By popular demand (in this thread), I am discussing the various words for ‘eggplant’ (Solanum melongena, a comestible with a far wider variety of shapes and colors than most of us are aware of—there’s a very nice photograph of “a smorgasboard of eggplants” here). The word eggplant itself is the odd man out here (and odd it is, too, until you see the variety it must originally have referred to: scroll most of the way down this page for a dramatic photograph of what do indeed look exactly like eggs with green stems); the English word that will start us on our voyage is aubergine. This is, as you might guess, borrowed from French; the French word is from Catalan albergínia, which is from Arabic al-bādinjān (with the definite article al-), itself borrowed from Persian bādingān, which is probably from Middle Indo-Aryan *vātiñjana-, vātingana-; most sources attribute the latter form to Sanskrit, but I don’t find it in my dictionaries.
The Arabic word is the source also of Spanish berenjena, which the Italians (assimilating it to mela ‘apple’) borrowed as melanzana, which they then folk-etymologized as mela insana ‘mad apple’; Hobson-Jobson, in its usual discursive fashion, says:
The Ital. mela insana is the most curious of these corruptions, framed by the usual effort after meaning, and connecting itself with the somewhat indigestible reputation of the vegetable as it is eaten in Italy, which is a fact. When cholera is abroad it is considered (e.g. in Sicily) to be an act of folly to eat the melanzana. There is, however, behind this, some notion (exemplified in the quotation from Lane’s Mod. Egypt. below) connecting the badinjān with madness. [Burton, Ar. Nights, iii. 417.] And it would seem that the old Arab medical writers give it a bad character as an article of diet. Thus Avicenna says the badinjān generates melancholy and obstructions. To the N. O. Solanaceae many poisonous plants belong.
This is under the heading brinjaul, a form now spelled brinjal, of which the OED (which classifies it as “Anglo-Indian”) says: “Few names even of plants exemplify so fully the changes to which a foreign and unintelligible word is liable under the influence of popular etymology and form-association… The Malay berinjalā, prob. from Pg., illustrates the Anglo-Indian form… In the West Indies brinjalle has been further corrupted to brown-jolly.” The Portuguese form referred to is spelled beringela in Portugal and berinjela in Brazil; Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) has both berengena and merengena (the former used among the Istanbul Sephardic community according to my dictionary); and the Neapolitans, idiosyncratic as usual, borrowed the Arabic as mulignana.
Greek μελιτζάνα [melitzána] and Slovene melancána are borrowed from Italian, but most other Eastern European words come from Turkish patlıcan (itself an eccentric borrowing from Arabic): Greek Romany patlidžáno (plural patlidzéa), Albanian patëllxhan, Serbo-Croatian patlidžan, Hungarian padlizsán, Polish bakłażan (there’s also oberżyna, presumably from German Aubergine, which is obviously from French), Russian баклажан [baklazhán]. The Yiddish word is patlezhán; perhaps one of my Yiddish-scholar readers can tell me what the immediate source is, but it’s clearly in this group.
Other forms: Swahili bilingani, Malagasy baranjely, Somali birinjal (according to this page) or bidingal (according to my dictionary)… oh, and a local descendent of the Middle Indic forms, Hindi/Urdu bai(n)gan, is the source of the West Indian form baigan (current in Guyana and Trinidad).
You can see still more eggplant words (of all origins) here.
Whew. Let the additions and corrections begin!
In my Hebrew class, our textbook, around chapter 8, introduced one word for food: eggplant (xatzil). The rest of the food words showed up about 10 chapters later. It was anomalous, and eggplant continues to be one of my favourite Hebrew words.
Exactly why I read you.
I’ve been saying bādinjān (pronounced in our family “beitinjune”) – the Arabic – for years but never put it together with the “al-” as a source for aubergine until I read this. Fascinating post! Thanks.
The reputation for madness may have originated in India because of a folk etymology connecting vatingana with the word for wind, which is associated with madness in India as the moon is in Europe.
In any case, Arab doctors warned their patients that eggplant would cause madness, cancer, freckles and hoarseness, among other evils (European doctors would later say the same), but the man in the street didn’t necessarily pay attention. The 9th-century poet Kushajam wrote:
“The doctor makes ignorant fun of me for loving eggplant, but I will not give it up.
“Its flavor is like the saliva generously exchanged by lovers in kissing.”
That may be the only racy poem ever written about eggplant.
Even today, the Touaregs say that if you eat eggplant daily for 40 days you will go insane, and they cite the case of a scoffer who tried it and at the end of the emerged from his tent crying, “I’ve been eating eggplant for 40 days and now I’m insane!” QED.
Han Ah Reum in Catonsville (SW corner of U.S. 40 and Rolling Road), is alleged to be the largest Asian grocery in the world: I’ve always assumed this means the largest outside of Asia. It always has five varieties in stock, including the long skinny purple ones and the little round green and white ones. I’ve forgotten know which is the Italian eggplant, which the Thai, and so on, but anyone in the Baltimore area could easily get five kinds there, and I am not talking about mere color varieties like the white or streaked varieties that sometimes turn up in ordinary groceries.
The Eastern Armenian is [patəldʒan].
Here’s the Anglo-Finno-Russian-Scandinavian food glossary. Which includes the various words for eggplant. The icelandic word, eggaldin, means, literally, eggfruit.
Thanks, that was great! That is one looong word-borrowing chain. Does anyone know any that are longer? (excluding morphemes that just get passed down a language family, obviously)
Entirely unrelated addition: the Japanese is “nasu” (may refer to a slightly variant plant) which was originally “nasubi” but got shortened somewhere along the line, possibly by Heian court ladies.
The most popular etymology is that nasubi was a variant on “natsu + mi” (summer fruit), and the word is indeed usable as a “summer” season word in formal haiku. Other proposed etymologies include “nasu + mi” (fruit that grows) and “nashi + mi” (pear fruit).
Bonus information: There is a related plant, a kind of nettle I think, called “warunasubi” (bad nasubi) or “oninasubi” (ogre [oni] nasubi) because it is thorny and stubborn and not useful to humans, IIRC.
As far as long borrowing chains go, orange gives aubergine a run for its money — Middle English from Middle French from Old Provencal from Old Italian from Arabic from Persian from Sanskrit. Or something like that.
The Spanish word is normally spelled berenjena.
Russian has a way around this — a colloquial synonym for баклажаны, coming from Ukraine and Southern Russia as I understand, is синенькие (“little blue ones”).
A west Indian dish of fried aubergines is gemerally spelled “bal and gen”.
Yes, Ukrainians call them синенькие (“little dark blue things”) as do some Russians. They also describe their color as dark blue (синий) and not purple. In Egypt during late summer-early fall they were small, dense and rather wrinkled, took much longer to cook, and had a stronger flavor. I assumed that was the variety that could withstand 60+ degrees C.
Hi, thanks to your link to my site (Vocabolario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana) I discovered your blog, that will become a regular reading.
Just a word about the italian melanzana.
The alternative form “petonciano” is almost unknown in Italy, but up to a 100 years was the more common form.
Pellegrino Artusi’s cookbook, the most famous italian cookbook and still often reprinted, was published at the end of XIXth century and uses the form “petonciano”, with the result that today’s reader often do not understand what the book speaks about!
For some reason the Plant Names Database page doesn’t have aubergine as a name in English. We call them aubergines here in Britain and it was a long time after I came across eggplant that I actually learned what it meant.
in romanian the name is pătlăgică vânătă(lit. dark blue pătlăgică)but usually just vânătă.
P.S. the tomato is pătlăgică roşie(red pătlăgică) again usually just roşie
Just to give folks a taste of the morphological delights of Romanian, the plural of vânătă is vinete (both stressed on the first syllable).
michael: You’re right, and I’ll fix it; I took the old spelling from an old source. Normally I’d double-check everything in a post, but in this case… you understand…
The Polish name is bakłażan but the plant itself is rare (only available at all for about 10 years now).
For Spanish, my dictionary also has berenjenal as an alternate (masc. while berenjena is feminine) and I would assume there are some regional names floating about.
I like the spelling with g better, it looks more spanish somehow (phonologically it’s weird I think, I’m suprised it hasn’t gotten reduced to something like berejena which is easier to say).
“Tres cosas me tienen preso
de amores el corazón,
la bella Inés, el jamón
y berenjenas con queso.”
http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/poesia/trescosa.htm
by Baltasar del Alcazar
In Moldova in everyday speech they say pătlăgică(pl. pătlăgele) for tomato and use a russian word for eggplant.
“in romanian the name is pătlăgică vânătă(lit. dark blue pătlăgică)but usually just vânătă.
P.S. the tomato is pătlăgică roşie(red pătlăgică) again usually just roşie ”
That mirrors Mandarin. ‘qie2zi is eggplant and tomatoes are ‘fan1qie2″ – foreign eggplants.
‘Rice’has a fairly twisted history too.
I bet there were similar twisted borrowing chains in North America around words like ‘cat’ and ‘pussy’.
Jim:
Pussy
In Australia, we call them eggplants. The Croatian name is patlidzan (the z should have a hachek on it).
Cheers
In Kannada, brinjal is Badh-ney-ka-yi. (Ka-yi is the generic term for nut)
Bengali has beigun or baigun.
John,
Thanks for that. I hadn’t known that “puss” was a slang term for hares. That’s the connection for that part of the meaning – hare = rabbit = coney > cunny.
But I meant the cat end of the word. Mary Haas once used a borrowed form from some language in northern California or southern Oregon as an example of how hard it can be to recognize a loanword even when it comes form your own language. In that gaining language the way you form a diminutive is to glottalize the intial consonant, front the vowel, palatalize the final vowel and reduplicate the syllable, so you get puss > p’ishp’ish. We were all convinced and edified by this example.
In Yiddish פּאַטלעזשאַן (patlezhan).
In Slovene, “jajčevec” is also very common, perhaps even moreso than the borrowing “malancan” (no “a” at the end). “Jajce” means egg, so “eggplant” may not entirely be the odd man out, but I don’t know the word’s etymology. BTW, “-evec” is a common noun ending.
I just checked and “malancana” is a correct alternative form of “malancan.” I’ve never heard it used, so I suspect it’s a regional variation, at least to a certain degree. I prefer “jajčevec” anyway.
In Serbian “patlidžan”. As we can see, almost all the names mentioned above have the suffix “gon” (džan, djan, žan etc.). Obviosly, it is connected with the “movement” (go, Germ. gehen, Serb. goniti…).
It seems, if we want to go any further in our explanation we have to understand why such a suffix is used here at all.
We called them brinjals in South Africa, aubergines in the UK.
We called them brinjals in South Africa, aubergines in the UK.
Peter Desmond posted a delicious translation on Baltazar del Alcazar poem in Apres moi,
My Three Loves
(by Baltasar del Alcazar)
Only three things hold my heart
love-captive in a prison vault:
gorgeous Betty, Spanish ham,
and eggplant roasted au gratin.
Betty, guys, knew what to do
to rob me of the slightest clue.
I held as hateful and as petty
everything that wasn’t Betty.
I spent a year without a hunch
until one day she served me lunch
consisting of some Spanish ham
and eggplant roastedau gratin.
Betty was the first to score,
but I’m not certain any more
which of them happens to control
the battlefield that is my soul.
In taste, in measure, and in weight
I think the three of them are great!
Now I want Betty, now it’s ham,
now it’s eggplant au gratin.
Betty’s beauty can’t be beat,
but Aracena’s ham is sweet;
and ancient chronicles attest
that Spaniards loved their eggplant best.
And, so in balance are the three
that, judging quite impartially,
all are equal: Betty, ham,
and eggplant roasted au gratin.
At very least, my new-found squeezes
(ham, and eggplant drenched in cheeses)
may induce my Bettykins
to charge less money for our sins.
For she will find as counterweight,
if she fails to negotiate,
a generous slice of Spanish ham
and eggplant roasted au gratin.
(translated by Peter H. Desmond)
8/04/2005 10:23:57 AM
Diccionario de la Real Academia Española: Del ár. hisp. baḏinǧána, este del ár. clás. bāḏinǧānah, y este del persa bātingān
El Rey, señor de Fugena, *
la cadena
vos eche que mereçedes,
pues tenedes
los ojos de berengena;
de Purchena * a Camarena, *
de Taraçena * a Carmena *
vos fagan luego trocar
e folgar
en la nao so el antena.
AÑO: 1406 – a 1435
AUTOR: Baena, Juan Alfonso de
TÍTULO: Poesías [Cancionero de Baena]
CORDE
That’s utterly delightful!
I recall hearing that the Arabic derives from “baida”, egg, and “jan”, demon, djinn: i.e. “devil’s egg”. The etymology is very appealing (as is the vegetable), but I don’t know if the Arabic permits it.
The Arabic word is from Persian, as I said above. Folk etymology is a popular sport the world over.
http://www.whimsyspeaks.com/archives/2004/12/
Scroll down to Dec 26 for a review of The Aubergine Anthology. All of the poems end on that word, in playful response to a comment in The New Yorker that “you can’t end a poem with ‘aubergine’ .”
m.
thank you for the nice comments on my poem!
while i’m sure it would be harmful to my career to be known as a one-vegetable poet, i thought i would post here a work which was recited in public this last Bastille Day in a happier New Orleans, at a celebration of the aubergine, which was sponsored by a local farmers’ market.
it is one of six works that survived the scrutiny of the editorial committee. i’m sorry to have missed the event, which featured both a cooking lesson (eggplant recipes, natch) and a parade of french poodles.
i enjoy following this blog.
peter desmond
Auberdoing It
Longfellow’s “Evangeline”
doesn’t mention aubergines.
When Baudelaire first published “Spleen”
he too forgot the aubergine.
Not one ballet by Balanchine
contains a single aubergine!
Even Esquire magazine
neglects the shapely aubergine.
Wagner was a Philistine —
his operas shun aubergines.
Elizabeth, the virgin queen,
never dined on aubergines.
I hiked the Upper Engadine
and did not find one aubergine.
In Rome, the Vatican’s Sistine
Chapel boasts no aubergines.
Though Aristotle’s Golden Mean
should guide our use of aubergines,
when I returned to New Orleans,
I gorged all night on aubergines.
For colds, take antihistamines.
For everything else, eat aubergines.
The Yiddish word for eggplant, patlezshan, could be from Turkish as well. MMarvin (Mikhl) Herzog wrote in Mendele:
Turkish origin words in Yiddish,derived either direc at some appropriate period in history or, perhaps via Ukrainian, should no surprise. As prestigious a word as “yarmulke” and “lehavdil” (and, perhaps, as notorious a word as “pots”, are likely of Turkish origin.
Mikhl Herzog
Peter! Nice reading you here!
Wow…I’m astonished by the french poodle parade 🙂
The first stanza of the del Alcazar poem looks suspiciously like a Celtic triad.
Japanese loanwords from English are so heavily japanned they’re practically impossible to recognize: what uninstructed anglophone, hearing /oeru/, would identify it with the (unfamiliar) English phrase office lady, acronymed and rhotacized?
I’m told by one of them that among Iranian youth, once two of them are at the point where one addresses the other with the -جان suffix (of endearment; Parviz-jaan, Maryam-jaan and so on; -joon, in Tehran, in practice), the response is often بادنجان , our bādinǧān above.
It’s perhaps a little silly to add more words at this point, but the Georgian is ბადრიჯანი badrijani. One of many Georgian loans from Persian.
It’s never silly to add more words, especially Georgian.
It’s thought that the Cid Hamete Benengeli, the alleged original Arabic author of Don Quixote, has a surname that is meant to suggest berenjena.
The variations on the Croatian coast seem to be countless: balancana, balancan, balančana, melancana, malancana, melancan, malancan, marancana… Sometimes I almost wonder if people are improvising on the spot.
“in romanian the name is pătlăgică vânătă(lit. dark blue pătlăgică)but usually just vânătă.
P.S. the tomato is pătlăgică roşie(red pătlăgică) again usually just roşie ”
That mirrors Mandarin. ‘qie2zi is eggplant and tomatoes are ‘fan1qie2″ – foreign eggplants.
In Serbia it’s still common to call it plavi patlidžan, even though crveni patlidžan for tomato isn’t commonly heard anymore. Google suggests it’s more common than just patlidžan. While comparing those, I was pretty surprised to come across plavi paradajz (blue tomato), but apparently it’s quite popular – 7400 hits.
In Sudan eggplants are called ṭamāṭim aswad, which would mean ‘black tomatoes’, except that ‘tomatoes’ is banadōra, and ‘black’ is azrag, historically ‘blue’: aswad is apparently now really something like ‘ill-fated, accursed’. Meanwhile, when written, banadōra (if lacking the dots of the tāʔ marbūṭa) could be read as ‘we love him’.
The CA word is properly bāðinjān, with ð from Persian d. Or rather Persian must have formerly had ð but changed it back to d. Similarly with Arabic ustāð ‘master, professor’ from Persian ustād.
Similarly with Arabic ustāð ‘master, professor’ from Persian ustād.
That sounds like a beautiful candidate for a false etymology of usted.
In Polish, the culinary name is bakłażan, and the official botanical one, oberżyna. It’s hard to see that they are ultimately cognate.
‘palavra’ in Turkish means
lie, hot air, boasting, applesauce, bragging, baloney, boloney, bounce, braggadocio, bunk, bunkum, claptrap, cock-and-bull story, eyewash, fish story, flubdub, flummery, gaff, jazz, palaver, talkee talkee, tall story, shits [sl.]
you get the idea.
Now, every linguist will immediately notice resemblance to Spanish palabra (word, speech) from an ecclesiastical Latin sense ‘discourse, allegory’ of Latin parabola ‘comparison,’ from Greek parabolē
It turns out Turkish got the word via Ladino
Palavra: “yalan haber” [ Osman Cemal Kaygılı, Argo Lugatı, 1932]
«Palavra» kelimesi matbuata ilk defa bundan altı yedi sene evvel [1925-26] «palavra edebiyatı» şeklinde girmiş ve ondan sonra «palavra edebiyatı», «palavracı muharrir» tabirleri herkesin ağzında klişe haline gelmiştir.
from Ladino palavra söz, laf << İsp palabra a.a. < from Latin parabola simge, mesel, vecize, anlamlı söz, parola.
I wonder how exactly a Ladino word meaning "word" came to mean "lie, hot air, boasting, bragging, baloney" in Turkish.
Must be an interesting an interesting story involving Jews of Saloniki.
The semantic development is not unlike English palaver (from the Portuguese contribution to West African Pidgin, ca. 1700) ‘speech, talk’ > ‘too much talking’ > ‘(unnecessary) dispute; idle talk, rigmarole’.
Japanese loanwords from English are so heavily japanned they’re practically impossible to recognize:
Or matahara (マタニティー‐ハラスメント, matanitii harasumento)
OP: vātingana-; most sources attribute the latter form to Sanskrit, but I don’t find it in my dictionaries.
The Sanskrit words are vātigagama- ~ vātigaṁgaṇa- (according to Monier-Williams), also vaṅga-, bhaṇṭākī. All these forms look like folk loans from more than one (ultimately related) Dravidian sources: Tamil var̤utalai, var̤utuṇai, Malayalam var̤utina, var̤utini, Telugu vaṅga, vaṅkāya, Kannada badaṇi. The Proto-Dravidian ‘eggplant’ word is reconstructed by Krishnamurti as *waẓ-Vt- (*ẓ = retroflex frictionless continuant).
See also
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~fsouth/Proto-DravidianAgriculture.pdf
All these forms look like folk loans from more than one (ultimately related) Dravidian sources: Tamil var̤utalai, var̤utuṇai, Malayalam var̤utina, var̤utini, Telugu vaṅga, vaṅkāya, Kannada badaṇi. The Proto-Dravidian ‘eggplant’ word is reconstructed by Krishnamurti as *waẓ-Vt- (*ẓ = retroflex frictionless continuant).
DEDR 5301 for வழுதலை et al. I don’t understand the w beginning BK’s reconstruction, when all the DEDR words begin with v or b(h).
வங்கணம் (vanganam) is in Tamil as well. I wonder where the now more common கத்திரி (kaththiri) comes from. Madras Lexicon doesn’t offer a source, so it doesn’t seem to be a loanword (?).
(Everybody having their own transliteration scheme brings out the Qin Shih Huang Di in me. R with two dots underneath does not make me think of ழ at all. ẓ doesn’t make that much sense either but at least we’re all used to z(h) for ழ.)
I don’t understand the w beginning BK’s reconstruction, when all the DEDR words begin with v or b(h).
B. Krishnamurti, The Dravidian languages (2003: 142):
I prefer to use /w/ in my reconstructions for Proto-Dravidian and also for Telugu. Several authors write v instead but they do not mean that the sound that they are representing is a labio-dental. The choice seems to be purely arbitrary.
Whether written *v or *w it patterns with semivowels.
The traditional Austrian term is Melanzani (sg. and pl.) – Italian, only not quite.
Eierfrucht has been spotted somewhere in Germany.
I’m getting umlaut envy.
So much.
BTW, you just invented your own for Chinese. :p
I’m so glad this thread got revived; it’s definitely a classic.
BTW, you just invented your own for Chinese. :p
That was a pun on Su Shih!
Ok, ok, that was a mistake. 🙂
Lazar: That sounds like a beautiful candidate for a false etymology of usted.
It’s been done: http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/arabic-%D8%A3%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%B0-ustaadh-and-spanish-usted.112999/
Finnish munakoiso is a compound of muna, which has a pan-Uralic etymology (“egg”, “testicle”, “penis”) and koiso, which, according to Nykysuomen etymologinen sanakirja, refers to various solanaceous plants, such as punakoiso (Solanum dulcamara) (“red koiso”) and is either an old Germanic loan or a later Scandinavian loan, derived from the same root as the Swedish kvesa “pimple; rheumatism, severe pain in the finger”. The reconstructed form is *kwaisōn originally meant “abscess, boil”. The shift in meaning occurred because punakoiso (Swedish kvesört, kvesved) was principally used as a medicinal plant.
kveisa, according to Cleasby-Vigfusson, means:
KVEISA u, f.
a whitlow, boil;
hafa kveisu í fæti, Hrafnkels Saga (D. II.)14;
kveisa er komin í hönd þér, Pr. 470;
kveisu-nagli, the core of a boil, Hrafnkels Saga (D. II.) 14, 15, Njála (D. II.) 244;
kveisu-sullr, a boil, Biskupa Sögur (D. III.) ii. 168:
in modern usage, of shooting pains, iðra-k., colic: as also, flug-k., shooting pains. kveisu-flug, a shooting pain, Málshátta-kvæði kveisu-gras, n., botan. Gentiana.
BTW, I’ve noticed a strange similarity between kova and kowai:
こわい2【強い】 ﾛｰﾏ(kowai)
〔かたい〕 tough; hard; stiff; inelastic; inflexible; 〔頑なな〕 feisty; obstinate; stubborn; inflexible.
▲こわいひげ a ┌bristly [stiff] beard
･髪の毛がこわい have ┌coarse [stiff, bristly] hair
･情がこわい unemotional; cold; not easily moved emotionally; not sentimental
･こわい飯 hard(-boiled) rice.
▲このシャツはのりがききすぎてこわい. This shirt is starched too stiffly.
･このご飯は少しこわい. This rice is ┌rather hard [on the hard side]. | The rice hasn’t been boiled with quite enough water.
Like in Uralic, EGGPLANT is linked to DICK in Hokkien, so Sinitic cognate «kiô»（茄） for EGGPLANT was a euphemism for DICK. I’ve never heard EGGPLANT called «kiô» in a Taiwanese (or any) context. In Taiwan Hokkien it’s called «ângchhài»（紅菜）, literally REDDISH VEGGIE. «Kiô» doesn’t seem to be in the vocabulary — of younger people at least. I don’t think most people know about the euphemism either.
Not sure what EGGPLANT is called in idiomatic Vietnamese, but Sinitic cognate «cà»（茄） comes up in the dictionary, and TOMATO is called «cà chua», literally SOUR EGGPLANT … while words for TOMATO in Hokkien include «chhàukhī-á» (STINKY PERSIMMON) and «kammábít» (from Luzonese — most likely Tagalog — “kamatis”, but reinterpreted as literally TANGERINE HONEY)…
Not sure what EGGPLANT is called in idiomatic Vietnamese, but Sinitic cognate «cà»（茄） comes up in the dictionary
Well, Wikipedia tiếng Việt gives the names as “Cà tím hay cà dái dê” (which Google translate helpfully renders “Eggplant and tomato goat testicles”), for what that’s worth. The article is oddly focused on the history of Western names for the eggplant, which suggests it was translated, probably from English, by someone who didn’t bother to localize it.
This reminds me of the infamous translation of the Chinese name for beef with tomatoes as ‘barbarian eggplant cowpork’.
This reminds me of the infamous translation of the Chinese name for beef with tomatoes as ‘barbarian eggplant cowpork’.
I am now disappoint that the “barbarian” qualifies the eggplant and not the intended consumer.
Technically yes. But I’m sure the semantics overlap onto both. Tomatoes, after all, are a New World vegetable. By 1544 Italians were already thinking of them as a new type of eggplant; the analogy to apples came slightly later. Scientifically, tomatoes are Solanum lycopersicum, whereas eggplants are S. melongena (and potatoes, while I am at it, are S. tuberosum).
“Cowpork” is spot-on.
the plural of vânătă is vinete (both stressed on the first syllable).
I’m getting umlaut envy.
In Sindarin, umlaut is the normal method of forming the plural, historically from a Proto-Elvish plural ending -í, shortened in Quenya to -i (as in quendi ‘elves’) but lost entirely in Sindarin. However, unlike Germanic umlaut it affects every vowel in the word: thus adan ‘Man’, pl. edain; ithron ‘wizard’ pl. ithryn; onod pl. enyd ‘Ent’. There are different rules for final and non-final syllables (where monosyllables count as final, hence alph [alf] ‘swan’ pl. eilph).
These are partitive/distributive plurals: the endings -ath, -hoth form collective plurals. Thus for orch ‘an Orc’ the distributive plural is yrch, which Tolkien himself glosses ‘orcs, some orcs, des orques’, vs. orchoth ‘the Orcs’ as a whole.
I missed this thread. For good measure I’m going to supply the Mongolian for eggplant, which is ᠬᠠᠰᠢ / хаш khash. In Inner Mongolia, ᠲᠦᠪᠡᠳ ᠬᠠᠰᠢ / төвд хаш tövd khash, literally ‘Tibetan eggplant’, is the word used for tomato. I’m not sure why they attribute it to the Tibetans, but the naming does parallel Chinese 番茄 fānqié ‘foreign eggplant’ (which was given by Jim more than a decade ago).
(A couple of Mongolian-Inner Mongolian vegetable name differences can be found at my site here.)
Excellent, the more words the better!
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-called-an-aubergine/answer/Raveen-21?ch=15&oid=319803408&share=f6c4e6bd&srid=Q43H&target_type=answer
Barbarous indeed.
Wortatlas der arabischen Dialekte 10. Pflanzen has an Auberginen map and some interesting notes. (I suppose 50¢ a page for an ebook isn’t insane by academic standards. More worth it if you have access to an institution with it.)
YM’s “devil’s egg” is apparently sometimes considered euphemistic bēḏ̣ il-ǧānn “Eier (Testikel) der Dämonen”.
Like what George Gibbard notes for Sudan, an Egyptian dialect has ṭamāṭim sōda “schwarze Tomaten”.
For the more usual color-association direction — a similar idea to the Chinese “foreign eggplant” — this and the following Tomaten headword note Lane‘s “black, white, or red bádingáns.”
This thread has indirectly illuminated a mystery for me: the Kusaal for “tomatoes” is kamantɔɔsi, which must surely be derived from the English word somehow; however, while the intrusive n is common in words taken from English, presumably because English vowels after nasal consonants sound nasalised to Kusaasi, the initial k is mysterious.
Or was: I hadn’t thought of the aubergine/tomato thing. Kusaal kɔma “aubergines.” Tomatoes are obviously an exotic kind of garden egg.