Victor Mair has a Log post, “Carrot” in Persian, Urdu, Uyghur, Sinitic, Vietnamese, etc., that’s full of interesting stuff. He takes off from a question by David Brophy: “I’ve often wondered why the Uyghur word for carrot is sewze, etc., which comes from P. sabz ‘green’.” There’s discussion of the Persian word, including this contribution from John Mullan:
The most common Persian word for “carrot” is havīj (هویج). In eastern dialects, which preserve older phonological features, it’d be hawīj. Other words are gazar (another eastern word) and zardak, literally ‘yellow’ plus the diminutive ending.
This paragraph is from Ephraim Nissan’s “Etymothesis, Fallacy, and Ontologies: An Illustration from Phytonymy”:
Persian havīj (هویج) for ‘carrot’ appeared relatively late in the language, and is related to (and probably derived from) the Turkish name for ‘carrot’, havuç. The standard Persian name for ‘wild carrot’, havīj-e waḥšī, is a compound formed with the adjective for ‘wild’, itself from Arabic. Also the Persian compound for ‘wild carrot’ havīj-e ṣaḥrā’ī is formed with an adjective that comes from Arabic, and literally means ‘of the desert’ (but in Persian, the compound is literally understood as ‘carrot of the field’, i.e., ‘of the wilderness’). By contrast, the third Persian compound for ‘wild carrot’ is entirely Persian etymologically: havīj-e kūhī (but it literally means ‘mountain carrot’).
Sinitic has luóbo 蘿蔔, whose etymology is unknown:
This word has been attested in various forms since early Old Chinese, and is the source of many of the terms for “radish, turnip” in other languages in modern China. The basic form seems to be *rabuk.
There’s no discussion of the English word; the OED entry (from 1888), like Wiktionary, derives it from Greek καρῶτον, but Wikipedia adds (without a citation) that that is “originally from the Indo-European root *ker- (horn), due to its horn-like shape.” I also learn from that Wikipedia article that the carrot only arrived in Europe in medieval times, and Alan Davidson says it didn’t make its way to England until the 15th century, which explains that when I checked the OED’s Historical Thesaurus for earlier terms I found only the rare terms tank (“origin obscure”) “The wild carrot; according to Gerarde, the wild parsnip” (a1400–50 Stockh. Med. MS. 181 Bryddys neste or tanke: daucus asininus) and clapwype “A carrot or ? parsnip” (c1425 in T. Wright & R. P. Wülcker Anglo-Saxon & Old Eng. Vocab. (1884) I. 644 Hic daucus, clapwype).
It’s a shame that MMcM of Polyglot Vegetarian never got around to carrots; he would have done a great job!
I missed this. What happened?
You missed what?
AHDIER confirms WIKI: “ker-1: … V. Extended zero-grade form …. 1. CHARIVARI; CHEER, from Greek karē, karā, head. 2. CAROTID, from Greek karoun, to stupefy, be stupefied (< “to feel heavy-headed”). 3. CARROT, CAROTENE, from Greek karōton, carrot (from its hornlike shape)."
Reminds me of my favorite poem by Ibsen:
Kjaere, babygulrot
Babygulrot
Liten
Stygg
Lever I gulrotens skygge
Babygulrot.
Dear baby carrot
Baby carrot
Little
Ugly
Lives in the carrot’s shadow
Baby carrot.
—-
Georgian also borrowed from Greek, but were too busy debating monophysitism to decide if it looked like a horn or not and so borrowed the term directly σταφυλῖνος > სტაფილო (st’apilo).
Kusaal has karɔt, a word whose origins are likewise shrouded in mystery.
(It is transparently a compound ka-dɔt, “millet huts.” The origin of the metaphor is, however, unclear at this point. Western Oti-Volta ethnobiology is – as yet – sadly understudied,)
This comments thread makes more sense if you assume Cowan’s is meant to fall after Eddyshaw’s.
I assumed John Cowan was asking what happened to MMcM.
In an entry unrevised since 1990, the Encyclopaedia Iranica offers this etymology of Persian havīj:
.
This is the Arabic word in question. Andreas Tietze (Tarihi ve Etimolojik Türkiye Türkçesi Lugatı) just says the Turkish word havuç is from Arabic ḥawj “need, lack, want”, from the same… root. Ba dum tss.
This raises a deeply philosophical question of whether it is possible to miss something that was never there. In a sense, yes. Suppose you read a textbook on English grammar and skip (you think) a chapter on irrealis. But for some reason it was not in the book. Then you miss the fact that it was not there. It’s even possible that you’ve meant to read the chapter on irrealis, which should have been there, but wasn’t and anyway you skipped it. More difficult question is whether it is possible to miss something that never even meant to be there. Is it possible to miss a chapter on mating habits of fish in a book about cosmology?
Which brings me to the following joke: Rabbi is pacing around his study deeply in thought. A pupil asks him “Rabbi, what are you thinking about?” – “I want to know why the word bread needs letter u” – “But there is no u in bread” – “And what if I put it in there?” – “But, why?” – “That’s what I am thinking about”.
There was a u in Germanic *brauda- ! And it’s still there in Icelandic brauð…
And ברויט has a vav so that’s good enough.
pc: Reminds me of my favorite poem by Ibsen:
Kjaere, babygulrot
Babygulrot
Liten
Stygg
Lever I gulrotens skygge
Babygulrot.
I had never encountered the poem before. And I even live in Ibsen’s town of birth, in the middle of what I believe is Norway’s largest carrot-producing district.
With the danger of ruining a long-running literate in-joke, let me say clearly that this is not Ibsen. I see some other attributions to the year 1945, long after Ibsen’s death, but those can’t be right either. The construction with “baby” for small versions of anything is much too recent. It came with Chinese restaurants for maize, and I didn’t encounter it for carrots until snack carrots were introduced around the millennium.
Like John I missed what happened to MMcM.
He has been… absent lately, but I tend to be very slow in noticing such things.
The construction with “baby” for small versions of anything is much too recent.
I was suspicious about that, and I don’t even know Norwegian. Bad attribution! Bad!
How is “ lives” pronounced in the translation of the carrot poem?
Livs
@Trond, who is to say that that the misattribution is not part of the poem?
Good point.
The actual author is Pierre Menard.
burkāns
Interesting. Perhaps a word from the agricultural substrate that started with [b], which was variously borrowed as *bʰ and *m by IE languages.
Now I know the origin of hawaij.
My favorite linguistic fact about carrots is their color: when some guy in 17th century Netherlands managed to breed orange carrots, they instantly caught on, because orange was the national color of the Netherlands. Previously carrots were purple or white (like beets, which I just found out aren’t actually very closely related).
You might be asking where the linguistics comes in. Well, the reason that orange was the national color of the Netherlands is that the Netherlands were (at the time) ruled by the Orange dynasty. It turns out that the name of the color is ultimately of Dravidian origin, while the name of the dynasty is ultimately of Celtic origin; they just happened to converge to the same word.
Now I know the origin of hawaij.
A similar semantic development from abstract to concrete can be seen in masala and indeed in spice itself.
@January First-of-May: The name for the fruit, orange, come from the Persian, probably mediated through Arabic and Aragonese naranja. (The Arabs brought oranges to Sicily, from whence they spread throughout Medditerranean Europe.) This name was assimilated to be the same as the place in (southern!) France and the Dutch dynasty named after it.
The color is named after the fruit, and it is the newest addition to the major spectrum of color words in English. The fruit vary enough in appearance* that there is no universal cardinal value for the color orange, the way there are for red, yellow, green, and blue. Despite the similarity in names being a coincidence, the Netherlands and the House or Orange (although the current royal house of the Netherlands is only distantly related to William the Silent) have embraced the color as a national symbol. The emergence of carrots as major vegetable crops in Europe probably coincided with the period in which the Dutch Republic was one of the great European powers, and the wide variety of colors available in wild carrots led people to breed particularly orange-colored ones. The orange color comes from vitamin A and related compounds. In contrast to the anthocyanins that produce purple colors in carrots, beans, and other vegetables, the orange pigments are relatively stable and maintain their coloration when cooked. Besides the association with the House of Orange-Nassau, this color stability was probably another reason that orange carrots eventually won out over white and purple varieties.
* In This Time of Darkness, H. M. Hoover described oranges as having brown skins.
When did brown become a color word? (I’m having this in mind.)
Red-green-colorblind?
Hat: That was indeed what I meant: why are you speaking of MMcM in the past tense?
What’s the origin of green and orange for Irish Catholics/Protestans? I’m too lazy to do the research.
why are you speaking of MMcM in the past tense?
Not him, his blog.
According to OED brown as a color is first found in 1607; orange as color is first given under 1557:
in Great Brit. Statutes at Large VI. 100 Coloured cloth of any other colour or colours..hereafter mentioned, that is to say, scarlet, red, crimson, morrey, violet, pewke, brown, blue, black, green, yellow, blue, orange, [etc.].
I would like to know what that [etc.] contains, more interesting colors, perchance? Anyway, notice that brown is in that list. What’s up with that, OED? As a fruit, orange first appears under a1400.
Pink appears first in 1464–5 as pink-yellow in M. Rissanen et al. Hist. Englishes (1992) 767 Item pro j lagena de pynke yelow..ijs viijd. And the first citation without “yellow” is given only under year 1676.
I would like to know what that [etc.] contains, more interesting colors, perchance?
Here you go:
[…] tawney, russet, marble grey, sad new colour, azure, watchet, sheeps colour, lion colour, motly, iron grey, friers grey, crane colour, purple, and old medley colour.
pewke ~ puke, OED:
(Checking for a friend.)
Aha, thanks! Of course, “sad new colour” is not something to let go without further research. This page has more fun colors with dates, but without an attribution…
Yes, “sad new colour” struck me too.
@Y:
William of Orange:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_III_of_England
“Green” is more complicated:
https://time.com/4699771/green-irish-st-patricks-day-color/
Incidentally, Wikipedia correctly describes King Billy as “the last person to successfully invade England by force of arms.” Few of the English would answer this pub quiz question correctly (more Scots would …)
History is written by the victors (one of those sayings which floats free, and is thus attributed to Winston Churchill, as it sounds implausible on the lips of Albert Einstein or Charles Darwin. It seems quite probably to have originated with Hermann Göring, who may have had an axe to grind.)
It’s interesting that the association of green as a colour of Catholicism is an Anglophone thing. In parts of Europe adjoining the old Ottoman empire, green is very much associated with Islam, with Catholics preferring red (presumably from the colours of Venice / Poland or the old war banner of the Holy Roman Empire).
Of course, in India, orange (or saffron of you will) is a Hindu colour, while in Sri Lanka, and SE Asia, a Buddhist colour – at least on flags.
To my inexperienced eyes the orange and green of the Indian flag look quite close to the two Irish colors.
@DE Thanks for the links. It’s still not clear why the color green came up when it did, supplanting the blue.
Except, as someone recently noted, the history of the US Civil War.
Never heard of that, only the association with Ireland in particular.
Never heard of that either. The flag of the Vatican is yellow and white.
Maybe just misdyed somehow? The Italian flag is that under which Napoleon entered Italy…
The flag of Vatican is indeed yellow and white. That is a special dispensation from the rules of heraldry, where two metals are placed together. The flag of Vatican and the coat of arms of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem are yellow and white – or rather gold and silver. However, the Kingdom of Jerusalem was extinguished long before the Ottomans appeared in Europe, and Vatican only became an independent state in 1929.
Of course, the Vatican flag was based on one of the flags of the Papal States. Other flags used by the Papal States were red. Indeed, the coat of arms of the Vatican City, and the Papal states beforehand, is red.
The war banner of the Holy Roman Empire was red with a white cross – a very old symbol, and possibly the origin of the Danish, Swiss and Savoyard flags. Red was also used in the banners of the Venetian Republic, and (with white) in Polish and Hungarian flags.
So I’m not saying that red was exclusively used by Catholics, just that it was commonly used. Of course there were other colours too:
– Black and Gold of the Habsburgs
– White of the Habsburg armies – uniforms were predominantly white in the 18th and 19th centuries
– Blue – traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary,
I have a very faint memory of reading about a young girl who wore an orange ribbon in her hair to her Irish Catholic school getting in trouble for it, back when the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Northern Ireland was more current. I don’t even remember if the trouble came from her teachers, or just from her fellow students.
The above anecdote, I should add, was in reference to a school in the USA, not in NI. The teachers and much of the ethnically Irish student body might have known about the colour symbolism, but not everyone who goes to an Irish Catholic school in the US is necessarily Irish.
I see, per WikiP, that the Orange Order still holds marches in NI on the 12th of July.
the last person to successfully invade England by force of arms
I think that’s a stretch. William landed in England with armed men all right, but he fought no battles and met no resistance. James fled the country, the throne was declared vacant (suppressing the claims of the warming-pan baby), and that was that, as the Stuarts had absolutely no constituency left in England. (Scotland and then Ireland were another matter.) J. R. Tanner tells the story beautifully in English Constitutional Conflicts of the Seventeeth Century (1971):
sad new colour
Sad, per the OED, means ‘deep, dark, saturated’ when applied to colors. The usual sense is apparently unique to English. German satt means ‘satisfied’ or even ‘fed up’, a sense taken over in English by derivatives of the Latin satis ‘enough’ and satur ‘sated, replete’, both true cognates.
The sense development is apparently ‘serious > grave > sad [in appearance] > sad [in feeling]’. The phrase sadder and wiser most likely meant ‘more serious and with better judgement [than before]’, but when this sense of sad was lost, and was replaced by but. The OED says sad soil ‘stiff, hard, difficult-to-work soil’ is still current (2002) as a technical term, and Gale’s mother used to refer to a sad cake, one which had failed to rise before baking or had fallen during baking and was therefore very dense. (Gale didn’t like this expression, but she did like the cake, so she renamed it happy cake.)
New is more mysterious, but I found some weaksauce evidence that it refers to the paint shade new blue. My attempts to find out what that is were swamped by reports of the discovery in 2009 of a genuinely new blue pigment, a solid solution of yttrium indium trioxide and yttrium manganese trioxide roasted in a furnace at 1200 C. It is the first new inorganic blue pigment since cobalt blue, discovered exactly 200 years before, it can be applied either in oil or in water, and it is chemically stable, resistant to weather and sunlight, and non-toxic (unlike its predecessor), The depth of blue can be varied by altering the In:Mn ratio.
J. R. Tanner tells the story beautifully in English Constitutional Conflicts of the Seventeeth Century (1971)
That’s an absurdly antiquated account (the book is from 1928, not 1971, and Tanner’s dates are 1860 – 1931); to quote Wikipedia, which while it is of course Wikipedia at least favors more recent sources:
“Imagine there’s a war and nobody comes.”
“Our Island Story” (that nice man David Cameron’s favourite childhood book, he says) has an account which will surely lay all doubt to rest in the heart of any true Englishman:
Any one could see that the people were everywhere ready for rebellion. The King alone would not see it and went on in his own way. He was angry and sullen, but very obstinate. “I will not give way,” he said, “my father lost his head by giving way,” and he resolved to punish the people.
But James had gone too far. The people were weary of a Popish tyrant, and they made up their minds to have a Protestant King. So they asked William, Prince of Orange, to come to rule over them, the Prince against whom Charles II. had fought in the Dutch wars. William had some claim to the throne. I will explain how […]
So when the British saw that James meant to rule as a tyrant and that there was no hope of any freedom or happiness for them as long as he was King, they sent messages to Holland begging William to come to take the crown. William consented to come, and began to gather his ships and men. And one day a letter reached James telling him what the Prince of Orange was doing. As James read, he turned pale and the letter dropped from his hand. He had thought that he might ill-treat the people as he liked. Now he discovered his mistake and tried to undo the evil he had done. It was too late. His people had forsaken him.
William was ready to sail, but for some days he was prevented because of the wind which blew from the west. At last it changed, and what was known for many years after as the “Protestant East Wind” began to blow. It blew the Prince and his great fleet to the shores of Britain. More than six hundred ships swept over the water, led by William in his vessel called the Brill. From the mast-head floated his standard, with the arms of Nassau and of Britain upon it, and in great shining letters the words, “I will maintain the liberties of England, and the Protestant religion.” By night the dark sea glittered for miles with lights. By day the white sails glimmered in the wintry sun.
Once before in our story a great conqueror called William had sailed to these shores with mighty ships and men. This was no conqueror, but a deliverer.
On the 5th of November 1688 A.D., William landed at Torbay, in Devonshire. There the stone upon which he first placed his foot is still to be seen. Although now it is a town, then it was a little lonely village, and the Prince had to sleep the first night in a tiny thatched cottage. But over it, as proudly as over any castle, fluttered the great banner with its promise, “I will maintain the liberties of England and the Protestant religion.”
Through rain and wintry weather, over roads knee-deep in mud, the Prince and his army marched northward. Worn, wet, and muddy as they were, the people crowded everywhere along the way to cheer them. The Prince rode upon a beautiful white horse, a white feather was in his hat, and armor glittered upon his breast. His face was grave and stern, his eyes keen and watchful. He looked a soldier and a King.
As he rode along an old woman pushed her way through the crowd, and afraid neither of the prancing horses nor the drawn swords of the soldiers, darted to the side of the Prince. She seized his hand, and, looking up into his face with eyes full of tears, cried, “I am happy now, I am happy now.” And the grave and stern William smiled gently as he looked down upon her. The Deliverer had come.
[…]
At Westminster a Parliament was called, which arranged that William and Mary should be King and Queen together. For although Mary had the better right to the throne she did not wish to reign without her husband, nor did he wish to accept a lower rank than that of his wife.
So ended the “Glorious Revolution.” It had been brought about with hardly any fighting at all, and the war between the King and Parliament was at an end, for William and Mary received the throne by the will of Parliament.
As he rode along an old woman pushed her way through the crowd, and afraid neither of the prancing horses nor the drawn swords of the soldiers, darted to the side of the Great Leader. She seized his hand, and, looking up into his face with eyes full of tears, cried, “I am happy now, I am happy now.” And the grave and stern Stalin smiled gently as he looked down upon her.
Sycophantic history is the same the world over!
(sad new colour, &c)
The Distribution of the Cloth Industry in 1561-2 breaks cloth down by county, and it looks like Kent and Suffolk were the only places producing “sad new colour” cloth; Kent had, in addition, “new colour” (no additional description), and “ruddy new colour”.
Kent was also making a “rat’s colour” (“light or iron-grey, sheep’s or rat’s colour”).
The list of cloth also has: kersey, dozens, plunkett, and peniston (hur hur hur hur)
Sorry about the date error; please fix. That was of course the date of my edition. But “absurdly antiquated” is itself absurdly overstated. The very act of landing with armed men is a threat of violence, but of actual violence there was little or none. It would be absurd to say that the landing of Charles II at Dover was an invasion, though he undoubtedly arrived with soldiers, and it would be “an exaggerated respect for technicalities” to point out that Charles had already been proclaimed king, whereas William had not. Resistance did not so much collapse as fail to materialize, and James may well have decided to leave before William left the Netherlands.
Note also that your quotation from WP comes from the section called “‘Dutch Invasion’ hypothesis”, where it is described as the view of “several researchers”, which is how WP describes a minority view that is not outright crackpot.
@David Marjanović: H. M. Hoover was a woman, so it is rather unlikely she was colorblind. (Her first name was Helen.) Moreover, typical American oranges are unlikely to be mistaken for brown even by someone with red-green colorblindness.* (Brazillian oranges** are quite a bit darker though and some might plausibly be called brown.) Hoover actually used a fair amount of color imagery in the two novels of hers that I read when I was a child, This Time of Darkness (which is not a very descriptive name for the book, really) and Return to Earth. So the oddity of the brown oranges is something that stuck in my mind.
It is, of course, well known that female authors of children’s novels are often advised to use their initials—for fear of driving off young male readers. That’s probably especially true for writers of science fiction, traditionally viewed as a genre for boys and men. I did notice, however, the the two Hoover novels I read both had female main characters—although in each case, the heroine is joined by a more knowledgeable male character. In This Time of Darkness, the two protagonists are both preteens, whereas in Return to Earth, the main character is about eighteen, but she gets help and advice from a middle-aged male friend; yet in both books, it is the young woman who is the one who steps up to take action when it’s needed, even if she would not know what to do without her companion.
* There is actually a fair amount of variation in how severe red-green colorblindness is, and that is not actually due to genetics. I have significantly better color vision than my maternal grandfather (from whom I inherited my colorblindness) did. I generally only have trouble distinguishing very unsaturated or muddy shades of orange from green, but Grandpa Frank could hardly distinguish a red rose from its leaves. Another indication of significant environmental influence in the manifestation of red-green colorblindness is that my color vision is actually measurably different between my two eyes. It’s a small difference, but some shades of brown look redder to me through one eye than the other.
** It’s a standard piece of advice in America that when shopping for orange juice, you should avoid the cheaper brands that include Brazilian oranges. Oranges from Florida and California are supposed to be better. I have never been a big drinker of orange juice, so I didn’t pay a ton of attention of that advice, but for a long time, I had a hard time believing that Brazilian oranges could really be that different. However, when I visited Brazil and got to eat Brazilian oranges fresh, I discovered that they are not good at all. They are actually sourer than oranges from the Northern hemisphere and also somewhat bitter.
That’s interesting about Brazilian oranges.
Not impossible, though – if her father was colorblind and her mother was a carrier, the chances of her turning out colorblind would be 50 : 50.
But maybe the brown orange had just dried up?
Everything looks bluer through my upper eye and more yellow through my lower eye. I mean that quite literally: when they’re at the same height, there’s no difference, but when I lie in bed with my head to a side, or if I just tilt my head far enough, the difference appears quickly, and whichever eye happens to be higher up sees bluer. I have no idea what sense that makes.
I remember nothing of the oranges but I’ve drunk enough caipirinhas there to know there’s nothing wrong with any other Brazilian citrus fruit, not that you said there was. Also there’s nothing remarkable about the quality of oranges from Florida or California; it’s merely the same story as when my father-in-law insisted there are no strawberries like Norwegian strawberries, local food – preferably from your own garden – tastes best (my wife’s growing Norwegian oranges at the moment).
I am, indeed, still around.
I have been quite busy with other projects, but you never know. I do actually have a few notes for posts I’d like to do.
I think Florida’s and California’s cold spells in the winters are supposed to make better citrus than what you’d get in a tropical climate. Unless they’ve developed good tropical-adapted citruses.
It’s also a question of comparing not top-shelf Brazilian and U.S. citruses, but standard everyday available anywhere fruit. Maybe good Brazilian oranges are available but they are expensive. Or maybe now Brazil imports their oranges from Chile, making the whole issue moot.
(Insert some clever comment about comparing oranges to oranges.)
Add: Brazil and the U’S. aere the world’s biggest citrus producers, and São Paulo state, says WP, produces half the world’s OJ. Still, it’s fun to speculate without researching the facts.
@David Marjanović: Of course, colorblindness in women is not impossible, but since the rate of red-green defective X chromosomes is about 8%, the phenotypic rate for women is the square of that. In any case, Hoover seemed to like vivid color imagery, including contrasting reds and greens in the outfits of the villains in Return to Earth, so I doubt she had a bad case of colorblindness.
However, I don’t think the oranges in This Time of Darkness were supposed to be shriveled either. When she encounters the oranges, the main character Amy has finally escaped from the decaying underground city in which she has lived her whole life, eating synthetic carbohydrate-protein mush most of the time. The oranges are among an exciting selection of fresh foods that she has never seen before (and does not know what to make of; I just remembered that she initially tries to eat the orange without knowing to peel it first). The whole last part of the book features her acclimation to life outside as a major theme; the other thing I really remember is her discovering that flying insects outside can sound almost musical, and they are much easier to squish that the cockroaches she is used to from the city.
Separately: I suppose, based on what I know about the way cone cells develop and diversify in the retina, it should not be surprising that the sensitivity to different colors can sometimes have significant inhomogeneities across the field of view. There are less than ten million cone cells in a human eye, which is a small enough number that fluctuations in the densities of the three types could be apparent. (Another indication that there just aren’t all them many cone cells is that in people with really good vision, the limiting factor in their visual acuity is not—like it is for most people—the quality of the optics, but rather the density of cones in the fovea centralis.)
I do actually have a few notes for posts I’d like to do.
Huzzah!
Note also that your quotation from WP comes from the section called “‘Dutch Invasion’ hypothesis”, where it is described as the view of “several researchers”, which is how WP describes a minority view that is not outright crackpot.
WP is of course conservative, and rightly so, but the specialist articles and reviews I’ve read in recent years have emphasized the revolutionary quality of the change — it is, as I say, absurd to suggest it involves no “interruption of historical continuity.” To read Tanner as one’s main source on the subject is like reading Gibbon to learn about the fall of Rome. Enjoy the style if you like.
I am pleased to learn from MMcM that rumors of one apparent implicature from hat’s earlier post were greatly exaggerated.
Sorry about the inadvertent implicature; reading it over, it still seems to me to mean exactly what I intended it to mean, but I guess everyone’s a little twitchy these days.
I am now wondering whether more people were killed in the Restoration of 1660– or in initial phase of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. However, once the later fighting in Scotland from 1690 onward is included, the deaths under William dwarf the relatively small number of reprisals under Charles.
Strawberries: It’s an accepted fact here that the berries are sweeter if picked after a cool night — the plants use sugar from the berries for metabolism when the sun is down, and they are normally picked in the morning. And as with many sorts of fruit, the imported ones have been picked when not quite ripe.
I had some of the best strawberries ever from a roadside seller on the south side of Trondheim Fjord in mid-August many years ago. (That’s about a month after the season ends in Denmark). They probably put the E6 in a tunnel since then.
OED:
kersey: [ Etymology: Possibly named from the village of Kersey in Suffolk, (compare Kendal, Worsted, etc., as names of fabrics); though evidence actually connecting the original manufacture of the cloth with that place has not been found. ] A kind of coarse narrow cloth, woven from long wool and usually ribbed.
dozens: A kind of kersey or coarse woollen cloth: : see quot. 1552. [1552 Act 5 & 6 Edw. VI c. 6. §13 All Devonshire Kersies called Dozens..shall contain in Length at the Water between twelve and thirteen Yards.]
plunkett: [Etymology: Apparently < Anglo-Norman plunket, plonkett (adjective) lead-coloured, grey (1351 or earlier), (noun) dark cloth (1367 or earlier), alteration (with suffix substitution: see -et -et suffix1 and compare note below) of Middle French plonquié , ploncquié , plonkié (adjective) lead-coloured, grey (1254 in Old French), (noun) kind of grey cloth (1380), use as adjective and noun of past participle of plonquier , regional (Walloon and Picardy) variant of plongier to cover with lead (late 12th cent.: see plunge v.). Compare post-classical Latin plunkettum (c1378, 1414 in British sources), plonkettum (1399 in a British source). ]
A adj: Of a light greyish-blue colour; light blue; (also) made of wool of this colour.
B n 1: A type of woollen fabric, usually of a grey or light blue colour
peniston: [Forms: 15 penestone, 15 pennestone, 15 penniestone, 15–16 penyston, 15–17 pennystone, 15– penistone, 15– pennistone, 16–17 penniston, 16–17 19– peniston; also Scottish pre-17 pennestane, pre-17 pennistone, pre-17 pennystane. Etymon: proper name Penistone.
Etymology: < Penistone, the name of a small town in South Yorkshire, where the cloth was made. ]
A kind of coarse woollen cloth used for garments, linings, etc.
I have to wonder why the city decided to go with "Penistone", when there were plenty of examples of doubled "n"s and "y" or "e" instead of an "i". Eh, maybe they decided to give the world the finger, as it were.
>Sycophantic history is the same the world over!
One way of interpreting this comment is that you’re calling the historian sycophantic, but it’s hard to see what interest would have driven her to curry favor in 1905 by praising an ancient representative of a monarchy that had long since disavowed interest in political power.
So I have to assume you mean that the sycophants are those currying favor with William in 1688.
But it’s contradictory to reemphasize the “invasion aspect” and simultaneously accuse those who choose a side of being sycophants. If the outcome is still in question as William marches north, then they’re bravely casting their lot.
If the outcome is not in question, then the invasion is mere formality. Indeed, 14,000 troops seems a bit light if the 35,000 English troops already mustered had any will to fight, and it should have been possible to call out many more, if any significant political faction wanted to keep William out. To me the explanation that emphasizes the near unanimity of English public and elite opinion is more compelling than the idea he won his kingship by force of arms never unholstered.
Penistone has been spelled with a single n since the 13th century.
Spelled by whom? The OED evidence to the contrary strongly implies not everyone.
Again, “sad new colour”:
I was thinking about the list of Fabric Colors in the Renaissance linked to above, especially the last section titled “Mysteries”. I wondered if some dyer had the soul of a poet, or a madman, or a mad poet, and needed to express himself with these bizarre colour names. Or maybe some apprentice, just before ragequitting, made a mad mixup of all the dye tubs, and the owners/masters decided to make the best of this confusion by coining some wild names for the mixed-up colours.
But I had an idea that is perhaps less useless: during the time period in question, sumptuary laws were still in effect. What if some of the odder colour names were simply codes to avoid being caught out by those charged with enforcing those laws?
“I assure you, these are not the colours Coleur de Roy and Ruby which are restricted to those titled Duke or higher, but rather the colours Dying Monkey and New Colour, which are, I swear, completely and utterly different. Look, they are printed right here on the receipts.”
Alas, this beautiful theory may be slain by an ugly fact: Where are the lists of forbidden colours?
Or to save ink and paper. That’s why Graz has this decidedly dialectal form and isn’t a standardized Grätz anymore.
If all I wanted was sweeter strawberries, I’d add sugar. There are different flavours and different varieties (I have five or six), the most extreme being so-called wild strawberries (which also vary; I’ve transplanted some large ones with a flavour I like).
Israeli, Italian & Spanish oranges that Europeans import are as good as or better than any I remember eating in the US, as were my uncle’s in Australia. The US was one of the first places to have squeezed juice available in shops & restaurants (and no ice, unlike le citron pressé) so it gets points for that.
I’m relieved MMcM isn’t dead. I hope one day he’ll show pictures of the Kunstkammer and (some of) the 12,000 books.
I’m wondering if the author had in mind blood oranges, or alternatively, oranges with rust, canker, scab, melanose, or other diseases, infections, or blights.
Or, maybe — given the title — viewed in dim or otherwise altered light.
Incidentally a less dated, less tendentious and thoroughly less irritating book than the awful old Our Island Story is Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, written when he was twenty-six before he moved to England. Like all the best children’s books it’s just as good reading matter for grown ups.
Neal Stephenson, in one of his Baroque Cycle books, has an exchange between a Prussian and an English Protestant –
“And in 1688, when William took England -”
Daniel corrects him. “We prefer to say that England took William.”
Fictional, of course, but rather well put.
I hadn’t realised that William was a grandson of Charles I by his eldest daughter – in an earlier century he would probably simply have made a claim in his own right, on the grounds that a king through a female line was more useful than a queen from the male line.
(It randomly occurs to me – I’ve been reading Cadfael – that a lot of trouble might have been saved if Stephen of Blois had married his cousin Matilda instead of *her* cousin Matilda!)
By arms or not, it doesn’t seem to have made any particular difference to the succession, which went straight back to the Stuarts, not into the House of Orange.
One way of interpreting this comment is that you’re calling the historian sycophantic, but it’s hard to see what interest would have driven her to curry favor in 1905 by praising an ancient representative of a monarchy that had long since disavowed interest in political power.
You’re overthinking it; it was a joke. I was just reminded by the phrasing of the many similarly effusive stories about Stalin.
The phrase sadder and wiser most likely meant ‘more serious and with better judgement [than before]’, but when this sense of sad was lost, and was replaced by but.
Did Coleridge originate the phrase or just pick it up?
>You’re overthinking it;
Yep. Sorry.
One way of interpreting this comment is that you’re calling the historian sycophantic, but it’s hard to see what interest would have driven her to curry favor in 1905 by praising an ancient representative of a monarchy that had long since disavowed interest in political power.
Notwithstanding Hat’s explanation that his remarks were meant as a joke, I have seen sycophancy for centuries-dead monarchs by historians, not in order to curry favour with the dead monarchs, but with their current successors, who regard them as their biological or spiritual ancestors, or with a nationalistic culture surrounding the historians. There were times up to only two-three generations ago where being critical of Frederick the Great of Prussia would mark you as a “bad German”.
Good point.
Sure. But that was my point about a monarchy that had long since abjured any genuine political power. By 1905, there was basically nothing to be gained, unless you mean sycophancy to the English people and their contemporary self-conception. I’m not sure sycophancy is the best word for this. Political correctness avant la lettre, maybe?
Sycophancy to the national heroes as part of confirming your belonging to the nation. That’s what I mean. Writing a kind of national history that has been simplified to a narrative with heroes and villains, where the heroes are painted bright white and the villains dark black.
Exactly. Virtually all English history used to be written with sycophancy to the English people and their self-conception, just as American history used to be written with sycophancy to the American people and their self-conception.
Notice that it’s virtually impossible to write history with any objectivity in many countries even today.
Owlmirror and other non-tropical readers, the balls of dried cellulose on sale in your supermarket are oranges only by courtesy and artificial coloring. I’ve tried to post a link to a picture of the real things on their tree, but the comment box rejects it. In text, though, those real things are mottled green and, yes, brown, and newcomers to Hawaii shun them (“Ew! They’re ugly!”). Once somebody slips them a taste, though, it’s time to delight in juice and poetry with Wallace Stevens, author of “Farewell to Florida.”
Brett (June 27, 2020): The name for the fruit, orange, come from the Persian, probably mediated through Arabic and Aragonese naranja
Why stop at Persian? Persian got it from Sanskrit, which got it from some Dravidian language. January First-of-May was right. (Though, as mentioned in comments at Hat and Log, the word has referred to different citrus fruits at different points along the trail.)
and it is the newest addition to the major spectrum of color words in English
Pink is newer as a color term; but by “major spectrum” maybe you meant monochromatic colors only.
D.O. (June 27, 2020): According to OED brown as a color is first found in 1607; orange as color is first given under 1557
You’re looking at brown (n.); the earlier citations are at brown (adj.), which has a first citation from Piers Plowman (1393), “Ale..of þe best and Brounest þat brewesters sellen.” But don’t take that too seriously, it’s a very old entry; you can’t compare it directly with orange, which is updated. Also, caution: they have orange colour as a separate headword, and that’s attested earlier, 1512 (actually, it can be antedated to 1502 in an account book of Elizabeth of York’s expenses).
The OED is not the right tool for this job since it’s not uniformly updated, and also because it isn’t meant to answer the more interesting questions of when yellow *stopped* including orange, and red stopped including pink, i.e., when those distinctions became mandatory in English. For those questions, I think the book you want is The Semantics of Colour: A Historical Approach by C.P. Biggam (2012), and the chapter on color by Biggam in English Historical Semantics by C. Kay and K. Allan (2015).
Pink appears first in 1464–5 as pink-yellow
That’s a homophone, unrelated to the modern color term, which is from the flower. English phonotactics must really love the string /pɪŋk/: nine etymologically distinct nouns, one adjective, and four verbs!
@ktschwarz: I’m not sure why I mentioned Persian specifically. Maybe that was as far back as I could trace the word referring specifically to oranges and their near-enough kin.
Regarding the color words, I definitely meant that orange was the newest term for a region of the visible wavelength spectrum. Pink, on the other hand, is a weird term, since it refers not to a shade of red but to a saturation level thereof. I personally think of the color pink as being simply an unsaturated red, but for many people it actually covers a larger area of the color space than that. Hues that they would probably call “purple” or “orange” if they were more saturated get referred to as “pink” when they are faint. There are other color terms besides pink that refer to saturation levels, but they typically* refer both to a range of saturation levels and a fairly specific range of hues. If you increase the intensity starting from azure (which has to be unsaturated), you don’t get navy blue (which has to be saturated, but in a somewhat different shade).**
* I think they do, at least. At the moment, I cannot think of any ancillary color terms that refer solely to a particularly saturated or unsaturated major hue.
** On a meta level, I found myself getting tangled up orthographically in writing this comment—specifically dealing with the use/mention/quote distinction. (Referring to the “use/mention distinction” is not sufficient in this case, since there is at least a trichotomy*** involved, with three different ways of writing “pink” in three successive sentences.)
*** To me, “at least a trichotomy” sounds perfectly natural, but I wonder whether others agree. If I try to parse that phrase too closely, it seems to decompose as “[at least a tri]-chotomy,” which seems possibly ill formed.
Brett: don’t get me started on people who insists CMYK is the One True Color Model. There are fanatics about that.*
* Giving you one footnote, just to relieve you.**
** We might as well make it a dichotomy.***
*** A trichotomy sounds perfectly parsable and cromulent to to me.
To me, “at least a trichotomy” sounds perfectly natural
To me as well.
That may not have been a color term, but meant “dark and saturated” or suchlike.
Note also that your quotation from WP comes from the section called “‘Dutch Invasion’ hypothesis”, where it is described as the view of “several researchers”, which is how WP describes a minority view that is not outright crackpot
That says something about the anglocentricities of WP perhaps but conventional historians have long ceased defending the contrived version – mainstream types like Norman Davies and Simon Schama and even the very conservative David Starkey all have 1688 down as a Dutch invasion/conquest.
The big picture was a long-simmering conflict between France and the Netherlands and the overriding imperative for the Dutch to avoid at any cost a repeat of the trauma of 1672. The “Glorieuze Overtocht” was a means to this end, internal English developments were collateral.
@dm
In þat time al hengelond
Þerl Godrich hauede in his hond,
And he gart komen into þe tun
Mani erl, and mani barun;
And alle [men] þat liues were
In eng[e]lond, þanne wer þere,
Þat þey haueden after sent,
To ben þer at þe parlement.
With hem com mani chanbioun,
Mani with ladde, blac and brown;
An fel it so, þat yunge men,
Wel abouten nine or ten,
Bigunnen þe[r] for to layke:
Þider komen bothe stronge and wayke;
Þider komen lesse and more,
Þat in þe borw þanne weren þore;
Chaunpiouns, and starke laddes,
Bondemen with here gaddes,
Als he comen fro þe plow;
Þere was sembling i-now!
Transcribed from: The lay of Havelok the Dane : composed in the reign of Edward I, about A.D. 1280
Here black and brown means “of all different kinds”, but there is a clear contrast between the colour terms. Elsewhere in texts of this date brown is used for suntanned:
Þo bi-cam he hardiore in godes name : and þare-ner he gan gon.
him þouȝte þat hit a womman was : naked, and swiþe broun,
Ase heo was with þe sonne i-brent : al plat heo lai a-doun;
hire her was hor and swiþe ȝwijȝt : as þei it were wolle,
Þunne and schort, þat it miȝte : onneþe helie hire scholle.
Vita sancte Marie Egiptiace,
Transcribed from: The early South-English legendary ; or, Lives of saints. I. Ms. Laud, 108, in the Bodleian library
Isn’t beige low-saturation yellow? Dun would also be a similar case.
@Alon Lischinsky: No, beige is a specific range of pale yellowish brown shades; an unsaturated cardinal yellow is not beige. As for the color dun, I’ll let Shakespeare take that one.
@Brett: YMMV, but this definitely falls under my definition of beige, and it’s unmixed yellow.
@Alon Lischinsky: That’s not beige to me, although it might be mistaken for beige if there was only a small spot of it, since it’s so faint that it could be difficult to distinguish the hue.
my beige is similar to coffee.
Here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beige it is between Light French beige and Cosmic latte (but let’s remember that even if our displays were calibrated which they are not, we would likely still see somewhat different colours).
trichotomy
You’ve got me wondering about what the Greek would be for ‘hair-splitting’. Not τριχοτόμηση, obviously.
Looking up possible candidates has thrown up μαλλιαρισμός:
Ουσιαστικό
μαλλιαρισμός αρσενικό
1. (μειωτικό) έτσι χαρακτήριζε το κατεστημένο της καθαρεύουσας στα πρώτα 60 χρόνια του 20ου αιώνα το δημοτικισμό στον προφορικό και γραπτό λόγο. Σταδιακά (καθώς η δημοτική κέρδιζε έδαφος) ο χαρακτηρισμός περιορίστηκε σε αυτό που η εξουσία θεωρούσε “ακραία δημοτική” έως ότου η λέξη “έσβησε” και σχεδόν εξαφανίστηκε.
2. ακραίος δημοτικισμός
DeepLed:
male hairiness
1. (diminutive) was how the establishment of katharevousa in the first 60 years of the 20th century described demoticism in the spoken and written word. Gradually (as demotic gained ground) the designation was reduced to what the authorities considered “extreme demotic” until the word “died out” and almost disappeared.
2. extreme demoticism
male should be masculine
The Japanese language has a colour term, ‘ao’ (or ‘aoi’), which is usually referred to in bilingual dictionaries as being the equivalent of English ‘blue’. Very often, however, it is used to describe things which English speakers would describe as being green. Granny Smith apples are ‘ao’, so are all Westerners’ eyes, regardless of whether they would be described as being ‘blue’ or ‘green’ in English. The sky and the sea are prototypically ‘ao’, but this term is also used to describe lawns, forests, traffic lights and unripe tomatoes. What, then, do Japanese native speakers (henceforth JNS) understand by this term? How do its semantic boundaries relate to those of the term ‘midori’ (‘green’)? What is the JNS understanding of the foreign loan words ‘guriin’ (green) and ‘buruu’ (blue)? This study pursues these questions seeking to delineate the semantic boundaries of the colour term ‘ao’.
Searching for the semantic boundaries of the Japanese colour term “ao”
So it is glas (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Celtic/glastos – a rare word that has the same shape in Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Irish and Scottish).
Gaulish: *glastom
→ Latin: glastum (“woad”)
I did not know “woad”. Oddly vitrum can also mean “woad”, I wonder whether “glass” is related.
Huzzah!
Okay. A new two-parter is up. I won’t risk this being eaten by including links.
For reasons that might or might not be evident, the working titles were “Maize pottery” and “Maize crackpottery,” although the final versions are more prosaic.
Granny Smith apples are ‘ao’, so are all Westerners’ eyes, regardless of whether they would be described as being ‘blue’ or ‘green’ in English.
Even the brown ones?
History is written by the victors … seems quite probably to have originated with Hermann Göring
Not original to Göring; he said (in translation) “The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused.” There’s an article in Slate about this based on the work of quotation mavens Fred Shapiro and Garson O’Toole. As far as they have discovered, the exact phrase “History is written by the victors,” as a generalization, is first recorded in 1891 from an ex-Confederate politician, with several precursors in the 19th century (in various languages) saying that the history of some particular event was written by the victors. A thread at ADS-L turned up similar quotes between then and World War II; somebody in 1903 already thought “the victor writes the history” was “an old saying”.
Churchill *is* documented to have made a quip along similar lines: “I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.”