An interesting tidbit at Nathan Hopson’s LLog post:
I recently received the following delightful question from Hilary Smith (University of Denver) about the origins of the term for protein in Chinese (dànbáizhì) and Japanese (tanpakushitsu). […] The hanzi/kanji used are identical (蛋白質), though in written Japanese the term is often タンパク質 or たんぱく質 because the 蛋 character is not one of the “regular use” kanji (常用漢字 jōyō kanji) selected by the officially announced by the Japanese education ministry for mastery during compulsory education.
Hilary wrote that she had circumstantial evidence from some extant texts that, like a lot of other technical vocabulary, this word was coined in Japan to translate a European term in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. That language, she suspected, was German. In German, the word is Eiweiß, which breaks down to Ei (egg) weiß (white). This is a perfect match for the Sino-Japanese term’s first two characters; the third means “stuff” or “substance.”
Hilary asked if I could confirm the German origin and comment on the date of coinage in Japanese. […] The standard answer to the origins of 蛋白質 in Japanese is provided by the Nihongo daijiten (“Great Japanese Dictionary” 日本国語大辞典), last edited in 1995. The dictionary cites Shiba Ryōkai’s (司馬凌海 1839-1879) 1862 七新藥 (Shichi shin’yaku, “Seven new medicines”) as the oldest extant use of the term 蛋白質. […]
In digging just a little further I came across an article by Shiba Tetsuo (芝哲夫) that uncovers evidence of the term used a year earlier, in 1861, by Kawakami Kōmin (川本幸民 1810-1871). Kawakami was the translator to Japanese of Julius Adolph Stöckhardt’s (1809-1886) Die Schule der Chemie (“School of Chemistry”), a highly influential text first published in 1846. It went through over twenty editions and was widely translated. Thus far, the German origins hypothesis for 蛋白質 was holding up well, though the date of origin was pushed back far beyond not just the texts Hilary had access to, but even a year past its canonical coinage.
However, Kawakami was not working directly from German. Japan had centuries of skill and knowledge working from Dutch texts (via Rangaku 蘭学, or “Dutch learning”), and Kawakami was a veteran scholar of the Dutch learning. He therefore turned to an existing Dutch expanded translation by Jan Willem Gunning, De scheikunde van het onbewerktuigde en bewerktuigde rijk: bevattelijk voorgesteld en met eenvoudige proeven opgehelderd: derde Nederduitsche uitgave van Stöckhardt’s Schule der chemie (“The chemistry of the organized and unorganized kingdom… 3rd. ed. of Stöckhardt’s Die Schule der Chemie”). Kawakami’s multi-volume translation was published as 化学新書 (Kagaku shinsho, “New book of chemistry”). Therein, he used the term 蛋白質 to translate the Dutch “eiwit,” which is structurally identical to the German Eiweiß.
That Rangaku link was eye-opening; I hadn’t realized that the Japanese, like the Russians, borrowed so much from Dutch (though of course it’s not at all surprising when you think of the history of Western contacts with Japan). And it’s very satisfying to me to see examples of the benefits of dogged research; to quote Robert Caro’s Newsday boss Alan Hathway: “Just remember one thing: Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.”
Japanese etymology can be tricky, but I think it is safe to say that any word that made its way into Japanese during the Edo period probably came from Dutch (although occasionally from Portuguese). I would say this includes ガラス (glas), コーヒー (koffie), ランドセル (ransel), オルゴール (orgel), ペン (pen), ビール (bier), タバコ (tabak), ボタン (bouton), countless others.
It makes sense; I just had never thought about it!
I’m surprised Dutch still called itself “Low German” in the second half of the 19th century.
You might have for example Hollands contrasted with Duits in one place and Nederduits contrasted with Hoogduits in another. In any event, the term didn’t become disused until the 20th century.
Also note that Belgium at some point wasn’t necessarily jumping for joy at calling their language Nederlands.
Edit: Here‘s a nice example: “Prof. Heremans, their teacher Flemish or Nederduits (then there were few who dared to say Nederlands)”
“In digging just a little further” is the phrase that got me. How exactly did Hopson dig? Getting access to the earliest example of a usage can be a challenge. Google Books is a good start but hardly reliable. Hopson appears to have had access to an article by Shiba Tetsuo, but how did he look for it? How did he find it? Where did he find it? Doing work on Asian languages while living in Australia quickly reveals the difficulties of research without access to local libraries and sources.
As a general comment, Rangaku is well known to anyone who has even a passing knowledge of Japanese linguistic history. I am not in the least surprised that the word 蛋白質 is from Dutch. (I believe another word from Dutch is コップ koppu.)
More mystifying for me is the origin of the Mongolian word for ‘protein’: уураг. One dictionary I have gives the meaning of уураг as: “colostrum, the first milk after delivery, beestings; the white of an egg; protein, albumen”. Is there a connection with Russian here, or is this due to Chinese influence?
Russian is likely. In both Russian and German the word for “white of an egg” (белок / Eiweiß) also means “protein”, and I guess that’s true in other languages as well.
This seems to be one of those rare instances where Norwegian didn’t just calque German without further processing. The traditional (now old-fashioned) term is eggehvitestoffer.
It’s also Eiweißstoff / eiwitstof in 19th century and early 20th century texts that make an attempt to distinguish protein the substance from egg-white the main proteins in eggs.
Edit: correction, I found an attestation dating back to at least 1789 in Manier om geneeskundige voorschriften voor te schryven by Pichler, J.F.C. on p. 188.
https://www.delpher.nl/nl/boeken/view?identifier=dpo:10434:mpeg21:0214&query=eiwitstof&coll=boeken&page=1&facets%5Bperiode%5D%5B%5D=0%7C18e_eeuw%7C&rowid=1
Unfortunately I’m having some trouble accessing page 188.
Edit 2:
Got it.
In short, the best and purest form of protein can be obtained from egg-white by means of alcohol. Definitely not a false positive.
One of two words in the German case; the other (southern?) is Eiklar.
Likewise, the yolk is Eigelb or Dotter.
…Was there an actual [j] in there? Because… that would be etymological, but I’d have expected it to drop out a thousand years earlier.
Swedish äggula (which my brain insists on reading ägg-ula and not ägg-gula because orthography, but there’s nothing called an ula). But Danish æggeblomme which is “flower of the egg.” (Specifically in earlier usage a flower like on a tree, the individual ones were blomst and that has been extended, so blomme is now only used for egg yolks and plums. Swedish has blomma for both kinds of flowers and plommon for the fruit. And people say Da and Sw are very similar).
Norwegian usage probably depends on where your grandmother was born.
@dm
I suspect the spelling eijeren or *eyeren is a non-phonetic spelling, because ije or ye did and do not occur at the beginning of a word in writing (because ambiguity?).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)
Norw. (egge)plomme “yolk”, lit. “(egg) plum”. The alternative (-)gule does exist, but it’s rare and could be recent, either from Swedish or after hvite.
The usual story of blom(m)e (now mainly archaic Nynorsk) and blomst is that the latter originated as blomster, an abstract/collective meaning “bloom, flowering”, which was reanalysed as a plural. Blomst became (and probably spread as) the commercial term. Apart from that, I don’t think the two singulars ever had different senses in Norwegian.
Adding to what Frans said, Eiweißstoffe can be used to disambiguate “protein” from “white of an egg”; it’s a word one can find in popular books on biology / nutrition / chemistry. The loanword Protein is also quite common.
@David
Yes, the pronunciation of eieren (modern spelling) is something like /ˈɛi.jə.rə/.
@PlasticPaddy
ei and ij are the same sound for me making the spelling distinction seemingly artificial, but they used to be two different sounds. The former is presumably not too far from the /ɛi/ as it still is (ignoring for a moment that Hollandic dialects are likely to embrace /ai/ and Brabantic dialects shorten it to just /ɛ/), while the latter was exactly what it looks like, and still is in some Flemish dialects: /iː/ or /iːj/. What looks like diphthongs may merely indicate lengthening or a more frontal vs a more central or back pronunciation in old spelling.
For example a (/ɑ/) vs ai (/a/) or ae (also /a/) is still the same in principle, but modern Dutch spelling has opted for a vs aa instead. In the case of ij it’s not always clear if that’s a meaningful j or just a means of avoiding ii, which simply doesn’t occur in manuscripts iirc, presumably for reasons of legibility or ease of writing.
the Mongolian word for ‘protein’: уураг
Not directly related to the question of how modern Mongolian уураг acquired the meaning ‘protein’, but I thought I would share what I found when looked around at etymological treatments of уураг.
Literary Mongolian uγuraγ ‘colostrum, beestings’ is said to be a borrowing of a Turkic *oğuraq, evidently an Oghur Turkic form, with *r corresponding to Common Turkic z; cf. Chuvash ырӑ ‘colostrum’, with 3sg. possessed form apparently ырри as in ĕне ырри ‘cow beestings’ (ĕне ‘cow’).
Turkic *oğuraq would be a diminutive in -aq of the Turkic word for ‘colostrum, beestings’. For the formation, note Sakha уоһах ‘colostrum’, apparently reflecting *oğuzaq (Sakha -h- from intervocalic -z- regularly). This Turkic word for ‘beestings’ is apparently preserved in every modern branch of Turkic: in Oghuz as Republican Turkish ağız, but regionally very common ağuz, etc; in Karluk as Uyghur ئوغۇز oɣuz, Uzbek og’iz suti (sut, ‘milk’), etc.; in Kipchak as Tatar угыз, Kyrgyz ууз, etc.; in Siberian Turkic as Khakhas оос, the Sakha mentioned above, etc.; etc.
Also interesting, about the Hugarian word író ‘buttermilk’, of problematic etymology… Martti Räsänen proposed that író was a loanword from an Oghur source akin to Chuvash ырӑ ‘beestings’. (For the phonology of the final Hungarian -ó from Turkic -(a)q, compare Hungarian apró ‘small’ if from a form akin to Old Turkic oprak, orpak ‘shabby’; Hungarian borsó ‘pea’, cf. Chuvash пӑрҫа ‘pea’, Turkish burçak, etc.; Hungarian koporsó ‘coffin’, cf. Karakhanid Turkic qopurčaq ‘chest, box, coffin’; Hungarian karó ‘stake’, cf. Turkish kazık ‘pole, stake’, Uzbek qozik; etc.) For a recent and extremely detailed discussion of the Hungarian word, see p. 464ff in András Róna-Tas et al. (2011) West Old Turkic: Turkic Loanwords in Hungarian, Part I: Introduction, Lexicon »A-K«.
Oğuz Turks, ay.
…or a Proto-Turkic or earlier, or even early Common Turkic, form with Uncommon [rʲ] corresponding to Common [z]. IIRC, the Orkhon rune for z is the one for r with a diacritic stroke added…
Re: Dutch eieren vs eijeren vs eyeren – My 2p is that in eijeren the eij is not ei + j but rather e + ij, the ij ligature sometimes alternating with y in older texts (like … voor te schryven in the 1789 attestation’s book title).