I recently ran across the Southern term benne (pronounced “Benny”) for ‘sesame,’ and of course wondered about the etymology. Merriam-Webster says it’s “of African origin; akin to Malinke bĕne sesame,” and The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Foodways concurs (“The term itself seems to confirm the African origin of the plant as the word bene means sesame in the language of the Bambara peoples of Mali and among the Wolof of Senegal and Gambia”). But I’m never content until I’ve double- and triple-checked something like that, and I was also curious to see if this specifically U.S. term would be in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary
By the way, power has been restored here at the Hattery; thanks for your patience and good wishes!
BENNE.
November 1, 2011 by 25 Comments
Did you see it in that New Yorker article about the chef in Charleston SC? From his account of the history, Malinke sounds a whole lot likelier than Malay.
Yes, that’s exactly where I saw it, and I agree about the likelihood.
The Shorter OED (6th ed.) says “ORIGIN: Mande”, Mande being the family that includes Malinke.
The OED2 says “Mende (Sierra Leone) bene“; the OED3 has not yet reached the word.
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The on-line full OED has:
Pronunciation: /ˈbɛnɪ/
Forms: Also bene, beni, benni, benny.
Etymology:
More exactly, Malay beneh or benih means seed. The word for sesame is bijan or lengah.
I’m glad you’ve got your power back. Does that mean that you can mow your lawn now?
Anyway, as I started to read your post I thought for a moment that you were referring to “Open Sesame!”.
More exactly, Malay beneh or benih means seed.
So there is a similar Malay word! Then I guess it is a competing etymology, and not just a goof.
“More exactly, Malay beneh or benih means seed.
So there is a similar Malay word! Then I guess it is a competing etymology, and not just a goof.”
Competing – are you so sure it’s a separate etymology? It looks like a wanderword to me. The species originates in South Asia and so does that word.
It may be historically the same word, but to say it’s directly from Malay rather than from Mande (which got it, at some remove, from Malay) is a separate etymology.
Sadia Shepard’s book, The Girl From Foreign, mentions the Bene Israel, an Indian Jewish community whose principal occupation was pressing sesame oil. Wonder if there is a connection between their name and their traditional trade?
I believe it’s just a coincidence that the בני ישראל ‘Sons of Israel’ are शनवाऱ्या तेली ‘Saturday oilmen’. They press(ed) coconut and other oils as much as sesame. The Shaivite सोमवाऱ्या तेली didn’t work on Mondays.
The derivation of benne from Malay seems to be an old theory that no etymologist believes anymore: the Century Dictionary has it from Malay, and so do Merriam-Webster’s New International (1909), and the 1933 Supplement to the OED. But every dictionary except COED changed it to a West African source decades ago. The 1972 OED Supplement changed it to “Mende (Sierra Leone) bene”, as mentioned above; that’s the origin given by the University of Chicago’s 1940 Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles and 1951 Dictionary of Americanisms, which Burchfield used heavily. But apparently the Concise fumbled the correction: they changed the etymon to bene but forgot to change the source language. The Malay etymology persisted in the print editions of ODE and NOAD up to 2010, and it’s still there in the Oxford-licensed-to-Google entry — and Wiktionary. Maybe when the OED3 gets to it they’ll remember to check their current dictionary for consistency.
But which West African language? Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect by Lorenzo D. Turner (1949) says Wolof and Bambara (that’s probably the ultimate source for the Southern Culture: Foodways book). AHD says Wolof and Malinke. Bambara, Malinke, and Mende are at least all in the Mande family, but Wolof is Atlantic, not demonstrably related at all (if I understand correctly), so if they all share the same word, it must be a regional loanword.
Jim said: “The species originates in South Asia and so does that word.” — Sesamum indicum originates in South Asia, but similar species such as Sesamum radiatum are native to west and central Africa, according to Wikipedia. Theoretically the word could still have come from South Asia to West Africa via trade, but we don’t know that without evidence in some intermediate language.
Proto-Oti-Volta had *bɪ́- “seed”, surfacing as e.g. Buli bíe, Konni bínní, Ditammari (dī)bíî. This has lots of Volta-Congo cognates (also as a verb stem “ripen”) but it means “seed” in general, not sesame specifically (which was proto-Oti-Volta *sàɣ-r-fʊ̀ or *sàɣ-l-fʊ̀.) And Mande is not related to Volta-Congo (whatever Greenberg thought), so this is just as coincidental as the Malay beneh “seed.”
What’s the Kusaal word descended from proto-Oti-Volta *sàɣ-r-fʊ̀ or *sàɣ-l-fʊ̀?
Sɔ’ɔd; Toende Kusaal has sa’at. (The noun class suffix is different: the old *fʊ̀ class is preserved only in a few very common nouns in Kusaal, and most words that originally belonged to it have been transferred to other classes.)
Mooré has sìilfú; here the root has acquired a derivational suffix /l/; the root vowel was umlauted before the *fʊ̀/i plural suffix, and the umlaut generalised to the singular too. Waama has the plural saarii, which corresponds exactly to the Mooré form etymologically.
Gulmancema ŋèèbu is also cognate: like the Kusaal, it is from the simple root *sàɣ-. The vowel fronting comes from the plural ŋèí, again generalised to the singular, as in the Mooré form: Gurma languages only do the fronting thing with plural -i when there is no intervening consonant, unlike Western Oti-Volta, where it’s real “umlaut.”
The implausible-looking initial ŋ for proto-Oti-Volta *s is actually regular, and supported by many other series, e.g. Gulmancema ŋúlūbū “navel” beside e.g. Mbelime sūdìfɛ̀, Waama súrífā.
Fascinating — you’ve really got yourself an interesting family there.
Yup. Also fairly conservative overall, I think: I don’t think it’s just the Teeter’s Law phenomenon. It could be a big contributor to Volta-Congo reconstruction.
(I’m in the throes at the moment of revising my analysis of the varying outcomes of stops in derivational suffixes in the various Oti-Volta branches. Initially, this looked like minor-adjustment territory, but as with any complex interlocking system, if you start pulling on one thread, unexpected things start to unravel … it might even lead to a reassessment of some of the internal relationships within Oti-Volta: specifically, whether the Gurma languages actually form a primary branch along with Eastern-Oti-Volta-excluding-Waama.)
Me, me, teacher, me!
*s > *’ > ŋ, right?
Arapaho, move over.
@Trond:
Yes, exactly that.
Non-initial *s also disappears in Gurma (though not before devoicing preceding alveolars and acquiring a preceding epenthetic vowel after other consonants), and /ŋ/ actually turns up in loanwords as a stopgap initial consonant to avoid vowel-initial full words, like ŋàlìfáangu “imam” and ŋandúna “world.”
My favourite cor-fancy-that exact etymological correspondence in Oti-Volta is probably Moorè sẽ̀ and Moba nyáĺ “sew”, both of which are absolutely regular outcomes of proto-Oti-Volta *sếr- in every respect (including tone.)
So not Arapaho, then, but mere Nenets.
Doubtless, in the first instance, Gurma *s became *h. That would be due to the Welsh substratum.