Spanish-English Cognates

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Spices and herbs, Part 19: Eng. ginger and Sp. jengibre

[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

Eng. ginger and Sp. jengibre

Ginger is the name of a plant ‘of tropical southeast Asia having yellowish-green flowers and a pungent aromatic rhizome’, as well as the name of the plant’s rhizome itself (AHD). A rhizome, also known as rootstalk or rootstock, is ‘a horizontal, usually underground stem that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes’ (AHD). This rhizome is used as a hot, fragrant spice, whether as a young and fresh, which has a mild flavor, or else, as a mature, dried and fibrous rhizome, typically powdered. It is used this way in the cuisines of India and other Asian countries, including China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. It is also used as a medicinal plant in many cultures with medicinal properties such as antiarthritis, antiinflammatory, antidiabetic, antibacterial, antifungal, and anticancer.

This perennial herbaceous plant is indigenous to tropical regions of Asia from where it spread to other parts of Asia and eventually to West Africa and the Caribbean. It is one of the spices that started being exported from Asia to Europe in the 5th century CE. Ginger production today is highest in India, where twice as much ginger is produced as in each of the next two producers, Nigeria and China. Other major producers are Indonesia, Nepal, and Thailand. In the English-speaking world, ginger is often used in sweet foods and drinks, such as ginger ale, ginger bread, and ginger snaps. In the Spanish-speaking world, ginger is much less common.

Figure 190: (left) ginger plant drawing; (right) fresh ginger rhizome [i]

The word ginger [’ʤɪn.ʤəɹ] had many different spellings (and pronunciations) in earlier times, including gingere in Middle English and gingifer in Late Old English. This word is presumably a borrowing from post-Classical Latin gingiber, with some influence of the equivalent Anglo Norman and Old French equivalent word. Post-Classical Latin gingiber was a corruption of an earlier version of the word, namely zingĭberi (indeclinable), also spelled zingiber, zinziber, and zinziberi. (Remember that the letter 〈z〉 in Latin was a loaned letter from Greek and it represented a Greek sound that did not exist in Latin, probably [ʣ], cf. Part I, Chapter 8, §8.2.) This Latin word was a borrowing from Late Hellenistic Greek ζιγγίβερις (zingíberis), which was itself a loanword from a Dravidian language of South India, such as Pali siṅgivera (in the Indo-European Sanskrit language, the word was शृङ्गवेर, transliterated as śṛṅgavera). According to Corominas, the initial g in Medieval Latin represents de [dj] sound combination, which is how the Greek z was imitated in popular Latin speech.

Figure 191: Two varieties of ginger.[ii]

The Spanish name for this plant and this root is jengibre [xeŋ.ˈxi.βɾe], which was earlier spelled gengibre and which is obviously a cognate of Eng. ginger, though the Spanish word looks more like the Latin word it came from than its English counterpart (except of the change in the spelling from 〈g〉 to 〈j〉, which is relatively recent). Spanish may have taken the word from Occitan or from Catalan, both of which had gingibre or gingebre for this word. This was not a patrimonial Spanish word, for if it had been, it would have changed to *enzebre, by applying the regular, expected sound changes, according to Corominas.

The botanical name of this plant is Zingiber officinale. It is part of the Zingiber genus of the Zingiberaceae family, which includes turmeric, cardamom, and galangal (Sp. cardamom). The genus name Zingiber (Eng. [ˈzɪnʤɪbəɹ]) was, of course, comes from an early version of the Latin word for ginger (see above). As for the species epithet officinale, it comes from Latin officīnāle, neuter form of officīnālis, an adjective that meant ‘workshop, laboratory, office’ and in botany ‘medicinal’ (used as adjectives), but which in medieval Latin came to be used as a noun meaning ‘storeroom for medicines’. English and Spanish have borrowed this Latin adjective as Eng. officinal [ə.ˈfɪ.sɪ.nəl] and Sp. oficinal [o.fi.θi.ˈnal] to refer to herbs or drugs standardly used in medicine and thus ‘kept in stock by druggists : available without special preparation or compounding : not magistral’ (WNTIU). (The word is admittedly rare nowadays and one major dictionary even says that Eng. officinal is obsolete, though most do not.) This Latin adjective is derived from the noun officīna ‘a workshop, factory, laboratory’, from an early Latin opificīna, a noun derived from the noun opifex ‘a worker, workman, mechanic, artisan’ (L&S).[1]

In English, the word ginger is used for a color, namely for ‘a reddish-yellow or orange-brown color, resembling that of dried and powdered ginger’, especially ‘with reference to hair, fur, plumage, etc.’ (OED, sense 5b). This includes, for instance, ‘a cat with primarily orange-colored fur, typically marked with stripes; a ginger cat’ (OED, sense 5c). Also, colloquially and mostly in Britain, ginger is used as a noun or adjective for ‘a reddish-yellow or (light) orange-brown hair, typically characterized by pale skin and freckles; (more generally) any person with reddish hair’, as well as for a person with such hair, ‘frequently as a nickname’ (OED, sense 5a), e.g. She has ginger hair (Sp. Es pelirroja or Tiene el pelo rojo). This hair coloration is caused by a recessive gene, which expresses itself when a person gets two copies of it, one from each parent. The OED adds that this use of ginger is ‘sometimes derogatory, reflecting negative attitudes towards red-headed people’ (see below). This sense of the word is sometimes derogatorily pronounced [’ʤɪŋəɹ], which rhymes with singer. In the slang of some dialects of English, the word ginger is used as an insult to refer to a homosexual man and even as a mass noun to homosexuals in general and to homosexuality (OED, sense 10).

As we said earlier, this spice is not as common in the Spanish-speaking world as in the English world and thus the word is not as common either. Sp. jengibre is not used for the color either the way Eng. ginger is, which means this sense of ginger translates as rojo ‘lit. red’, anaranjado ‘lit. orange-color’, or color zanahoria ‘lit. carrot color’ when talking about the color and rojo/a or pelirrojo/a as an adjective when talking about a red-haired person (see below). A ginger cat, on the other hand, would be gato rojizo, ‘lit. reddish cat’. The English phrase ginger ale has been borrowed into some dialects of Spanish as ginger-ale with a pronunciation that is an approximation of the English one, namely [ˈʝiɲʝeɾei̯l], not a spelling pronunciation. This word is found in the DLE, as a foreign word (extranjerismo), so it must be written in italics or within quotes as all foreign words (regardless of whether it is in the Academy’s dictionary or not).

As we just saw, the main Spanish noun or adjective for ginger hair or ginger hair person is pelirrojo/a, a compound formed with the root pel‑ of the word pelo ‘hair’, and the adjective rojo/a ‘red’, with the ‑i‑ linking vowel in the style of Latin compounds (cf. Part I, Chapter 5, §5.8.3). Other hair-color words like this one are pelirrubio/a ‘blonde-haired’ (synonym of rubio), peliblanco/a ‘white-haired’ (said of animals; equivalent to de pelo blanco), pelicano/a ‘white-haired’ (said of people; equivalent to canoso/a or con canas), pelilargo/a ‘long-haired’ (equivalent to de pelo largo), pelicorto ‘short-haired’ (equivalent to de pelo corto), and pelitieso/a ‘stiff-haired’ (equivalent to de pelo tieso).[2]

The hair color known as red hair or ginger hair is quite rare, since it is found in only about 1% of the human population and less than 5% of people of European descent. There are many different shades of red/ginger hair, including deep burgundy, bright copper (reddish-brown or auburn), burnt orange or red-orange, and strawberry blond. Ginger hair is more common among Celtic people, with around 10% of the people of Ireland, 6% of the people of Scotland, and 4% of the people of England having this color hair.[iii]

Ginger hair has been greatly admired at times, but it has also been feared and disparaged and redheads have been discriminated against and harassed. There are many popular stereotypes about red-haired people, known as redheads in English since the early 16th century, such as that red-haired women are very sexually active and wild or that red-haired men are quick-tempered and violent. In the Middle Ages, people with certain shades of ginger hair were associated with witches and vampires. Even Judas Iscariot, who in the Christian mythological tradition was the apostle who betrayed Jesus, is often portrayed as having red hair.

[1] The Latin noun officina is, of course, the source of Sp. oficina ‘office’, which is not strictly speaking a cognate of Eng. office despite sharing some meanings. (Traditionally, Spanish oficina refers to a place where professional administrative or managerial work is performed, whereas a professional person’s office (room) is referred to as a despacho.) English office, pronounced [ˈɔfəs] or [ˈɑfəs] in the US and [ˈɒfɪs] in Britain, is a loanword from Old French office, which is a loanword from classical Latin officium ‘task, a person’s business, duty, function, moral obligation, official position or employment’ (cf. Sp. oficio, a word that means ‘job, occupation, trade’, as well as ‘role, function’).

[2] The adjective peliagudo/a, which means ‘difficult, tricky’ when referring to a problem, and ‘thorny’ when referring to an issue or matter, seems be formed on the same pattern from pelo and agudo ‘sharp, acute’. Corominas, however, thinks that this word was probably created on the model of puntiagudo/a ‘pointed, sharp-pointed’ which would be an alteration of an unattested *puntegudo, a cognate of Catalan punxegut (same meaning), by misanalysis of the word as containing the word agudo.

[i] Sources: (left) “Koeh-146-no text” by Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen - List of Koehler Images. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Koeh-146-no_text.jpg#/media/File:Koeh-146-no_text.jpg; (right) “Ingwer 2 fcm” by Photograph: Frank C. Müller, Baden-Baden - Self-photographed. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ingwer_2_fcm.jpg#/media/File:Ingwer_2_fcm.jpg

[ii] Source: By Anna Frodesiak - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10105589 (2018.10.17)

[iii] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair

Monday, October 15, 2018

Spices and herbs, Part 18: Eng. curry and Sp. curry/curri

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,

one of the most popular dishes of Southeast Asia in the world.[i]

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

[ii] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry_powder (2018.10.13)

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Spices and herbs, Part 17: Eng. cumin and Sp. comino

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).

Figure 188: Cumin seeds and cumin powder[i]

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

[ii] Cf. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3210012/ (2018.10.10)

[iii] Cf. http://www.theplantlist.org/browse/A/Apiaceae/Cuminum/ (2018.10.10)

Monday, October 8, 2018

Spices and herbs, Part 16: Eng. clove and Sp. clavo

Eng. clove and Sp. clavo

The English word clove refers to ‘an evergreen tree ([botanical name:] Syzygium aromaticum) native to the Moluccas and widely cultivated in warm regions for its aromatic dried flower buds’ and to the ‘flower bud of this plant, used whole or ground as a spice’ (AHD). The clove buds are harvested before they open and dried. They are used either whole or ground as a spice in cooking, though ground cloves soon lose their flavor. Cloves are used in small quantities due to their strong flavor, which comes primarily from the aromatic compound eugenol, an essential oil also found in nutmeg and cinnamon, for example. This plant has also been used for medicinal purposes, such as toothache pain and for inflammation more generally. Clove used for health purposes typically comes in the form of clove oil, which is eugenol extracted and concentrated from the plant. Finally, cloves are also used mixed with tobacco and other ingredients in cigarettes known as kreket or clove cigarettes that are common in Indonesia.

Figure 187: Cloves: dried flower buds of the clove plant.[i]

The word clove is typically used in the plural, that is, as cloves. Other names for this spice are clove-gillyflower or clove-pink, though these names are now used primarily for ‘a clove-scented species of Pink (Dianthus caryophyllus), the original of the carnation and other cultivated double forms’ (OED).[1] As we shall see below, the clove and the carnation were thought to be related plants.

The clove plant species belongs to the myrtle (Myrtaceae) family. As for the place this plant is native to, the Moluccas, they are ‘a group of islands in Indonesia, between Sulawesi (Celebes) and New Guinea’, also known as Molucca Islands or Spice Islands (RHWU).

The word clove [ˈkloʊ̯v] is derived from Old French phrase clou de girofle, literally ‘nail of gillyflower’, a name inspired by the shape of the dried flower bud, which looks like a nail, that is, like a metal nail for hammering, not for fingernail or toenail, which is the original meaning of the word nail in English, a word that descends from Proto-Germanic *naglaz.

As for the English word gillyflower (or gilliflower) [ˈʤɪ.lɪ.ˌflaʊ̯.əɹ], it refers to ‘the carnation or a similar plant of the genus Dianthus’, in particular the Clove Pink (Dianthus caryophyllus), the ancestor of the carnation, but also to ‘any of several plants, such as the wallflower [genus Erysimum, with hundreds of species], that have fragrant flowers’ (AHD). There isn’t a single Spanish word for all the flowers that in English go by the name of gillyflower, though two common ones are clavel silvestre ‘lit. wild carnation’ and clavellina, a word derived from clavel ‘carnation’. The word clavel for the carnation flower in Spanish seems to come from Old Catalan clavell ‘(fastening) nail’, a word that has, thus, the same root as the English word clove. The reason for this name is that the carnation flower has a smell like that of the clove spice, which as we saw has the shape of a (fastening) nail, although as we have seen we now know that the two plants are not related.[2]

The Spanish name of this spice (the dried flowers of the clove plant) is clavo, clavo de olor, or clavo de especia. This clavo is the same word as the word clavo for ‘nail’, in the sense ‘metal spike’ or ‘fastening nail’, not the sense of ‘fingernail’ or ‘toenail’, for which Spanish has a separate word, namely uña.[3] Both Sp. clavo and Fr. clou come from Lat. clāvus, with the same meaning, ‘(fastening) nail’, though originally it meant ‘a callous growth, a corn, wart, tumor, excrescence’. As we just saw, the word clavo for this spice is typically modified by adding the phrase de olor ‘lit. of smell’ or de especia ‘lit. of spice’, to differentiate this meaning of clavo from the more common one. As for the clove tree, it goes by different names in Spanish, such as árbol del clavo, clavero, and even giroflé (also jiroflé), the latter being a word derived from the French word for ‘clove’ and the source of Eng. gillyflower.

The English word gillyflower, first attested in the mid-16th century, is a loanword from French gilofre ‘clove plant’, an alteration from Old French girofle. The ‑flower part of the English name is obviously based on a mis-interpretation of the last part of the original French name. This French word came down from Late Latin gariofilum, a name that presumably comes from Latin caryophyllus, a compound name for both the plant and for its dried flower that was presumably formed from Ancient Greek words, κάρυον (káruon) ‘nut’ and φύλλον (phúllon) ‘leaf’. Caryophyllus is the New Latin word for the early botanists’ name for two genera of plants related to clove and carnation, which used to be thought to be related but which we now know are from different genera: Syzygium, of the Myrtaceae family (where clove belongs), and Dianthus, of the Caryophyllaceae family (where carnation and many other plants belong). Nowadays, the botanical name for the clove plant is Syzygium aromaticum (formerly Caryophyllus aromatica), and the one for the carnation or clove pink is Dianthus caryophyllus.

Let us look now at the botanical name of the clove plant, Syzygium aromaticum. The first part is the genus name Syzygium, shared by 1200-1800 species of flowering plants of the myrtle family (Myrtaceae), most of which are evergreen trees and shrubs. This is a New Latin word, an alteration of Late Latin sȳzygia ‘conjunction, union’, a loanword from the Greek noun συζυγία (suzugía), derived from the adjective σύζυγος (súzugos) ‘yoked together’, a word formed from συ (su), a variant of συν (sun) ‘together’ which is commonly found in English words spelled as syn‑, and ζυγός (zugós) ‘yoke, pair’. Latin sȳzygia has been borrowed into English as syzygy [ˈsɪz.ɪ.ʤi], a technical term used in astronomy, psychology, mathematics, medicine, zoology, and genetics. Its general meaning is ‘a pair of connected or corresponding things’ (COED. In astronomy, for example, syzygy means ‘conjunction or opposition, especially of the moon with the sun’ (COED). The Spanish version of this word is sizigia, a word that is found in the DLE with only the astronomical meaning.

As for the second part of the clove plant’s botanical name, aromaticum, this is the neuter form of the Latin adjective aromaticus, source of the cognates Eng. aromatic ~ Sp. aromático/a, which mean ‘having an aroma; fragrant or sweet-smelling’, as in aromatic herbs (Sp. hierbas aromáticas). These loanwords come into English and Spanish probably through French but ultimately it comes from Latin ărōmătĭcus, itself a loan from Greek ἀρωματικός (arōmatikós), an adjective derived from the noun ἄρωμα (árōma) ‘seasoning, spicy and/or fragrant smell’ (cf. Eng. aroma & Sp. aroma).

There is also different word clove in English which has the meaning ‘any of the small bulbs making up a compound bulb of garlic, shallot, etc.’, as in clove of garlic. The origin of the two words clove in English is the same Latin word and it has to do with the shape of the two items it refers to, which is like that of a nail or what was the original meaning of the Latin word clāvus, namely ‘hard excrescence’. In Spanish the second sense of the English word clove translates as diente ‘tooth’, as in diente de ajo ‘a clove of garlic’.

[1] The noun pink is used for ‘various species of Dianthus (family Caryophyllaceæ)’, especially Dianthus plumarius and ‘with qualifying words’ such as clove-basil, clove-brown, and clove-pink, it is used to refer ‘to other species of Dianthus, and to other plants allied to or resembling the pink’ (OED). The origin of this word pink is unknown, though there are various theories.

[2] The source of the English word carnation for ‘the cultivated varieties of the clove-pink (Dianthus caryophyllus)’ is not totally clear. Some think it comes from Lat. carnātĭo ‘fleshiness, corpulency’ (regular stem: carnātĭōn‑), derived from the noun caro (gen. carnis, acc. carnem) ‘flesh, meat; flesh of a fruit; etc.’ (cf. Sp. carne ‘flesh, meat’, derived from the accusative form of the Latin word carnem). Eng. carnation could also come indirectly from the Italian descendant of this Latin word, carnagione, which meant ‘the hew or color of ones skin and flesh’, after a typical color of this flower. The OED, however, thinks that Eng. carnation most likely comes from Lat. coronation: ‘Some 16th cent. authors give one form of the name as coronation, apparently from its 16th cent. specific name, Betonica coronaria, in allusion to its use in chaplets (compare campion n.2), or from ‘the floures…dented or toothed aboue..like to a littell crownet’ (Lyte). On the other hand, Turner calls the plant an incarnacyon, Lyte has carnation as well as coronation, and Gerarde expressly identifies it with the colour ‘carnation’. Prior takes coronation as the original form, and Britten and Holland think his opinion ‘probably correct’’ (OED). The reason for this name would be that carnations were one of the flowers used in flower garlands used in Greek ceremonial crowns.

[3] This other sense of the English word nail, namely ‘fingernail’ or ‘toenail’, is uña in Spanish. This word comes from Lat. ungula ‘claw, hoof, talon’, which is itself derived from Lat. unguis ‘finger/toe nail’; cf. Eng. ungulate ‘a hoofed mammal’, a technical term in Zoology.

[i] Source: “Gewuerznelken”. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gewuerznelken.jpg#/media/File:Gewuerznelken.jpg