[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. curry and Sp. curry/curri
The word curry is used for a type of dish or
family of dishes typical of South and Southeast Asian cuisines made with a spiced
sauce or relish made from a combination of spices or herbs, such as onion,
ginger, turmeric, garlic, coriander, cumin, as well as fresh or dried chilies,
some of which are hot. A curry is a type of stew (Sp. estofado, guisado, guiso) and there are many different
types in the many varied cuisines of this part of the world. A curry may contain
meat, poultry, fish, or shellfish, with or without vegetables. However, there are,
also vegetarian curries and, actually, in India, most curries are vegetarian,
without meat, chicken, or fish.
Actually,
it was Europeans who lumped the large variety of savory stews found in the
Indian subcontinent into a category that they came to call curry. The British brought Asian curry back to Great Britain,
modifying it along the way, just like the Dutch brought similar dishes to the
Netherlands from what today is Indonesia. The first the Indian curry house
opened in London in 1810. In time, curry has become extremely popular in Britain,
to the extent that some consider curry a true national dish.[1]
Different varieties of curries have also made it to other countries’ cuisines,
such as those of China, Japan, Korea, South Africa, and the West Indies.
Figure 189: Chicken tikka masala, a type of chicken curry,
The word curry,
pronounced [ˈkʰɜɹi] in North American
English and [ˈkʰʌɹi] in British English, is
said to come from the Tamil language of Sri Lanka and southern India, from the
word கறி
(kaṟi), which meant ‘sauce, relish for rice’ (OED). The equivalent word in
Kannada, another language of south India, is karil, from where comes the Portuguese word for ‘curry’, caril. French borrowed the word as cari, though today the English loanword curry is more common (it is pronounced [ky.ˈʀi]). Spanish too has
borrowed the word curry from English
for this type of dish, which is rare in the Spanish-speaking world. It is
pronounced as it is spelled, namely [ˈku.ri].
The spelling curri has also been
proposed and it is acceptable according to the DPD.
The actual spelling of the English word curry is thought to have been influenced by an obsolete English
word cury meaning ‘cookery’ or ‘cooked
dish’. This word is a 14th century loan from Old French queurie that meant ‘cookery, kitchen’ and which is ultimately
derived from a word that was derived from Vulgar Latin cocus ‘cook’ (coquus in
Classical Latin). This same Latin root coc‑
is found in English words such as cook
and in Spanish words such as cocina
‘kitchen’, cocinar ‘to cook’ and cocer ‘to cook’ (all three of them
patrimonial words).
We should mention that English has another, unrelated word curry, a verb, which has two distantly
related meanings. One of these meanings is used primarily in North America, and
it is ‘to groom (a horse) with a currycomb’ (Sp. almohazar) (AHD). The other meaning is ‘to prepare (tanned hides)
for use, as by soaking or coloring’ (Sp. curtir)
(AHD). This word comes from Anglo-Norman curreier
‘to prepare, arrange’, which comes from Vulgar Latin *conrēdāre, a verb formed from the prefix com‑ ‘with’ and the Vulgar Latin verb *rēdāre ‘to make ready’, which is a Germanic loan related to Eng. ready, from Proto-Germanic *raidaz ‘ready, arranged, prepared’.
Spanish did not inherit this any version of this Vulgar Latin verb.[2]
Perhaps the most common use of the verb to
curry nowadays is in the idiomatic phrase to curry favor (with somebody), which means ‘to seek or gain favor
by fawning or flattery’ (AHD) (in Spanish: congraciarse con alguien, hacerle
la pelota a alguien (Spain, informal), etc.).
Although the word curry
is used for the type of dish that we have been discussing, it is also used to refer
to the sauce or relish used to make these dishes, since after all, the sauce is
what the word curry originally
referred to. The OED describes this sense of the word curry (‘curry sauce’) as ‘a preparation of meat, fish, fruit, or
vegetables, cooked with a quantity of bruised spices and turmeric, and used as
a relish or flavoring, especially for dishes composed of or served with rice’.
In addition, the word curry
is also used nowadays to refer to a commercially sold powdered mixture of spices
used to make this dish, which is also known as curry powder (Sp. curri en polvo, or just curri). This powder is actually a Western
invention, one dating back to the 19th century, and not a specific traditional mix
of ingredients or something that was ever used where curry originated. The spice
mixture known as curry varies a great
deal depending on the manufacturer. Commonly found spices in curry powder blends
are coriander, cumin, turmeric, ginger, fenugreek, and chili peppers. Less
common ingredients are garlic, asafetida, fennel seed, caraway, cinnamon, clove,
mustard seed, green cardamom, black cardamom, nutmeg, long pepper, and black pepper.[ii]
Curry that has chicken in it is very popular in some places.
Such dishes are popularly known as chicken
curry. In addition, it can also be referred to by using the adjective curried, as in curried chicken. Both phrases would be translated into Spanish as pollo al curry.[3] The word curried is, of course, the
past participle of the verb to curry,
derived from the noun curry by
conversion (cf. Part I, Chapter 5,
§5.7).
This verb, which means ‘to prepare or flavor with a curry sauce’, is not as common
as the derived adjective curried.
We should mention that there is also a plant known as curry plant, so called because of the
strong smell of its leaves, which is reminiscent of the smell of curry powder. The
botanical name of this plant is Helichrysum
italicum, a flowering plant from the daisy family (Asteraceae). Although this plant is occasionally used as a spice,
it has nothing to do with the curry that we have been talking about. This plant
is also not related to a tree popularly known as the curry tree, which produces an aromatic leaf often used in Indian and
Sri Lankan cuisines, including some curries. The leaf of this plant is
popularly known as curry leaf. This
tree is native to India and Sri Lanka and its botanical name is Murraya koenigii.[4]
Eng. stew and
Sp. estofado
As an
aside in this section about curry, let us look at the words Eng. stew and its Spanish equivalent estofado, since we said that a curry is
a type of stew. These two words are related to each other and may perhaps be related
to the words Eng. stove ~ Sp. estufa as well.
Although
the full history of the words Eng. stew
and Sp. estofado is a bit confused,
they seem to ultimately come from the Vulgar Latin verb *stufare ‘to evaporate, steam off’ (another version of this verb is *stupare). This word is presumably a
loanword and adaptation from Ancient Greek εκτύφειν
(ektúphein) ‘to smoke’, derived from the verb τύφειν
(túphein) ‘to raise smoke, smolder’.[5]
These Greek verbs are derived from the noun τύφος
(túphos) ‘steam, fever, stupor’, a word also found in Vulgar Latin as *tūfus ‘hot vapor, steam’. The New Latin
word tȳphus also comes from this
Greek word, resulting in Eng. typhus
and Sp. tifus. Sp. tufo ‘strong smell’ is also a descendant
of Lat. tūfus.[6]
The English verb to
stew is a 14th century loan from Old
French estuver ‘to have a hot bath,
plunge into a bath; stew’ (cf. Modern French étuver; Provençal estubar;
the related Old French noun estuve
meant ‘large bath’, Mod. Fr. étuve). The
verb to stew is used today primarily
for a form of cooking since its primary meaning is to ‘cook or be cooked slowly
in liquid in a closed dish or pan’ (COED). There are other, less common
meanings for this verb, including some informal ones, such as ‘to suffer with
oppressive heat or stuffy confinement; swelter’ (AHD).
The noun stew with
the meaning ‘a dish cooked by stewing, especially a mixture of meat or fish and
vegetables with stock’ (AHD) is derived from the verb to stew and it is first attested in the mid-18th century. There was an
earlier noun stew also derived from
the verb that meant ‘heated room’ and ‘vessel for boiling, a caldron’ (OED).
One Spanish equivalent of the English verb stew is estofar, which is a cognate of Eng. stew and which also presumably came into the language through
French estuver or, actually, because
of its sounds, probably through a variant of this French verb influenced by its
Italian cognate, stufare, or else
influenced by a different, unrelated Old French verb estofer (Modern French étouffer)
that meant ‘to stifle, suffocate, choke, smother (a fire)’, a verb that comes
from Vulgar Latin *stuffare ‘to
stuff, cover’.[7]
Sp. estofar is first attested in the
early 16th century and other variants of this word were estubar, estobar, and estufar.[8]
Just like English derived the noun stew from the verb stew
by conversion, Spanish derived the noun estofado
from the past participle of the verb estofar,
also by conversion.
Actually, more common than the verb estofar in Modern Spanish for the meaning ‘to stew’ is the verb guisar, a verb that originally meant ‘to
prepare, arrange’. Today, the verb guisar
is used in some dialects as equivalent of cocinar
‘to cook’, as in El pollo se guisó en muy
poco tiempo ‘The chicken cooked very quickly’ (VOX), equivalent in
other dialects to El pollo se hizo en muy
poco tiempo or El pollo se cocinó en
muy poco tiempo. More commonly,
however, the verb guisar means ‘to
stew’. It can also translate the English verb to braise, which means ‘fry (food) lightly and then stew slowly in
a closed container’ (COED).
The switch in meaning from ‘prepare’ to ‘cook’ for the verb guisar came obviously by the common use
of this verb with objects having to do with food. There is a common Spanish
saying with guisar, namely Tú te lo guisas, tú te lo comes, which
is equivalent to the English expression You
have made your bed, now you must lie on it.
Sp. guisar is an
old word, attested in the Cid poem already with the original meaning. This verb
was derived, in Spanish, from the noun guisa
‘manner, way, guise’, which is archaic today. This noun’s source is Germanic,
from a Germanic word that descended from Proto-Germanic *wīsǭ ‘manner, way’, perhaps from Old Frankish *wīsa (same meaning). Old English had a patrimonial word wīse that meant the same
thing which descended from the same Proto-Germanic word. This word is archaic
or obsolete today, but it has survived in the suffix ‑wise, as in clockwise, lengthwise, moneywise, publicity-wise.
The English word wise that means ‘having
or showing experience, knowledge, and good judgement’ (COED) is a patrimonial
word derived from the same Germanic root, since it comes from Old Germanic *wīsaz. The English word guise ‘a way in which someone or
something appears or is presented’ (COED) is a doublet of the word wise that means ‘manner, way’. It is a
loanword from French, which took it from the Frankish word we just mentioned,
as well as of Sp. guisa.
From the verb guisar,
we get the noun guisado, derived from
the verb’s past participle by conversion, as well as its synonym guiso. Both of these words mean ‘stew’
and, just as in the case of the verb, is more common than estofado to express this meaning. The original meaning of guisado was ‘reasonable’, and later
‘arrangement’, since the original meaning of the verb guisar was ‘to arrange’, but those meanings are now obsolete. The
noun guiso as equivalent of
food-related guisado seems to have
come later into the language.
[1] What is now India, along with Pakistan and Bangladesh, was part of the
British Empire from the early 18th century until 1947. This explains why Great
Britain received culinary influences from those lands, such as this one. It
also explains why there are so many natives of India and Pakistan living in Great
Britain and other parts of the British Commonwealth and other parts of the
English-speaking world, including the United States.
[2] Sp. enredar
‘to catch in a net, net; to tangle up, entangle; etc.’ is unrelated to Eng. ready, since it comes from red ‘net’,
which comes from Lat. rēte (gen. rētis, acc. rēte).
[3] Spanish uses al, al la, and a lo (i.e. a + definite article) followed by a noun or adjective, to indicate
the manner or style in which something is done or made, e.g. a la española ‘the Spanish way’, a la antigua ‘the old-fashioned way’.
The gender of the article depends on the gender of the noun that follows. When
an adjective follows, there is an understood noun there, typically manera or usanza ‘manner, way’, which are feminine and hence a la is more common (but cf. al curri). It is used very often to
indicate the manner of preparing a food, as in espaguetis a la milanesa ‘Spaghetti Milanese’ (lit. ‘spaghetti made
the Milan way’). This construction with the preposition a is most likely a calque from the French expression à la ‘in the manner of’, borrowed into
English for many expressions related to cooking, fashion, and style, e.g. walking with a swagger à la John Wayne (MWALD)
or She has her hair blonde and curly, à
la Marilyn Monroe (CALD). The variant a
lo is often used with names, whether male or female, e.g. un corte de pelo a lo Marlon Brando ‘a
Marlon Brando type haircut’.
[4] The two parts of this tree’s species name commemorate two different 18th
century botanists. The genus name Murraya
comes from botanist Johan Andreas Murray. The species name koenigii comes from Johann König.
[5] The precursors of *stufare
and *stupare could have been the unattested Late Latin verbs *extūpāre and *extūfāre, respectively; note that the Latin prefix ex‑ ‘off’ is equivalent to Greek εκ‑.
[6] Eng. typhus and Sp. tifus refer, of course, to ‘any of
several forms of infectious disease caused by [bacteria of the genus]
rickettsia, especially those transmitted by fleas, lice, or mites, and
characterized generally by severe headache, sustained high fever, depression,
delirium, and the eruption of red rashes on the skin’ (AHD).
The cognate
nouns Eng. typhoon and Sp. tifón are not thought to be related to
the Greek word τύφος (túphos). They are thought to come from the Sinitic
大風 ‘big
wind’ (Mandarin dàfēng). The spelling
of the English word, however, is clearly influenced by Ancient Greek τῡϕῶν (tuphôn)
‘whirlwind’ (Τυφῶν Tuphôn was also the name of a monster with 100 heads in Greek
mythology). There is a theory that the Chinese word may ultimately come from
Ancient Greek, through Arabic or Indian languages, but that is not very likely.
[7] The English noun and verb stuff [ˈstʌf]
are not related to this Vulgar Latin *stuffare.
They come from Old French estoffe
‘material, furniture’ and estoffer
‘equip, furnish’, respectively, which come from Medieval Latin estoffa, stoffa. The English noun stuff
in particular has developed a great number of senses, including the very common
informal senses ‘unspecified material’, as in Put that stuff over there, ‘household or personal articles
considered as a group’, and ‘worthless objects’ (AHD).
The final source
of Eng. stuff is unclear. Some have
related it to Old High German *stopfôn ‘to
plug with oakum’, which is a loanword from medieval Latin stuppāre ‘to plug, stop up’, derive from stuppa ‘tow, oakum’. The noun tow
refers to a ‘coarse broken flax or hemp fiber prepared for spinning’ (AHD).
Eng. oakum is an obsolete word for a
‘loose fiber obtained by untwisting old rope, used especially in caulking
wooden ships’. The Spanish equivalent is estopa,
which besides ‘tow’ and ‘oakum’, also means ‘burlap’. If this etymology is
correct, then Eng. stuff would be a
cognate of Sp. estopa.
[8] It is not clear whether there is a connection between Eng. stew and Sp. estofar, on one hand, and the words Eng. stove and Sp. estufa on
the other. These last two nouns are often said to be false cognates, though
they share a semantic component, namely ‘heating’, and some of their senses are
also related, at least in some dialects of Spanish. Eng. stove refers to ‘an apparatus for cooking or heating that operates
by burning fuel or using electricity’ (COED), though its primary use today is
‘apparatus for cooking’, not for heating. English stove translates into Spanish as cocina for the ‘cooking range’ sense, as hornillo for the ‘cooking ring’ sense, and as horno for the ‘oven’ sense. Sp. estufa today means primarily an
‘apparatus for heating’, though in some countries, such as Colombia and Mexico,
it is also used for ‘an apparatus for cooking’, i.e. for a stove.
We know that Sp.
estufa comes from late Latin or
Romance stūfa, ‘an enclosed space
heated artificially’, and the related verb stūfāre
‘to heat up an enclosed space’. This verb is thought to come from Vulgar
Latin *extūpare or *extūpare ‘to heat with steam’, from where we saw ultimately come the verbs Eng. stew and Sp. estofar.
Experts are not
sure whether Eng. stove is ultimately
related to Sp. estufa and its Romance
cognates. We do know that English got the word stove from Middle Dutch and/or Middle Low German stove. What is not clear is whether this
word came from Proto-Germanic *stubō
‘room, living room, heated room’, or whether it was borrowed from a Romance
word related to Sp. estufa, but this
seems to be quite likely.
[i] Source: “Homemade chicken
tikka masala” by Rezwalker - Sopstveno delo.Previously published: http://www.parapsihopatologija.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=17368&st=1845.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons -https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homemade_chicken_tikka_masala.jpg#/media/File:Homemade_chicken_tikka_masala.jpg;
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tikka_masala
