuscripts, and they had a tendency to separate letters inside words and to agglutinate words together, which explains the Unicorne/Licorne thing 🙂