[This entry is an excerpt from the chapter "Spices, herbs, and other condiments" of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]
Go to the listing of entries on spices, herbs and other condiments
Go to the listing of entries on spices, herbs and other condiments
Eng. cumin and Sp. comino
The English word cumin
and its Spanish cognate comino refer
to ‘an annual Mediterranean herb … in the parsley family, having finely divided
leaves and clusters of small white or pink flowers’, as well as to ‘the seed-like
fruit of this plant used for seasoning, as in curry and chili powders’ (AHD). This
annual herbaceous plant of the celery, carrot and parsley family (the family
name is known botanically as Apiaceae
or Umbelliferae). It is native to a
region between the Middle East and India. Its botanical name is Cuminum cyminum, a name given to the
plant by Linnaeus himself (or its
equivalent, Cuminum odorum).
The dried seed of this plant, either whole or ground, has
been used as a condiment since ancient times in Indian, Persian, Greek, and
Roman cuisines, and today it is common in Mexican cuisine as well, for
instance. It is used in many food products, including chili powder, curry, and
even cheese, bread, and pickles. The flavor and aroma of this seed comes from
its essential oils, the main one of which is cuminaldehyde. There are different
varieties of cumin in the market that differ somewhat in flavor and other
characteristics: Iranian, Indian, and Middle Eastern. Nowadays the main
producers of this seed are China and India, which India consuming more than
half of the world production. But cumin is also often added to chili powder and
used in Mexican and Tex-Mex cooking. In some countries, this seed is also used
for medicinal purposes in the ethnomedicine of different cultures, though scientific
research on such applications is just now under way.[ii]
The English word cumin
was borrowed from Latin in the Old English period. It is pronounced in different
ways. The main one is [ˈkʰju.mɪn],
but the word cumin is also pronounced
[ˈkʰʌ.mɪn] in the UK and
[ˈkʰu.mɪn] in the US. Spanish
comino, a word first attested in the
13th century, would seem to be a patrimonial descendant of the Latin word for
this plant, which was cŭmīnum or cymīnum (the change of Latin short ŭ
to Spanish o is what we would expect
in a patrimonial word). In other Romance languages we find Italian cumino, Portuguese cominho, French cumin (Old
French cumin or comin), and Catalan comí.
This Latin word was a loan from Ancient Greek κύμινον
(kúminon) and its ultimate source is presumably a Semitic word, one that is cognate
with Hebrew כמון (kammon)
and Arabic كمون (kammūn).
Some European languages, in particular Slavic and Uralic
ones, use the same word for cumin as for caraway, another spice seed, though
they come from different plants of the same family (Apiaceae or Umbelliferae). In
Spanish, caraway is known as alcaravea,
but one of its other names is comino de
prado, ‘lit. meadow cumin’. Other distantly related plants of the Apiaceae family
sometimes also go by the name cumin,
including Persian cumin, which is
another name for caraway, and black cumin,
which can be used to refer to two different types of seeds from much less
common, different plants: Bunium
bulbocastanum and Nigella sativa (fennel
flower), both also known as black caraway.
In the Spanish-speaking world, this plant doesn’t seem to
have been held in high regard. There is a very common Spanish idiomatic phrase containing
this word, namely (No) me importa
un comino ‘I (don’t) give a damn’, as in Me importa un comino lo que piense la gente ‘I don’t give a damn
what people think’. Other variants of this expression are no valer un comino and no
montar un comino. The Spanish noun comino
is also used in some regions to refer to small-sized or young people
(children), and it can be used in either a loving way or a disparaging way.
As for the botanical name for this plant, Cuminum cyminum, given to the plant by
Linnaeus himself, we can see that it consists of two different versions of the
same word, the Latin name for this plant: cŭmīnum
for the genus name and cymīnum for
the species name. (The Greek letter 〈ύ〉 was typically transliterated into Latin as 〈y〉, but
occasionally it was nativized as 〈u〉; however the two letters have the same
origin, cf. Part I, Chapter 8, §8.2.5.) Originally, there was only one
species of the genus Cuminum, but now there are three other accepted members of
this genus.[iii]
[i] Source: ‘Cumin-spice’.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 1.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cumin-spice.jpg#/media/File:Cumin-spice.jpg
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