My wife and I are reading Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (see this post), and at one point a character refers to having “a long cool drink of nimbo.” Naturally I wanted to know what this “nimbo” might be; after some frustration, I realized it was a variant of nimbu: “There may be no better drink for beating the heat than a nimbu soda, a lime-and-soda drink that’s ubiquitous in India.” But what’s nimbu? Well, Hindi नींबू (nīmbū) ‘lemon/lime (fruit or tree)’ (Urdu نیمبو) is from Sanskrit निम्बू (nimbū), which is “Of Austroasiatic origin; compare Mundari लेम्बु (lembu). Compare also Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *limaw (‘lime, citrus’), whence Malay limau (‘citrus’).” And this is where it gets interesting, because the long list of descendants of the Hindi/Urdu word includes Classical Persian لیمو (lēmū, līmū), from which is derived Arabic لَيْمُون (laymūn), borrowed into Old French as lymon, which is the source of English lemon. Furthermore, lime (the fruit) is:
[French, from Spanish lima, from Arabic līma, from Persian līmū, lemon, any of various citrus fruits; akin to Hindi nimbū and Gujarati lību, lime, of Austroasiatic origin; akin to Mundari (Munda language of Jharkhand, India) lembu.]
So lemon and lime are doublets; I probably knew that at some point, but I certainly didn’t know all the details, which are a lot of fun (note that Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *limaw gets turned around in Fijian and Polynesian and becomes moli). And now I want a long cool drink of nimbo.
I hadn’t realized, but now I do, that a species of citrus (the pomelo) had reached as far as Tonga in pre-European times. It was recorded by David Samwell, physician on Cook’s last voyage, as “moree, Shaddocks”. Another species,Citrus macroptera, reached as far as Samoa.
(Something about Welsh physicians messing around with languages.)
Li’em is the Kusaal name for this fruit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ximenia_americana#/media/File%3AHog_Plum_(Ximenia_americana)_(5963679978).jpg
Sadly, this must be sheer coincidence (also, although these things do taste vaguely lemony, they’re only the size of large plums, and are plum-like in consistency too.)
They seem to be called “tallow plums” in America. “Sea lemon” is apparently a name for them, too, though.
[Be careful not to confuse li’eŋ “Ximenia americana tree” with lieŋ “axe.” No refunds will be given. Vowel glottalisation matters, people!]
Preparing a nimby soda is so disgusting that people prefer doing it over the fence – crossing the limes into their neigbours garden.
I thought nimbu was the word for the fruit, and the name of the usual drink made with it was nimbu pani. Nimbu soda sounds like a neologism for the carbonated version languagehat linked to.
(I assumed, from the first time I encountered lime as a child, that it was a double ot lemon.)
So what you’re telling me is that the Proto-Austroasiatic word may well have started with l-, In Sanskrit that got changed to n-, and then Classical Persian had n > l dissimilation, which English and some other European languages ultimately inherited? Or maybe the Proto-Austroasiatic word started with n- and it got dissimilated to l- in Mundari and (separately?) in Classical Persian?
Yeah, that’s a mess of similation.
It’s also possible that Persian got the variant with l- from some other Indo-Aryan language, circumventing Sanscrit. Turner has a number of Indo-Aryan languages with l- (scroll down to entry 7247 nimbu-). In that case, it’s possible that there is only one assimilation, in Sanscrit.
It’s also possible that Persian got the variant with l- from some other Indo-Aryan language, circumventing Sanscrit.
On this point, M. Mayrhofer, Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen, vol. 3, s.v. nimbū has the following remark on this group (nimbū ‘lime’; limpāka- ‘citron or lemon tree’, etc., etc.):
There is a brief treatment of the possible Austroasiatic origin of this word family by F.B.J. Kuiper in the middle of page 84 here. As usual, Kuiper throws in everything and the kitchen sink.
See also from pp. 614f in T. Burrow (1945) “Dravidian Studies V.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 11(3) (abbreviations expanded):
As for further Austroasiatic connections… There is no mention of the group of Santali lembo, Mundari lembu, etc., in H.L. Shorto, A Mon-Khmer Comparative Dictionary. There is, however, this:
The Cantonese reflex 橘 gwat1 of this Middle Chinese form is the -quat in English kumquat and loquat, of course.
“Trying to taste the difference ‘tween a lemon and a lime / Pain and pleasure and the church bells softly chime” Note that as with salt-pepper the order is virtually always lemon-lime rather than lime-lemon. It may be otherwise in other languages, I suppose.
I’m not sure I have ever tasted the fruit called a citron in English. Standard Average European requires exactly two etymons for the lemon, lime, and citron, but permits any allocation among them.
Citron is the Hebrew etrog, used ritually in the autumn holiday of Sukkot. They are big. My father promised every year to get one and make marmalade, but never did.
Etrog at LH.
The Presbyterian farmer in Tulare County, California who back in the 1980’s had improbably become the U.S.’s only producer of rabbinically-approved etrogim died a few years ago at age 92, and then the first growing season after that with his son taking over was full of setbacks a lazy journalist would call Biblical in magnitude from the weather and otherwise, leading to a final harvest only 30% that of the previous year. (Linguistic note, the younger farmer pronounces the word “esrog,” as some Ashkenazim do.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20260323213412/https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-28/la-me-etrog-farm-sukkot
The same citrus-farming operation is also now providing orange blossoms used to flavor gin for the non-Sukkot market. https://www.fresnobee.com/living/food-drink/bethany-clough/article290914059.html
TIL the mess is even bigger than I thought. The biology is pretty complex (lots of hybrids).
German has Zitrone “lemon”, Limone which I thought meant “lime” but actually refers to some lemons or other (…green ones?), Limette which does mean “lime”, and, it turns out, Zitronatzitrone for the citron, where Zitronat and Orangeat are diced and candied peels. Oh, and, “lime” is not in the hybridization chart because it’s a cover term for a whole bunch of species and hybrids of Citrus and related genera.
David M.: TIL the mess is even bigger than I thought. The biology is pretty complex (lots of hybrids).
Yes, we’ve already been through Mucaceae and Cucurbitaceae — complex families of “pure” species, natural hybrids, and cultivars, and sorting them out could be important also for population history.
(OTOH, everything’s just going to end up in Brassica olaracea anyway.)
I think pretty much all rabbinically-approved etrog one can order nowadays is sourced from Israel. They are worthless to eat; having been bred for stability, they are quite dry.
@DE: Li’em is the Kusaal name for this fruit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ximenia_americana#/media/File%3AHog_Plum_(Ximenia_americana)_(5963679978).jpg
Sadly, this must be sheer coincidence (also, although these things do taste vaguely lemony, they’re only the size of large plums, and are plum-like in consistency too.)
They seem to be called “tallow plums” in America. “Sea lemon” is apparently a name for them, too, though.
After a bit of looking around, I think we call them “hog plums” and other names more often, though we may call the tree “tallow wood”. “Hog plum” is the only common name for the tree in Flora of North America.
According to Wikipedia, the distribution is tropical and subtropical from Mexico and Florida to Australia, and it’s never been domesticated. I wonder how it’s supposed to have gotten to all those places.
This hog plum/tallow wood has sent me down several branches of a rabbit hole, one of which led to the claim that this species was the subject of the first western botanical record made in what is now Australia.
Apart from that, I don’t remember coming across a distribution map that is so obviously based on political borders as the one in that Wikipedia article before now.
I wonder how it’s supposed to have gotten to all those places
Yes, I was wondering that too.
Most of the trees I know Kusaal names for are very distinctly African, like tɛ’ɛg “baobab.” (Which is one of the very few trees that I, as very much a non-botanist, can actually recognise.)
@Jonathan D: Something went wrong with your link (as happens with mine sometimes). Was it https://www.jstor.org/stable/41738950 ?
Anyway, that seems to hint that the tree wasn’t taken to Australia by Europeans.
@Hans and Xerîb: Thanks for the etymological points. Clearly I was oversimplifying.
@Brett: Wikipedia says that citrons have little juice if any and quotes Theophrastus and Pliny the Elder as saying that citron fruit wasn’t eaten except as medicine (hence Citrus medica?), so worthlessness for eating (except the candied peel) is nothing new.
@mollymooly: It seems to be quite likely that fruitcake contains candied citron peel, so maybe you’ve eaten that.
I guess that the fruit I had remembered as a juicier citron was probably some other member of the lemon-lime-citron species complex.
I have no doubt some useful plants were spread very early by humans, similar to how they later brought fish to lakes after the ice shield retreated.
It seems to be quite likely that fruitcake contains candied citron peel—the citrus in Irish fruitcake is “mixed peel”: candied orange and lemon peel, not even lime.
OTOH in my day, I have eaten many, many cakes, often abroad, in the sun and the dark, and it’s possible a citron slipped in. There would be no way of knowing.
I’ve made my own candied citrus peel, using lemons, limes, oranges and grapefruit.* I’ve also had candied citron peel and maybe one or two other varieties. As in most other applications, the oranges and lemons are distinctly better than the others.
* Don’t put the leftover sugar water on your compost heap. It’s actually fine as compost, but it attracts a lot of bees.
Danish fruit cakes are likely to contain diced sukat and pomeransskal. Sukat is the rind of Citrus medica, or possibly pomelo, pomeransskal that of Citrus aurantium (a.k.a. Seville orange, bitter orange, bergamotte). (What gender is that even supposed to be?)
Sukat is either from Italian succata (via Dutch) and in turn a conflation of Latin succus and zuccata, pumpkin boiled in sugar; or it’s got something to do with Hebrew sukhot. I’ve been told that the word kedron in New Testament Greek is the source of both citron and cedar and that the cedar cones sometimes found carved on woodwork in Christian churches originate as citron fruits served at the Jewish feast day.
What gender is that even supposed to be?
Citrus is feminine, as you’d expect of a tree name. I presume that the aurantium is either genitive plural of aurans, or just Biologists’ Bad Latin.
EDIT: Or just appositional: it looks like Citrus aurantium is for Citrus x aurantium*, as the name of a hybrid, rather than a form in Proper Linnaean (as spoken in ancient Linnaea.)
* As in Francis X McCarthy.
A friend mine made a joke to the effect that “i’m a lime, not a lemon” last night 🙂 It was a _really_ inside joke — as in a 25 years joke old. As In that’s how old we have known each other.
I have no doubt some useful plants were spread very early by humans, similar to how they later brought fish to lakes after the ice shield retreated.
I believe it, but X. americana doesn’t seem all that high on the present usefulness list, and more to the point, how did it cross the Atlantic or the Pacific, even with human help? Keeping in mind that it wouldn’t survive in the Far North. This looks like an even bigger puzzle than those Polynesian sweet potatoes.
I didn’t know about the fish.
Fish eggs stick to waterbirds, meaning they can fly.
Fish eggs stick to waterbirds, meaning they can fly.
To successfully transport a breeding stock, you need more than a few eggs from one bird-egg encounter.
But there are lots of waterfowl encountering fish eggs.
The subject seems to be controversial. Here’s a paper with indirect evidence suggesting that recent colonizations of artificial closed-to-the-public lakes by European Perch have resulted from bird visits.
I remember seeing a film about a French Jewish family going to Italy to buy etrog, as a yearly ritual.
Brett: my grandmother used to make jam from orange peels, I only do preserved lemons.
Jam has Seville oranges. Anything else is marmalade innit.
According to WP.en, both etrog and E orange ultimately descend from Old Iranian wādrang. Who’d a thunk?
How does Old Iranian wādrang correspond to Sanskrit nāranga? The Dravidian word, if that is the origin, would also seem to have had initial n.
Jam has Seville oranges. Anything else is marmalade innit.
Other way around, which may be what you meant. (And marmalade made from other citrus fruit seems to be popular).
As I was posting yesterday about the variety of candied peels I have eaten, I got to thinking about marmalade varieties. Orange is obviously the predominant type, but I’ve had lime, tangerine, and (pink) grapefruit marmalades too. However, it occurred to me that I have never had lemon marmalade, and I’m not sure I have even seen any. Marmalade may be one recipe in which lemons’ sourness just makes them unworkable.
Here’s a paper
Where?
@Lars Mathiesen: I’ve been told that the word kedron in New Testament Greek is the source of both citron and cedar and that the cedar cones sometimes found carved on woodwork in Christian churches originate as citron fruits served at the Jewish feast day.
Wiktionary agrees on the etymology. OED says s.v. “citrus” that it’s either that or a borrowing in both Greek and Latin from some unknown language. It says Latin citrus originally applied to a different tree, probably the sandarac, Tetraclinis articulata, in the cypress family.
The citrons used in Sukkot aren’t served. The rabbi or the head of the household just shakes or waves one, along with the lulav made of a palm leaf, a myrtle branch, and a willow branch, in the six cardinal directions, including up and down.
The Bible says only “fruit of a beautiful tree” or something like that in a commandment about Sukkot. This article by a professor at Tel Aviv University says the citron was unknown in Israel during the First Temple period and became the standard fruit for the holiday only around the first century C.E.
Oops. Try this for the perch: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10031398/
While getting that, I found this critical comment: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article/19/9/20230233/63352/On-ability-of-perch-to-colonize-new-waterbodies
I was too lazy to reality check the being served bit, which in the light of the citron’s claim to inedibility I maybe should have.
ObDanish: The lemon is citron /si’tro:n/, but we’re not alone in that. We can’t get Citrus medica in stores, only the candied peel, so the fruit an sich doesn’t have a common name. WP.da calls it cedrat, but nobody knows that. (Unlike pomerans for bitter oranges, which your greengrocer might recognize enough to tell you which 3 weeks in fall they are in season and you might be able to buy them).
marmalade made from other citrus fruit seems to be popular—The EU will soon distinguish “marmalade” from “citrus marmalade”, which seems wrong. Like keeping Pluto as a “planet” and relabelling the other 8 “giant planets”.
I have never had lemon marmalade—some brands of marmalade also have a lemon curd. This includes some citrus-only brands that don’t also do jam (“marmalade” in Europe).
@Jerry: Thanks, will read. Human zoochory* is often assumed between Norwegian lakes and river systems (and also well documented from recent times), but now that I think about it, I don’t know how they discern that from avian or any other form of zoochory* without any records.
* Silently repeating the word
The EU will soon distinguish “marmalade” from “citrus marmalade”
Apparently our very own Trumpophile party, “Reform”, was trying to sell this as a wicked conspiracy against British* culture by Horrid Europeans.
And indeed, I see that the marmalade I put on my toast this morning came from a jar labelled “orange marmalade”, which will now have to be relabelled as “orange marmalade.” We must fight this …
* By which they mean, “English.”
The BBC article is very strange. Preserves of citrus fruits are practically unknown on the mainland (except among people who’ve watched Paddington), so I can’t see where any confusion would even come from.
French and German:
jam: Marmelade
marmalade: “you make jam out of what?”
BTW, Catalan has interpreted honey into jam: melmelada.
@Trond: Another theory is waterspouts. though if we’re talking about Norwegian mountain tarns, waterspouts seem unlikely.
There seems to enough interest in this question that somebody should really give somebody a grant to do some good experiments.
in some circles, it’s customary to make preserves from the rind of your sukkos esrik/esrog/etrog. but i don’t know how recently developed a practice that is, or whether it has a specific geographic origin point. the jar i have from a few years ago is very tasty; i’m pretty sure the esrik in question was an un-hekshered buddha’s hand (Citrus medica var. sarcodactylis).
recently, there have also been some lovely moves (mainly, i think, in anti-zionist jewish circles) to use local plants for the branches in a lulav, which i think has also included using local fragrant fruits instead of an esrik.
Preserved lemon is neither a jam nor a marmalade. It’s whole lemons cut in halves or quarters lengthwise (depending on size) and put into a jar, mixed with with salt and sugar. It’s an ingredient in dishes, not to be eaten raw. The lemons release their juice (due to the salt) and they get covered in it. It _preserves_ a long time. Cut the top and bottom of the lemon, and be sure the peel has not been treated. If it has been, first put it in boiling water for about half a minute and rub the wax off with a towel. Stir it around a bit every so often for the first week.
Previously here under Hebrew Loanwords in Polynesian Languages, Y discussed Austronesian citrus words: “There are native citruses, called most everywhere by reflexes of *moli, reconstructible maybe as far back as PAN. tīpolo is used for citruses introduced (presumably) by Europeans, namely limes and citrons, though oranges are moli …”
A 2012 post FROM ELAMITE TO CHINESE quoted a book on loanwords saying that Mandarin Chinese níngméng was “of Austronesian origin, cf. Malay limau”, but that’s complicated; see comments on that post.
Preserved lemon … an ingredient in dishes, not to be eaten raw.
You’re not the boss of me, I’ll eat preserved lemons raw if I want to! I bought a jar for a recipe (very small lemons, didn’t need to be cut in pieces) and couldn’t resist eating the rest with cottage cheese or yogurt.
ktschwarz: the smallest lemon I’ve done with that was about 1.5 centimeters long, and not waxed. I am nothing if not dedicated.
@ktschwarz, I have a jar of preserved lemons in the fridge. Small ones, but French or Italian so horribly salty by Danish standards. (Maybe they have to be so salty to keep for a long time, but nobody enjoyed it when I tried to garnish an oven-baked salmon with them).
@JF, yes, I swapped the words. ObDanish, we have syltetøj, runnier with less pectin and usable in cakes or as sides with dinner (cf lingonsylt which the Swedes consume by the quart with their traditional lunch dishes [husmanskost]). Solbærsyltetøj = ‘blackcurrant preserve’ is the archetype here. And marmelade with enough pectin to be usable as a spread on bread and not drip onto your summer dress. Black currant stains, along with elderberry ones, were quite intractable before enzymatic washing powders came along.
My mother’s bitter orange marmelade was indeed intended to stay on the morning roll, but its name did not depend on the fruit used. I think the best selling marmelade here is strawberry. (Now available in you’d-never-know-it-was-fruit smooth versions so parents don’t have to teach their kids to deal with reality. But the fruit is still there, so it’s not a jelly).
@David M.: BTW, Catalan has interpreted honey into jam: melmelada.
Which is back to the original etymology:
That’s etymonline. Wiktionary agrees.
Oh. Makes sense.
Theophrastus and Pliny the Elder as saying that citron fruit wasn’t eaten except as medicine (hence Citrus medica?)
Linné’s 1753 definition of the species is here, Species plantarum, vol. 2, p. 782. Note Linné’s remark, Habitat in Asia, Media, Assyria, Persia.
For Theophrastus, the citron is the ‘Median apple’ (Greek Μηδικός Mēdikos ‘Median’, derived from Μῆδος ‘a Mede’; not Latin mĕdicus ‘healing, curative’). From Περὶ φυτῶν ἱστορία (Historia plantarum) 4.4.2:
From the post “From Elamite to Chinese” linked to in the thread above:
I was wondering about the chronology and the direction of borrowing here too. Blust’s treatment of the group of Malay limaw, etc., in Austronesian is here (note the remark on the side). As for the relationship of this group to the words in South Asia (Hindi nimbū and its immediate relations; Gujarati lĩbu and its immediate relations; Tamil elumiccai and its relations; Santali lembo, Mundari lembu), no one seems to say any more than just stating the resemblance. On this point, there is also the -นาว -naao in Thai มะนาว má-naao ‘key lime (Citrus × aurantiifolia) vel sim.’, Lao ຫມາກນາວ /mȁːk náːo/. I don’t have time at the moment to look for cognates in other Zhuang–Tai languages.
I wonder what the words for citrus varieties were in the Tambora language.
For the relatively old date of the group of Malay limaw, etc., in the region, occurrences of Old Javanese limo (form cited by Blust) in the Kakawin Ramayana in the 1980 bilingual edition of Soewito Santoso are here and here.
@PP: How does Old Iranian wādrang correspond to Sanskrit nāranga?
It doesn’t say. It doesn’t even mention Sanskrit. It mentions the alveolar nasal in Aramaic אֶתְרוּנְגָּא as a parallel to E orange, implying (to me) a shared origin where the path to Semitic is through Old Iranian. (Dravidian? Where is Zizka?)
@lars
Thanks for that. It looks like I was asking the wrong question. Maybe wadrang by sound change became *vadrang or *badrang, which was interpreted as “ugly colour” and was replaced or subsumed by a word beginning with n.
*w > b is indeed a thing in Persian.
kingkong “star” FTW.
the chronology and the direction of borrowing…
This open edition book chapter surveys archaeobotanical and linguistic evidence for the origin of citrus cultivation:
Charred pummelo peel, historical linguistics and other tree crops: Approaches to framing the historical context of early Citrus cultivation in East, South and Southeast Asia (D.Q. Fuller et al., 2017)
As far as I can tell the authors are all archaeologists/biologists (the part about citrus rinds in ancient trash heaps is their original work), but they cite a lot of linguistics references. They rightly caution that words in ancient languages may not refer to citrus types as we know them today, but they seem oddly dismissive of Sanskrit, remarking that “early epic texts” don’t mention citrus, while “Sanskrit terms found in dictionaries may in themselves be problematic as Sanskrit has remained a living language for ritual and religious use, and as such it has acquired words through time”. They give more credence to Pali, citing words including nāraṅga (orange) — but in the next paragraph they say Proto-South Dravidian *nāram-ka was borrowed *from* North Indian languages, instead of loaned *to* them as every etymological dictionary I know of says. (The thread for “why was the ‘orange’ word in Dravidian before it was in Sanskrit” is FROM TAMIL TO HEBREW.)
It looks to me like the authors checked good etymological sources but sometimes misunderstood them. In the paragraph about Pali and Prakrit words, they also say: “another Citrus related term in Prakrit did not refer to Citrus originally: Prakrit ṇiṁbōliyā, the source of modern Hindi nimbu (“lemon”), appears to have originally referred to the fruit of the neem tree, Azadirachta indica.[61]” I don’t know where they got ṇiṁbōliyā. Footnote 61 cites Turner, A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages, and Southworth, Linguistic Archaeology of South Asia. But Turner (linked in the comment by Hans above) doesn’t mention the neem tree at all, and Southworth’s discussion of nimbū(ka), after clearly stating that it means ‘lime’ and is probably from Austroasiatic, adds “Cf. PSD [*vē-mpu] ‘neem, Azadirachta indica’ DEDR 5531;”, i.e., that’s a word in Proto-South Dravidian in A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary. I don’t think Southworth means that this is the source or original meaning of nimbū.
Who’s confused here, them or me? Can anyone help? Despite these questions, it looks like there’s a lot worth studying in this paper. I haven’t even started on the Chinese section.
Sanskrit nimbū is only attested in Sanskrit dictionaries of relatively late date, not in literature of any antiquity (on the order of Pali literature, for example). Similarly limpāka- is only in dictionaries. The terms are therefore likely to be Sanskritizations of modern Indo-Aryan words, a very common phenomenon. (Cf. the quote from Mayrhofer in the thread above: “Die moderne Wortgruppe — skr. nimbū, limpāka sind wohl nur Sanskritisierungen neuindoarischer Lexeme — gehört wahrscheinlich zu austrischem Wortgut wie muṇḍārī lembu, malayisch limau.”)
As an example, the Bhāvaprakāśa of Bhāvamiśra, a very very late text by Sanskrit standards, mentions a nimbūka-phala-pānaka ‘lime-fruit-drink’, which sounds quite like the familiar nimbu-pani. Here is the recipe and comments on it (with my quick translation—this is not the genre of text I usually read at all, so there are things I am unsure of):
The Pali texts can provide much more securely datable, much more ancient attestations.
Thanks very much, Xerîb, I had no idea. So the archaeobotanists are right to ignore Sanskrit for this word. Turner also marks nimbū as “lex.”, for “attested only in lexicographical works”, and I guess that’s why the AHD etymology avoids saying “Sanskrit”. Doesn’t this mean the Wiktionary entry for Sanskrit nimbū is misleading in listing the modern Indo-Aryan words as “descendants”?
What about “nimbū appears to have originally referred to the fruit of the neem tree”? Is this anything but speculation? Elsewhere in Southworth’s book he has the same Dravidian word for neem tree paired instead with Sanskrit nimba (Turner; source of “neem”, via Hindi) in a list of words “attested early in both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, without there being any possibility at present of determining whether they originated in OIA, Dravidian, or some third language”.
The Pali texts can provide much more securely datable, much more ancient attestations.
There’s no Pali in Turner’s list of words related to nimbū. I have no idea which of those might be the oldest attested.
Yes.
(Besides, it remains to be seen if any extant language or even any Prakrit is actually descended from even Vedic Sanskrit. Sanskrit has at least one innovation that has not been found elsewhere to my knowledge: a megamerger of numerous voiced and voiceless consonant clusters as kṣ where the Prakrits distinguish ggh from kkh.)
I don’t know where they got ṇiṁbōliyā
Turner has a separate entry for a virtual Old Indo-Aryan *nimbagulikā ‘berry of Melia azadirachta’. There is a णिंबोलिया ṇiṁboliyā in Ardhamagadhi Prakit—see the dictionary entry here, top of the right-hand column on page 940 (९४०).
I think Turner’s glosses reflect some confusion between Azadirachta indica (neem) and Melia azedarach (chinaberry; Hindustani بکاين बकायन bakā’in, bakāyan) in his sources, or some folk likening between the trees at some point. Neem has medicinal and culinary uses, but chinaberry is simply poisonous for human beings, as far as I know. I have to go to sleep now, so I will let someone else sort it out if they are interested.
I looked at this again after waking up. I see that Linné established both a Melia azedarach (chinaberry) and a Melia azadirachta (neem), pp. 384f here. Neem is now Azadirachta indica, however. Apparently a Sanskrit name of Melia azedarach (chinaberry) was महानिम्बः mahānimbaḥ, literally ‘great neem’. This name for chinaberry is attested several times already in the corpus of Suśruta, it seems.
There is a णिंबोलिया ṇiṁboliyā in Ardhamagadhi Prakit
Yes, but my question is, is there any basis for claiming that’s “the source of modern Hindi nimbu”? That’s the part I don’t understand.
Quoted above from Shorto, A Mon-Khmer Comparative Dictionary:
Makrut lime has gotten some use in English for those unhappy with the name kaffir lime,
Citrus hystrix.
Lars M. (way up): I’ve been told that the word kedron in New Testament Greek is the source of both citron and cedar
Lars M. (some way up): According to WP.en, both etrog and E orange ultimately descend from Old Iranian wādrang.
Cam we postulate a common origin in … Sumerian or something?
I peeve (if I may) at those infidels who confound kaffir (as in lime) and kefir.
Makrut lime has gotten some use in English for those unhappy with the name kaffir lime,
Citrus hystrix.
One of my very few peeves actually intended to get people to change something was asking the food co-op in Santa Fe to stop labeling them “kaffir lime”, but I think they went with “Thai lime”. (I haven’t looked at that section in quite a while.)
Cam we postulate a common origin in … Sumerian or something?
Harappan!
KONGO! It’s citron in Danish, after all. And oranges are named for their color innit, and that’s /o’ʁɐŋʃɵ/ of course.
Den Koning van Hispanje heb ik altijd geëerd!
FWIW, we don’t get Citrus hystrix (hystrix = ‘porcupine’, from Greek it says here [θρίξ], not one of those feminine dominatrix words) here as a fruit, but I can buy Thai limeblade from the spice shelf. Kaffir limeblade seems to be a minority opinion. (But kaffir doesn’t get any other hits with that spelling, it’s probably stolen directly from English. The muslim term for unbeliever [and the name of Sorghum caffrorum] is spelled kafir [or Kaffer for the cognate exonym for a South African bantu people]). The encyclopedia knows about makrut but the web shops don’t seem to.
Fr and It combava!? Wikt.en professes ignorance of the origin, but wikt.fr says it’s from the name of an island (Sumbawa) east of Bali, part of the Sonde archipelago in the Moluccan Sea.
Fr and It combava!? wikt.fr says it’s from the name of an island (Sumbawa) east of Bali, part of the Sonde archipelago in the Moluccan Sea
That’s why I wondered above what the words for citrus varieties were in the language (isolate?) of the small sultanate of Tambora on Sumbawa before it was annihilated in the eruption of 1815.
There is a णिंबोलिया ṇiṁboliyā in Ardhamagadhi Prakrit
Yes, but my question is, is there any basis for claiming that’s “the source of modern Hindi nimbu”? That’s the part I don’t understand.
Not even Kuiper tried to associate nimbū ‘lime’ and nīm ‘neem’. See the footnote on the page of Kuiper’s on nimbū, etc., that I linked to above:
And Kuiper has a high tolerance… Look at how uncontrolled everything else on that page is! Johansson’s discussion is here. Charpentier’s discussion is here (ni- ‘in, into, within’; āmra ‘mango’ (cf. amla- ‘sour, acid; acidity’); even Charpentier says of his derivation, “Was ni hier bedeutet, scheint nicht völlig klar”.) And neem fruit is not really sour, but bitter. (The word nímba- ‘neem’ apparently occurs in a later Vedic text—which I haven’t looked up yet—and it is well attested in Sanskrit literary and medical texts from a much earlier date than Sanskrit nimbū.)
I will concede that limes look a little like huge versions of unripe neem fruit, and lemons sort of have the color of ripe neem fruit. But that is hardly enough to justify the etymological association.
“Neem” in Kusaal is properly called nasaasisibig “European [version of] Lannea microcarpa”
https://kus.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisibig
but the dictionary also gives pɔŋguda. That’s got to be a loanword, both on first principles and for morphological reasons, but I don’t know where it comes from. It looks vaguely Hausa-ish (Proper Hausa f quite often turns up as p in Ghanaian Hausa, so that’s not a problem.) Can’t find anything like it in the dictionaries though. And that’s not what Hausa Wikipedia calls it:
https://ha.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icen_Dalbejiya_(Azadirachta_Indica)
Come to that, dunno where dalbejiya comes from, either.
If English WP is to be believed, “Azadirachta” is from the Persian ازادرخت .
Thanks, Xerîb, then we can discount “nimbu originally referred to the fruit of the neem tree” as just a mistake by the archaeobotanists. The paper is still worth reading, I think.
It looks vaguely Hausa-ish
Do any of the languages of the region have something meaning ‘tall boy’ like Hausa dogo yaro, dogonyaro?
Good find! I didn’t know that one.
Not as far as I know, though. The commonest strategy for naming the tree actually seems just to be to borrow from English or French, as with Mooré niim, Dagbani nyimsa.
The Mbelime dictionary has tetuosibù, which is a transparent compound meaning “bitter tree.”
The Gulimancema dictionary has danmadaci, which does look very like a Hausa ɗan … “son of …” lexicalised compound. Hausa maɗaci actually means “mahogany tree” FWIW.
Buli has fel-tiib “European tree.” The “European tree” par excellence, presumably.
Talking of Hausa lexicalised ɗan forms, I’ve often wondered where Kusaal daŋkɔŋ “measles” could have come from, but I’ve never come up with anything likely either in Hausa or elsewhere.
Hah! The Moba dictionary has
pángúꜜ ́dá, pángúꜜ ́dá–n̄bà (de l’anglais ‘pound’ et du haoussa ‘guda’) n. neem (Azadirachta indica.)
That’s literally “one pound”, which doesn’t explain why the tree got to be called “one pound”, though. However, this is made more plausible by the fact that the Moba dictionary also gives pányéꜜńd̀ for “neem”, where the second element is the Moba word for “one.”
Footnote 50, p. 65, in Renne, E. P. (2019) “Sylvan Memories of People, Place, and Trees in Nangodi, Northeastern Ghana”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 61(1), 50–81:
!
Another mystery solved by Xerîb.
Prof. Mair over at the Log has just posted a reasonable query from a reader baffled by the seemingly-unrelated names in various West African languages for the fruit of Blighia sapida,* where the Twi-or-Akan name that’s the probable etymon of the Jamaican-English name appears at least superficially very different from the supposed names in Bambara, Ewe, Kabiye, etc etc. Perhaps some here have wisdom or at least information to offer over there.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73330#more-73330
*Named of course for THE Captain Bligh.
Ackee — that takes me back!
(Ends with a dog barking in the distance.)
The Renne article is quite interesting, though she seems to know surprisingly little about the actual cultural background of the Nabdema given that she’s an actual anthropologist (mostly having worked in Nigeria, though, apparently.) And neither she, nor her sources, know anything at all about how the local languages actually work.
The place name “Nangodi” cannot conceivably be derived from nan “bend down, avoid, respect”, guosi “thorns”, gaagin “ebony tree” and dagliga “clay”, as the footnote on p50 asserts. The second element probably is “thorns”, though. Nan is “respect”, not “bend down”, and is not related to the word for “chief” at all; why gaagin (= Kusaal gaan /gã:/) and dagliga (which I think is imaginary) are brought in at all is mysterious.
Why do people feel they can just make up random shit like this when it comes to African languages?
The “chieftaincy of thorns” etymology given in the text on p50 is a folk etymology recorded by Rattray; “chieftaincy of thorns” in Kusaal, which is extremely close to Nabit, is gɔn’ɔs na’am, not na’am gɔn’ɔs which would mean “thorns of chieftaincy.” In principle, you could make a compound na’aŋgɔn’ɔs “chieftaincy thorns” (a kind of thorns, not a kind of chieftaincy.) Doesn’t seem to help …
Unfortunately, I don’t know the actual Nabit name of Nangodi, so I can’t say for certain what it really means. My best guess would be the equivalent of Kusaal naŋgɔn’ɔd “scorpion thorns”, which at least seems like a possible name for a plant. Lots of places in that area are named after trees or plants.
The place name always reminds me of a story I was told about a local policeman riding his bicycle on the road out of Bawku; on being asked what he was doing by my friend, he replied “going to Nangodi to collect bribe.”
Life is too short for engaging with Victor Mair’s posts, but Christaller’s excellent Twi dictionary cites àṅkyẽ “a kind of wild cashew tree with fruits eaten by the Krobos”, which is presumably the word in question.
I see it’s kpihiga in Dagbani
https://dag.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kpihiga
and the Kusaal dictionary has kpisig “ackee-apple tree”, which corresponds entirely regularly.
The initial does not correspond with this Dagaare kyira etymologically though the h and the r are both the expected reflexes of *s in this position.
I imagine the Kabiye form might be either cognate, or (more likely) borrowed, but I don’t know enough about Grusi historical phonology to say (and suspect that nobody else does either.)
I see that it’s fĩ-zã in Mooré, which is obviously a borrowing from … somewhere.
Ah: Dyula, of course. It’s right there in the LL post.
Feso in Fulfulde, which is presumably connected with the Dyula/Bambara by borrowing in one direction or another.
Asõa in Ninkare (Farefare dialect.) No idea. Must be a loan from somewhere.
Chihaa in Waali, which matches the Dagaare etymologically; unsurprising as the languages are quite close.
The Waama dictionary has purumbu for Blighia sapida, but is also says “le faux fromagier”, which suggests the red kapok instead. I think it may be a mistake.
Kpìíg̀ in Moba, which again corresponds exactly to the Kusaal and Dagbani (the exciting LH root tones show that the *s within the root has been lost, as is normal in Gurma.) The dictionary glosses it “faux acajoutier” (Blighia sapida), which was maybe what the Waama entry meant to say.
Féegá in Nawdm, but Nawdm is like that. On the other hand, Nawdm does actually have some sporadic cases of f for expected initial kp, and like Gurma, it regularly blats non-initial *s, so it’s actually not inconceivable that this too might go back to a proto-Oti-Volta *k͡pɪs-.
I’ve a feeling that I’ve encountered some cases of sporadic shift of labial-velars to plain velars in the Dagaare dialect continuum; that happens regularly in Mooré and in the more northerly dialects of Farefare, with some leakage into the Ghanaian dialects. So I could probably set up a Grand Unified Theory of proto-Western *k͡pɪ́s- “ackee apple” despite the variation, with at least some evidence that it may be inherited from proto-Oti-Volta. The Kabiye form surely must be connected, but it looks too alike not to be a loan. And words for this tree and its fruit obviously do get borrowed quite a bit – as witness the Mooré and Fulfulde words.
Christaller’s Twi dictionary must have been the source for the “wild cashew” in AHD’s etymology of ackee: “Possibly Kru akee or Akan (Twi) aŋkyẽ, wild cashew”. Can we chalk this up to linguists not being botanists? The ackee is not closely related to the cashew (which is native to South America; name from Tupí via Portuguese), but the light-colored part of the ripe seeds *looks* a lot like cashews to me in the pictures at Wikipedia, especially this one — the seeds are not eaten (says Wikipedia), but maybe Christaller didn’t know that?
Thank you, Merriam-Webster, for exposing how the lexicographical sausage was made:
Wow, good for them for making that public; AHD must not have had access to that insider knowledge. And I didn’t know that Lorenzo Turner was the African etymologist for Webster’s Third!
Are there more recent references on Twi confirming that the word really does mean Blighia sapida? OED (revised 2009):
(The old OED just said “Native name.”)
This is my ackee song.
Can we chalk this up to linguists not being botanists?
This is a phenomenon I have often noticed …
The best source for reliable identification of Kusaal plant/tree names that I have ever come across is Ernst Haaf’s Die Kusase; mind you, Haaf (a) wasn’t a linguist (he was a doctor) and (b) got an actual botanist to identify the plants for him.
Gã: atĩa
That’s interesting. Chakali (another Ghanaian Grusi language) has tii for the ackee apple. Which is weird, because it looks just like the pan-Volta-Congo root for “tree”, as in Kusaal tiig and Swahili mti. The awesome power of sheer coincidence. An indirect loan from Gã to Chakali is not inconceivable, though.
This ternary diagram represents varieties of citrus species of different proportions of mandarin, citron, an pomelo. Half the varieties I have not heard of before.
The ky of àṅkyẽ sounds like “ch” to modern L1 Anglophones, rather than “k”; but I suppose both English and Akan may well have changed significantly since the period of the supposed borrowing.
This putative Kru word looks like a better contender – if it actually exists. It doesn’t feature in the extremely brief vocabularies I have of Bété or Dadjriwalé, but that proves nothing. I don’t have anything on Grebo.
I was looking at the scanty material I have on Kru languages lately to see whether the group does actually look related to Volta-Congo, a conclusion that seems in these post-Greenberg days to be regarded as seriously premature. I was reluctantly coming to the unsatisfactory conclusion, “yes, quite likely, but so distantly as not really to be properly demonstrable.”
good for them for making that public
Heartily seconded. Shine a light on the darkness!
This is my ackee song.
Very pleasant, but I’ll still take the (English) Beat any day.
There *is* a tree called wild cashew, Anacardium excelsum, but it’s only in Central and South America.
It’s just occurred to me that French fisanier “akee apple tree” must be borrowed from Dyula (with the French tree suffix -ier grafted on.) Duh …
Impressive – and it says “simplified” in the filename…
I see what you did there.
“Cashew” in Dyula is tubabu finsan “European akee”, I see. Which Makes Sense.
This putative Kru word looks like a better contender – if it actually exists.
And if it actually means Blighia sapida; “a tree yielding an excess of sap” doesn’t sound like ackee. And if there’s any other evidence for Kru contributions to Jamaican, whereas Twi is already known to be a big contributor.
Does the name of the Gold Coast ackey support the existence of that word for that tree in that place in the late 1700s? I don’t know how reliable the claim is that the seeds “were used as weights roughly equivalent to 20 grains of gold dust”. (Is January First-of-May out there?)
Odd that Merriam-Webster included this obsolete British-colonial coin, but the OED never did.
Twi is already known to be a big contributor.
True.
I was under the impression that pɛ́sɛwa(-bo) was the Twi name of the seed that was used to weigh out a pennyworth of gold. (Hence the name of the quondam hundredth-of-a-cedi coin.)
The date is early enough that Gã might be more relevant than Twi (or Fante), I suppose.
I wonder what language takoe is from?
/blaːja/? /bla.ia/? /blɪgia/?
Just discovered from Jeffrey Heath’s dictionary of Humburi Senni Songhay the pleasing fact (if fact it be) that HS ʔàgò:jì “neem, Azadirachta indica” is ultimately derived from the name of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Guggisberg
(one of the distinctly less regrettable governors of the Gold Coast, though no good friend to the northern parts of what is now Ghana, alas.)
I may take to claiming that the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddoe
is named after me.
@Y: I’m not a convert to the sect that believes personal names in scientific names should be pronounced as close to the original as possible. But the only pronunciation that comes to my mind is /blaɪ.i.ə/. I’ll bet Italian ackeeologists say /bligia/, though.
is named after me.
Ah, hence the need for an extended interview before appointing you. (“It all _fits_, I tell you.”)
/blaːja/? et seq.
my vote is for /blɪɣ.jə/
blaːja/? /bla.ia/? /blɪgia/?
The second is what I heard in the YouTube video I googled up, and it’s what I would have guessed.
I didn’t think of putting reduced English vowels as schwas in phonemic transcriptions. Pity the poor L2.
I wonder what language takoe is from?
Johann Gottlieb Christaller (1881) A Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Language called Tshi (Chwee, Twi), p. 469 (available here) has the following:
Does the taku correspond to the weight of a certain seed? I found a proposal in Jean-Jacques Crappier et al. (2019) “The Akan Weighing System restored after 120 years of oblivion. A metrological study of 9301 geometric gold-weights”, Colligo 2 (2), pp. 9–22 (available here), on page 18:
Parkia biglobosa seeds are of course the base of dawadawa. The primary author has further articles compiling early European descriptions of the Akan weight system here and treating the question of the seeds involved here. Looking for the Akan words for Parkia biglobosa, I found things like sorɔno, sɔrɔnoo, soronõo…
Albert Ott (1968) “Akan Gold Weights”, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, 9:17–42, on page 19, has the following:
This sort of matches the appearance of the seeds of P. biglobosa, before and after hulling.
The entry from Christaller should read tàkú.
Christaller’s Twi dictionary must have been the source for the “wild cashew” in AHD’s etymology of ackee: “Possibly Kru akee or Akan (Twi) aŋkyẽ, wild cashew”. Can we chalk this up to linguists not being botanists?
The Merriam-Webster files contain an unattributed note that is apparently the source of this etymology: “This seems to be the Kru word ‘ā-kee’ which is used for a tree yielding an excess of sap but its exact botanical name is not certain.”
That etymology in the AHD has been in there since the 3rd edition (1992). The 1st edition had “Native name in Liberia.” Nick Clements reviewed the etymologies involving words of African origin for the 3rd edition, but it is now impossible to consult Clements’ review notes and his other communications with the AHD editors to see who was responsible for what, and what gloss came from which dictionary. These notes had been preserved in the AHD etymological files, but Mifflin Harcourt must have discarded these along with all the rest of the AHD editorial documentation when it sold the dictionary off to HarperCollins some years ago.
*seethes*
Thanks yet again, Xerîb. (And Gjonaj.)
So, Akan.
Parkia biglobosa is significant enough in Kusaasi culture that the seed has a name (zʋ’ʋnf) which seems to be etymologically unrelated to the name of the tree itself (duan /dũã/), the only such case in the language AFAIK.
Trying to taste the difference ‘tween a lemon and a lime / Pain and pleasure and the church bells softly chime
Ackee — that takes me back!
*parties like it’s 1982*
Does the name of the Gold Coast ackey support the existence of that word for that tree in that place in the late 1700s? I don’t know how reliable the claim is that the seeds “were used as weights roughly equivalent to 20 grains of gold dust”. (Is January First-of-May out there?)
I was aware of the Gold Coast ackey, but not that it was named after a particular seed. (I think numismatically it’s a silver coin – reasonably enough, as a gold coin of such a size would be very tiny.)
I think the use of various seeds as standard (small) weights is common among various cultures; I can’t think of an African example offhand, but there’s the Indian ratti, and of course the English grain.
Odd that Merriam-Webster included this obsolete British-colonial coin, but the OED never did.
Indeed it’s not in the Wordle list, which is very unusual for a five-letter English word.
Another seed that became a measure of weight is that of the carob. Etymonline says s.v. “carat”:
the light-colored part of the ripe seeds *looks* a lot like cashews to me…
… or rather, that light-colored part is the aril, which is what’s eaten; the shiny round black seeds are not eaten. The aril has sometimes been called “vegetable brains”, on account of wrinkliness and spongy texture. Some other names around the Caribbean and from Africa according to excerpts from agricultural science papers include ris de veau (= sweetbreads) in Martinique, huevo vegetal in Guatemala and Panama.
Talking of obsolete coins, I’ve mentioned before that Francophone West Africa, when not speaking French, counts money in units of five francs, in honour of the old Maria Theresa dollar.
It occurred to me that I didn’t know what this unit was actually called in Mooré. Quite a few languages just have something boring like Kassem dálá, (Ader) Hausa dala, Dyula dalasi, Dendi dàllà.
It turns out to be wàkɩ́rè, plural wakɩya in Mooré. This has to be a loanword, because of its tone pattern and morphology: but loaned from where?
The Moba word is mysterious, too: it has kūūg̀, which matches Gulimancema kuuga, but has no obvious origin. Neither word seems to mean anything else than “five francs.”
Nawdm biyeeŋa is supposed to be from French billet, which seems reasonable. It also has the loan-translation wadbuga “little letter.”
Ackee was said to be an African name by de Tussac in Flore des Antilles (1808): “Cet arbre porte en Afrique le nom d’Akée; mais comme il existe un genre sous le nom d’Hachea, quoique les deux noms s’écrivent différemment, pour éviter toute équivoque, j’ai donné à celui-ci le nom d’Akeesia, en françois Akée.” He must not have known that somebody else had already published Blighia sapida slightly earlier.
It turns out to be wàkɩ́rè, plural wakɩya in Mooré.
I should think wàkɩ́rè is backformed from wàkɩ́yà and ultimately comes from Arabic أوقية ʾūqiyyah, also وقية wiqiyyah, etc., variously vocalized (explanation in the Wikipedia here, for convenience), like Swahili wakia, ‘ounce, weight of a silver dollar’, etc. Note also wakīya ‘once’ in Delafosse, top of page 806 here.
(Reminds me of the discussion salbre ‘bit’ on LH a while ago.)
That looks very probable indeed. (I hoped you’d come up with something, and was not disappointed.)
Back-formation from a loanword ending in -a taken as a plural is very much a Western Oti-Volta thing (as indeed with salbre), and with a currency unit, it would of course be particularly natural.
I wonder how it got to Mooré exactly? Any number of ways, potentially, with the name of a coin, I suppose. I can’t find a Dyula intermediary, that being the biggest source of Arabic-origin words in Mooré other than Hausa (probably.) But IIRC salbre doesn’t have an obvious non-Arabic immediate source either. [EDIT: And I see that the Delafosse thing is “Mandingue”, so: yes. I just need a bigger dictionary.]
I also wonder if the Arabic is actually ultimately from Latin uncia? Mooré wàkɩ́rè being cognate with “ounce” would be Way Cool.
Toende Kusaal has wakɩt, plural wakɩya, no doubt borrowed from Mooré. There’s no Agolle Kusaal wakir AFAIK, but that’s hardly surprising, as there’s no call for the thing in Ghana. (There are a few Agolle-Kusaal-speaking villages in Togo. I wonder if they use the word?)
Bisa has wakɩr too, unsurprisingly; lots of Mooré loans in Bisa.
Gulimancema kuuga/Moba kūūg̀ has the look of a thoroughly indigenous word that has got repurposed, but I can’t find any likely candidates for the original meaning if so. (I see that one Gulimancema dialect has wacili too.)
Mbelime has pídààtìdè. From “piastre” somehow? (Mbelime /d/ is realised as a flapped “r” non-initially, but even so, that would be a pretty good mangling.) And why “piastre” when all the cool kids thereabouts have dollars or ounces?
Farefare has wakɩtɛ, plural wakɩrɛ, which seems to be the result of adopting the Mooré back-formation singular wàkɩ́rè as a plural, and then back-forming a new singular from that (t is the regular sandhi outcome of *rr in Farefare, and Farefare has a fair bit of vowel harmony, making wakɩrɛ a plausible equivalent of what would be a plural in -a in Mooré or Kusaal.)
So: a back-formation from a back-formation.
Could any of the names you cannot explain mean “dot”? After all, the coin is known as Abu Nuqta “father of the dot” in Arabic speaking areas.
What stem is suggested by Gulimancema sg. kuuga ‘5 francs’, pl. kuumú, alongside kun- in kúnpííga, kuunpiiga ‘50 francs’ (that is, ‘ten 5-francs’), beside Moba kūūg̀, pl. kūūdî ? (Forms from the Webonary.)
Is the resemblance between Hausa kuɗī ‘money’ and Moba kūūdî, plural of kūūg̀, just sheer coincidence? Or can we pull off the back-formation trick here too?
Does Gulimancema sg. wacili, pl. wacila belong to the same group as Mooré wàkɩ́rè, wàkɩ́yà, with palatalization, r > l, metanalysis of noun class suffixes, etc.? Or does it contain wa ‘small’ and something else (cíé ‘break’ (‘casser, faire la monnaie’?)?)? Or is folk-etymology involved?
@de
Doesn’t pídààtìdè look like pi= pièce +
dààtìdè = escargot (n. m.) d’eau? Great tone match!
Is the resemblance between Hausa kuɗī ‘money’ and Moba kūūdî, plural of kūūg̀, just sheer coincidence?
Yes, I think so. The Gulimancema plural is kuuma; Moba is unique within Gurma in preserving a reflex of the original plural suffix *si in this gender/noun-class set. So the word would have had to have got to Gulimancema from Moba, which would be very unusual. Also, the vowel length is wrong, and the mid tone is odd for a loan from Hausa.
I did wonder about “iron, piece of metal”, which is Moba kúd̀, Gulimancema kúgu, plural kúdi, (cognate with Kusaal kudug, plural kut*) but again, the tone and vowel length are wrong. And “iron” seems a stretch for a word for a Maria Theresa dollar; however, Waama pɛtɛre plural pɛtɛya (probably borrowed from the same source as Mbelime pídààtìdè) is glossed “(1) la pièce de monnaie (2) une petite pièce de métal” in the SIL dictionary, so maybe.
Does Gulimancema sg. wacili, pl. wacila belong to the same group as Mooré wàkɩ́rè, wàkɩ́yà, with palatalization, r > l, metanalysis of noun class suffixes, etc.?
Yes: it’s exactly the form you’d expect a loan of the Mooré word to take in Gulimancema. Gulimancema palatalises velars before front vowels, and doesn’t have an /r/; historically, Gulimancema /l/ actually corresponds to /r/ in e.g. Nawdm, and to /d/ [ɾ] in Mbelime. (The reflexes of the proto-Oti-Volta consonant in Western Oti-Volta are more complicated, but it’s /r/ in the class suffix in Mooré and Agolle Kusaal; it has mostly disappeared elsewhere, after fronting the preceding vowel sometimes.)
Doesn’t pídààtìdè look like pi= pièce +
dààtìdè = escargot (n. m.) d’eau?
I did actually consider that for a moment. And then I went: Nah.
* Niggli’s Toende Kusaal dictionary tags kut as a loan from Hausa, but it definitely isn’t. The word certainly goes back to proto-Oti-Volta. However, there is something weird going on with the root-final consonant: several languages seem to have remodelled the singular after the plural, and the plural has often reallocated the initial consonant of the plural class suffix to the stem. Gulimancema seems to have done the opposite, with an unexpected d-less singular form kúgu.
@de
Thanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_money
—
The shells of Olivella nana, the sparkling dwarf olive sea snail were harvested on Luanda Island for use as currency in the Kingdom of Kongo. They were even traded north as far as the Kingdom of Benin.
—
Just saying…
Gulimancema plural kuumú, not kuuma, sorry. Though it doesn’t affect my point.
It’s actually an interesting development in Gurma. I think the replacement of the inherited *si by *mu was driven by disambiguation: in Gurma, non-geminated *s has disappeared in all positions, though late enough in the day that Moba still preserves reflexes of original epenthetic vowels preceding it. It presumably went via [h]. But in proto-Gurma, suffix-initial consonants were geminated after monomoraic stems, and in Moba *ss has become d, so you get e.g. Moba bíg̀ plural bíd̀ “child” corresponding to Kusaal biig plural biis, Waama bika plural bisu. This Moba plural -d has then spread a bit beyond its original phonological frame and got itself added to some other words in this noun-class set/gender secondarily. Moba has no trace of the plural *mu.
(This Moba -d plural is part of the misinterpreted evidence used to set up a completely spurious proto-Gur plural suffix *ci in Miehe, Reineke and von Roncador’s generally excellent Noun Class Systems in Gur Languages. You can’t reconstruct morphology properly if you don’t pay attention to phonology.)
Lorenzo Turner, the African etymologist for Merriam-Webster’s 3rd unabridged dictionary (1961), retained the “Kru” etymology but noted that he could not confirm it.
Later Merriam-Webster editors were unsatisfied with that and omitted it from subsequent editions: when ackee was added to the 10th Collegiate in 1993, it was “origin unknown”. Same for the 11th Collegiate in 2003, and same online until sometime between 2017 and 2019, when the detailed discussion quoted above was added.
Cassidy and Le Page’s Dictionary of Jamaican English gave both MW’s Kru and Christaller’s Twi as possible sources (first edition 1967; the ackee entry is the same in later editions). This dictionary draws heavily from Christaller for Twi phonology as well as vocabulary as influences on Jamaican English. I’ll bet this was the immediate source for AHD.
But there have been plenty of botanists since Christaller who have recorded vernacular names for Blighia sapida. In Plants of the Gold Coast by F. R. Irvine (1930):
(It goes on to describe uses for soap, timber, and “to stupify fish”. Bunting was a previous researcher who passed on vocabulary he had collected to Irvine.)
And for more recent work, the Société Française d’Ethnopharmacologie provides a database of papers on Blighia sapida that indexes Nom vernaculaire; some samples:
and lots more. One of them has the one we’re looking for: akyee (Asante-Twi) appears in An ethnopharmacological survey and in vitro confirmation of ethnopharmacological use of medicinal plants used for wound healing in Bosomtwi-Atwima-Kwanwoma area, Ghana (2009; authors in Ghana and Germany), which lists it as a source of treatment for snake bites and stings with a poultice from its bark.
“Cashew” in Dyula is tubabu finsan “European akee”, I see. Which Makes Sense.
And not only Dyula: from Irvine (1930),
(Did Christaller conflate this with the ackee tree?)
The African names for cashew in the ethnopharmacology database look like they’re mostly borrowed from Portuguese, but not all.
Ah yes. Missed that Hausa one. Bargery has fisa “cashew tree” (sic), obviously of the same origin as the Dyula word. I wonder which came first? Dyula, presumably, or there’s no motivation for the nasal vowels.
Interesting that the Bété one is nothing like “ackee.” (Bété is a Kru language, of course.)
Akaselem bopè and Ntcham (Bassar) bupobu are very interesting. They’d be the same etymon as each other: Akaselem has dropped all its final syllables in a way so thoroughgoing as to make French look like Lithuanian, which confuses the issue, but Akaselem and Ntcham are actually quite closely related to each other.
Nawdm féegá (which I mentioned above) would regularly come from a pre-Nawdm *pesga, and Akaselem and Ntcham, like all the Gurma languages, have lost *s throughout. The bo-/bu- part of the Akaselem and Ntcham words is the “tree” class prefix (the southern Gurma languages have developed a new class prefix system from fused proclitic “articles”*), and the final bu of Ntcham bupobu is the original class suffix. The rounded stem vowel in the Ntcham form is the result of the preceding and following u‘s: compare Ntcham bʋ́sʋ̄bʋ̄ “tree” beside Akaselem búcīī “tree” (both cognate with Kusaal tiig, though showing a weird spontaneous alveolar-to-palatal shift which is something of a Gurma speciality. I blame Sean Connery.)
So the Nawdm, Akaselem and Ntcham forms can all be reconstructed as going back to a stem *pes- or *pɪs-. Which looks remarkably like the Dyula and Hausa forms (neither Dyula nor Hausa has a native /p/, and they substitute /f/ in loanwords.)
So the Oti-Volta area has the two stems *pɪs- and *k͡pɪs- going on. There’s no way of unifying these via regular historical developments, but given that these seem to be basically Wanderwörter, and have probably been transmitted through languages without labial-velar stops at various points, it’s maybe not too big a stretch to see them as connected.**
They must be pretty old for the Gurma and Nawdm forms to have undergone these changes (assuming that I’m right in my conjectures here.)
* It’s an areal thing: the same has happened in Ditammari (which is Oti-Volta, but not Gurma) and in Miyobe, which is not even Oti-Volta, though (for my money) it’s the closest relative of Oti-Volta.
** Kusaal ku(r)kur “pig” is (probably) ultimately from Portuguese porco by way of (among other languages) older Gã kproko.
For a wonder, the Ntcham form is actually in the (very incomplete) SIL dictionary:
bʋ́pɔ́bʋ̄ pl ípɔ́fɩ́ “cajou/cashew” (sic)
(I hadn’t thought to look.)
The high tone on the root in Ntcham and Nawdm would be right if the words were actually cognate, but of course it’s also consistent with borrowing. The initial low tone in Moba kpìíg̀ is not consistent with the word being actually cognate to these, but of course, neither is the initial consonant.
Unfortunately none of the Western Oti-Volta forms that I’ve found are from dictionaries that mark tones.
I see that for yer actual cashew, Anacardium occidentale, (not the ackee apple), both Farefare and Toende Kusaal have just borrowed the Twi form, as atẽa. All consistent with the ackee apple being Proper West African and the the cashew as a Nasty Foreign Vegetable*, of course.
* Sorry. I was traumatised by broccoli as a child.
Lorenzo Turner, the African etymologist for Merriam-Webster’s 3rd unabridged dictionary
I hadn’t heard of him, to my shame. A man worthy of note.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Dow_Turner
I was traumatised by broccoli as a child.
Not as terrifying as Brussels Sprouts under traditional British cooking methods.
If you can get over the trauma, broccoli is actually very toothsome broken up into florets and steamed for only a few minutes. Possibly Béchamel sauce … (I never did persuade my mother.)
Following the link from the Turner page to “Peace Corps”, I note that WP helpfully disambiguates:
“For Iraqi Shia militia, see Peace Companies.”
I don’t really quite get the Peace Corps; though I should say that the one alumnus of it I have known was an excellent person who was one of the about three non-Africans who could speak Moba.
He cheated by being married to a Togolese woman, though. He told me that he used to speak Moba to his son, until (at the age of about five) the son said to him one day “Non, non, Papa! On le dit pas comme ça!”, after which they spoke French together.
And “iron” seems a stretch for a word for a Maria Theresa dollar
Can we be sure that Moba kūūg̀, Gulimancema kuuga, ever indicated the Maria Theresa dollar? The Webonary gives the meaning as ‘5 francs’. I assume this is CFA (XOF), and 5 francs CFA is now a very small sum, though it must have been much more substantial at the introduction of the CFA. Cf. the example in the Gulimancema Webonary: pa nni kuuga min daa a tiina ‘donne-moi cinq francs pour acheter des arachides’—literal peanuts. (A YouTube video I just watched shows someone buying a lunch—five millet griddle cakes (Mooré maasa? Dyula ŋɔ̀mi)—for 100 francs on the streets of Ouagadougou.)
I gather some form of iron currency (kissi pennies, Idoma akika, stylized hoe blades elsewhere in Nigeria) was usual in many areas of West Africa even up to end of colonization, and it still has traditional uses for bride prices, ritual, etc. Republican Turkish has demir para for ‘coins’, literally ‘iron money’, beside madeni para ‘metal money’. (Ottoman ﺳﻜﻪ sikke ‘coin’, from Arabic, was too close to echt Turkish sik ‘dick, cock’, I think. I have never heard sikke ‘coin’ in everyday speech except in jokes involving double entendres.) Captain Grose includes iron as ‘money’ here. Interesting: Green’s dictionary has cites for old American slang iron man ‘dollar’ from a constellation of authors: Ring Lardner, John Dos Passos, Raymond Chandler, Richard Wright.
By synchronicity, a friend is now experiencing a long layover in the Lomé international airport on his way to Cameroon to distribute zakat directly to local entities deemed trustworthy for the purchase of livestock in advance of Eid. He says the airport has no functioning air-conditioning. I’ll see if he can ask around about what various Togolese people around him call 5 francs CFA (XOF) (and maybe name for 5 francs (XAF) for the people waiting to go to Yaoundé).
Lorenzo Turner’s pioneering work on Gullah has been mentioned at Language Hat before, at Recognizing Mende and BENNE (in a comment that David E replied to). But I didn’t know until now that he was also a consultant for Merriam-Webster (one of 201 outside consultants listed in the front matter of the 1961 Unabridged).
For ackee, it looks to me like the botanists did their part, publishing vernacular names in their literature, but the lexicographers didn’t consult them until recently.
Mooré maasa?
Yup, màasà, = Kusaal ma’asir, plural ma’asa.
The Kusaal word turns up in the translation of Matthew 7:9:
Anɔ’ɔnɛ bɛ ya san’an, ka o biig na sɔs o ma’asir, ka o tis o kugirɛ?
“Who is there among you, that his/her child asks him/her for a griddle cake, and he/she gives him/her a stone?”
(“Bread” is an exotic foreign foodstuff. The translators have chosen well in picking a more normal thing that a child might actually want. More stone-like in appearance than “bread”, too …)
stylized hoe blades
Now that’s a thought!
Moba kūūl̀, Gulimancema kuuli “hoe” (= Kusaal kuunr /kũ̀:r/.) Exact same stem as the five-francs word, but in a different gender/noun-class set.
The ga/si gender is diminutive in many Oti-Volta languages, particularly when used with a stem which normally appears in a different gender; so it’s possible to take kūūg̀/kuuga as “little hoe”, which seems a perfectly possible name for the coin, given a background of hoes as an exchange unit.
I think you’ve cracked another one, Xerîb!
(I shall resist the urge to make an off-colour comment about a five-franc ho, or two-bit hooker, or tuppenny-ha’penny tart.)
That’s the kind of poetry I come here for.
Eerie.
it’s possible to take kūūg̀/kuuga as “little hoe”, which seems a perfectly possible name for the coin, given a background of hoes as an exchange unit.
This really is rather satisfying. It has made my day. There is an early European description of this money on pp. 114f of William Balfour Baikie, Narrative of an exploring voyage up the rivers Kwóra and Bínue (commonly known as the Niger and Tsádda) in 1854 (available here), with a word for it in Hausa, which is not in Bargery.
I noted the Songhay words for ‘hoe’ from one of Lameen’s papers, ‘The subclassification of Songhay and its historical implications’: Korandjé kumu, Koyra Chiini kuumu, Djenné Chiini kumbu, Korandjé kumu, Koyraboro Senni kunbu (if I’ve got those right). Is this a just borrowing from Oti-Volta into Songhay?
Eerie
Western Oti-Volta presumably borrowed it from Hausa māsā̀ “fried cake”, with the usual WOV dodge of adopting it as plural and retrofitting a singular to it.
(The low tone of the stem and the Kusaal and Farefare vowel glottalisation are peculiar, though. Perhaps influenced by the adjective ma’as- “cool”? Though that has the wrong tones too: high in Farefare, mid in Kusaal.)
If there’s an Arabic word from μᾶζα, the Hausa could be ultimately of the same origin.
Gulimancema has maasili and madili, but the former must be borrowed from Mooré, and the latter probably is too. Having unwisely got rid of proto-Oti-Volta *s, both Moba and Gulimancema sometimes use /d/ for non-initial /s/ in loanwords.
I noted the Songhay words for ‘hoe’ from one of Lameen’s papers
Lameen actually raised this question here not long ago:
https://languagehat.com/xmas-loot-2025/#comment-4689924
Nice Hausa proverb with masa, from Bargery:
A ci masa daga tsaka?
“Does one eat a fried cake from the middle?”
(Putting the cart before the horse.)
The Newmans’ dictionary also has waina, meaning a similar but smaller kind of fried cake, and gives the pleasing expression juyin waina “turning over of the griddle-cake” for “coup, takeover of the government.”
More five-franc words: Baatonum has the boring dala.
Koromfe has borrowed the Mooré word (as wakɩrɩ), unsurprisingly, but according to Rennison’s dictionary, also uses mãnəfɛ, which is literally “(one) cowrie.”
Humburi Senni has kà:tíbò, which Heath also glosses “rial.”
Gao Songhay has (beside dala), alliyaara, which is presumably “rial” with a bit of metathesis thrown in and the Arabic article.
Kevin Jarrett’s dictionary of Manga (a Kanuri dialect), available thanks to Roger Blench, has gúrsù, which is an obvious one.
Unfortunately I haven’t got any data from the XAF zone.
Supyire has darashi. Weird how all these officially-Francophone-country languages have picked up a non-rhotic English plural form for a currency unit that isn’t actually used in the officially-Anglophone countries anyway.
Jamsay has bú:dù, which Heath says is a Fulfulde loan. Dunno what it meant originally in Fulfulde. The only lexical sources I have for Fulfulde are for the Adamawa dialect, which (inevitably) just uses dala.
Ah: a Cameroon language. Mundabli (which is “Bantoid”) uses ya̋n “leaf” for 100 francs, according to Rebecca Voll’s grammar.
And Pius Tamanji’s grammar of Bafut says àbàá ŋkábî “bag of money” is used for 100,000 francs.
But there’s no mention of counting currency in fives in either work. Maybe it’s only a West African thing.
mbuuɗu ᠪᠫᠬᠭᠮ n Frn pièce d’argent la plus petite, 5 F CFA, franc Eng money of the
smallest denomination; i.e. one five cfa coin is “mbuuɗu” or “one money”, franc
Compare: baawɗe, daliili 1, jawdi, mbecca; Synonyms: buuɗu, ceede, kaalisi. (catégorie :
6.8.6 – Frn Argent Eng Money.) sing: ngu plur: ɗi Pl. : buuɗi
mbuuduuri ᠪᠫᠬᠭᠮ (source: mooré) n 1) Frn généalogmbuuɗu ᠪᠫᠬᠭᠮ n Frn pièce d’argent la plus petite, 5 F CFA, franc Eng money of the
smallest denomination; i.e. one five cfa coin is “mbuuɗu” or “one money”, franc
Compare: baawɗe, daliili 1, jawdi, mbecca; Synonyms: buuɗu, ceede, kaalisi. (catégorie :
6.8.6 – Frn Argent Eng Money.) sing: ngu plur: ɗi Pl. : buuɗi
https://mooreburkina.com/sites/www.mooreburkina.com/files/pdf-files/Dictionnaire%20Fulfulde%20-%20fran%C3%A7ais%20-%20english%20et%20images.pdf
Thanks, PP!
Though it still doesn’t help with deciding what buuɗu meant before it meant “five francs”, alas.
I’m not clear if it was primarily “money”, and got hijacked for “five francs”, or if the “money” sense is generalised from the “five francs” meaning.
Interesting to see the Mooré búudu “sort, kind, ethnic group” well-established as a loan in this dialect of Fulfulde. At least, that’s the way round this dictionary has it.
It’s an odd word from a Western Oti-Volta angle, though. Mooré has the expected singular form búugu, but it’s not much used as far as I can see, and may well be yet another back-formation; búudu itself is generally used as singular.
Kusaal has buudi, with a final -i which is inexplicable if it were a straightforward cognate (should be *buud), suggesting that it’s actually borrowed from Mooré. Mampruli has burli, plural bura, where the d, which Mooré has interpreted as belonging to the class suffix, has instead been analysed as stem-final (Mampruli has no r/d contrast.) Same with Dagbani birili.
On the other hand, this word doesn’t seem to be found in Adamawa Fulfulde.
Nawdm has búùdŕ “semence; variété, espèce, race, catégorie”, which Nawdm-internally is easily derivable from the verb buud- “semer, planter.”
That, in turn, is cognate with Kusaal bʋd, Mooré bʋde, Buli bori, Gulimancema bùlì, Byali būūrí, Ditammari būātí, Nateni bɔ̄dí, Mbelime būōtī, Waama bori, all “sow”, and indeed with proto-Bantu *-bʊ́tò “seed.”
That makes it look like Mooré búugu must indeed be a back-formation. But there’s also the difficulty that all the verb cognates speak to the original vowel being *ʊ rather than *u.
It’s also hard to work out the morphological structure of buud-u. But there was a proto-Oti-Volta class suffix *-u(u), and Moba (for example) uses it to make deverbal nouns (e.g. wāālû “hunting”, from wāāl̀ “hunt.”)
This class set is lost in Western Oti-Volta, apart from a few nouns in Nõotre. But if Mooré búudu is a relic of it, the stem u could be due to “umlaut” caused by the u of the ending, and the very fact that the formation is obsolete in WOV would naturally lead to the word being reanalysed as buu+du (where -du is a common enough class suffix) and being given a “regular” singular form búugu. It would also explain why Mampruli and Dagbani have just shifted the word into a regular class set while keeping the original stem intact.
That also might lead to an alternative take on Kusaal buudi: the plural suffix corresponding to the singular *-u(u) was *-i(i), which is identical to the plural suffix of the fu/ii “small-round-objects-along-with-some-animals” gender, which is still extant in Western Oti-Volta. So the Kusaal form might not be borrowed from Mooré at all, but just continue the old plural form.
There’s a precedent for that: Kusaal piini “gift”, cognate with Moba pāānî “gifts”; the umlaut a > i of the stem vowel in the Kusaal is regular in WOV before this suffix. (The underlying verb root *pa “give” goes right back to proto-Volta-Congo.)
Yeah, I think that works …
(Don’t mind me muttering in the corner here. I’m quite harmless. But better not to make eye contact.)
Not to me – what’s it from?
What is this script again? It looks a bit too round for Gʋlse… or is that just me? (And why is it displayed in my ancient browser when Coptic still isn’t – after I installed a Coptic font?)
Small round animals? Tortoises?
mbuuɗu […] sing: ngu plur: ɗi Pl. : buuɗi
How is that to be read?
what’s it from?
German, I reckon:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kurus
Small round animals? Turtles?
Sadly, no (at least not in Kusaal.)
The “small-round-things/seeds” and the “animals” genders/class sets were originally separate, and have fallen together as a secondary development, partly driven by sharing the same plural suffix, partly (I think) because the original “animals” singular suffix *-wʊ very often ended up ambiguous because of historical sound change in various O-V branches; in the whole “Outer” branch (WOV-Buli/Konni-Yom/Nawdm), it was replaced by the “seed” singular suffix *-fʊ. The two genders still are distinct in most other Oti-Volta languages; Moba, notably, is an exception, probably because of WOV influence.
The (original) “animals” class affixes are probably cognate with the Bantu Bleek-Meinhof 9/10 pair of prefixes.
How is that to be read?
Fulfulde has multiple “genders”/noun classes with distinct sg/pl suffixes; like Oti-Volta, though with much more conflation of plural forms than Oti-Volta.
I think the ngu and ɗi are the relevant sg and pl 3rd person pronouns for this gender.
Fulfulde also famously has initial consonant mutations between singular and plural; the patterns differ between noun classes/genders. Meinhof and other colonialist racist linguists managed to interpret these differences as reflecting “gender” in the way that they thought was evidence of Hamiticism, which matched their view that the Fulɓe, on account of (a) being paler and (b) being the ruling group in what is now Northern Nigeria and Cameroon when the Europeans invaded, were obviously racially superior Hamites and nearly as good as Aryans.
Oops. Delete my ectopic first sentence under the accidentally premature first occurrence of “How is that to be read?”
“Turtles?” should be immediately followed by “Sadly, no.” (A sound rule in general, I find.)
Too much good wine at dinner …
Done!
Na gode sosai!
What is this script again?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adlam_script
That’s got to be good wine if it changed tortoises to turtles.
Nothing but the best at Château Eddyshaw.
Cheap wine is just such a false economy, don’t you think?
Quite so, old bean!
*pours another glass of Petrus*
Tortoises are turtles, just like apes are monkeys. It you try to exclude them, the out group is not a clade.
ᠪᠫᠬᠭᠮ
This is the sequence bpqgm ( ᠪ ᠫ ᠬ ᠭ ᠮ ) in the traditional alphabetical order of the Mongolian script.
What are the exact details of the semantic development in this etymological proposal for the Fula term? Does it reflect the original use of seed weights? Payment in kind (returning borrowed money or giving change in the same form of currency)? Or payment in specie? (I.e. not by bartering, or taking it out in trade?)
Oh. I see.
Funny that I can see it here but not in the article.
I did think it looked Mongolian! I suppose my ancient browser renders Adlam as Mongolian somehow…???
I edited “turtles” to “tortoises” very quickly, but not quickly enough.
“Outgroup” has a more specific meaning than that: it is what you use to root your tree, because phylogenetic analysis usually gives you unrooted ones; the root is between the outgroup and the ingroup. By default, the software assumes that the first line in your dataset is the outgroup (and all the rest the ingroup).
@Xerîb:
I don’t think Fulfulde buuɗi is derived from Mooré buudu at all; only Fulfulde buudu is (which means just the same as the Mooré word.)
I don’t think the dictionary actually claims that: it was an artefact of PP’s formatting of the snippets.
Heath reports the existence of buuɗi “five francs/money” in whatever Fulfulde dialect Jamsay has borrowed from, and that’s quite a long way from likely Mooré influence (though Jamsay does just overlap the border with Burkina Faso, at any rate.)
Neither word turns up in my dictionary of Adamawa Fulfulde, though (not that that necessarily proves much. Quite a few words that I know aren’t in the Kusaal dictionaries either.)
Laura McPherson’s Tommo So grammar reports búudù for “five francs” in that Dogon language too, which is well away from the Burkina border. Though I suppose that the Fulɓe are not famous for being sedentary …
The Jeffrey Heath lean mean linguistic-documentation machine seems to make a point of noting how people count currency. Jeffrey Heath and Aminata Ouattara’s Tiefo-D grammar says that the five-franc unit in that language is called ə̀rá or wə̀rá depending on subdialect.
Tiefo is one of the Languages Formerly known as Gur, that Gabriel Manessy lumped in with Gur (in the strict sense of Oti-Volta and Grusi and not much else) on the basis of extremely inadequate evidence, as people are now beginning to realise. Spoken in southwest Burkina Faso.
I suppose my ancient browser renders Adlam as Mongolian somehow…???
No, I just leapt to conclusions.