By popular demand (in this thread), I am discussing the various words for ‘eggplant’ (Solanum melongena, a comestible with a far wider variety of shapes and colors than most of us are aware of—there’s a very nice photograph of “a smorgasboard of eggplants” here). The word eggplant itself is the odd man out here (and odd it is, too, until you see the variety it must originally have referred to: scroll most of the way down this page for a dramatic photograph of what do indeed look exactly like eggs with green stems); the English word that will start us on our voyage is aubergine. This is, as you might guess, borrowed from French; the French word is from Catalan albergínia, which is from Arabic al-bādinjān (with the definite article al-), itself borrowed from Persian bādingān, which is probably from Middle Indo-Aryan *vātiñjana-, vātingana-; most sources attribute the latter form to Sanskrit, but I don’t find it in my dictionaries.
The Arabic word is the source also of Spanish berenjena, which the Italians (assimilating it to mela ‘apple’) borrowed as melanzana, which they then folk-etymologized as mela insana ‘mad apple’; Hobson-Jobson, in its usual discursive fashion, says:
The Ital. mela insana is the most curious of these corruptions, framed by the usual effort after meaning, and connecting itself with the somewhat indigestible reputation of the vegetable as it is eaten in Italy, which is a fact. When cholera is abroad it is considered (e.g. in Sicily) to be an act of folly to eat the melanzana. There is, however, behind this, some notion (exemplified in the quotation from Lane’s Mod. Egypt. below) connecting the badinjān with madness. [Burton, Ar. Nights, iii. 417.] And it would seem that the old Arab medical writers give it a bad character as an article of diet. Thus Avicenna says the badinjān generates melancholy and obstructions. To the N. O. Solanaceae many poisonous plants belong.
This is under the heading brinjaul, a form now spelled brinjal, of which the OED (which classifies it as “Anglo-Indian”) says: “Few names even of plants exemplify so fully the changes to which a foreign and unintelligible word is liable under the influence of popular etymology and form-association… The Malay berinjalā, prob. from Pg., illustrates the Anglo-Indian form… In the West Indies brinjalle has been further corrupted to brown-jolly.” The Portuguese form referred to is spelled beringela in Portugal and berinjela in Brazil; Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) has both berengena and merengena (the former used among the Istanbul Sephardic community according to my dictionary); and the Neapolitans, idiosyncratic as usual, borrowed the Arabic as mulignana.
Greek μελιτζάνα [melitzána] and Slovene melancána are borrowed from Italian, but most other Eastern European words come from Turkish patlıcan (itself an eccentric borrowing from Arabic): Greek Romany patlidžáno (plural patlidzéa), Albanian patëllxhan, Serbo-Croatian patlidžan, Hungarian padlizsán, Polish bakłażan (there’s also oberżyna, presumably from German Aubergine, which is obviously from French), Russian баклажан [baklazhán]. The Yiddish word is patlezhán; perhaps one of my Yiddish-scholar readers can tell me what the immediate source is, but it’s clearly in this group.
Other forms: Swahili bilingani, Malagasy baranjely, Somali birinjal (according to this page) or bidingal (according to my dictionary)… oh, and a local descendent of the Middle Indic forms, Hindi/Urdu bai(n)gan, is the source of the West Indian form baigan (current in Guyana and Trinidad).
You can see still more eggplant words (of all origins) here.
Whew. Let the additions and corrections begin!
In my Hebrew class, our textbook, around chapter 8, introduced one word for food: eggplant (xatzil). The rest of the food words showed up about 10 chapters later. It was anomalous, and eggplant continues to be one of my favourite Hebrew words.
Exactly why I read you.
I’ve been saying bādinjān (pronounced in our family “beitinjune”) – the Arabic – for years but never put it together with the “al-” as a source for aubergine until I read this. Fascinating post! Thanks.
The reputation for madness may have originated in India because of a folk etymology connecting vatingana with the word for wind, which is associated with madness in India as the moon is in Europe.
In any case, Arab doctors warned their patients that eggplant would cause madness, cancer, freckles and hoarseness, among other evils (European doctors would later say the same), but the man in the street didn’t necessarily pay attention. The 9th-century poet Kushajam wrote:
“The doctor makes ignorant fun of me for loving eggplant, but I will not give it up.
“Its flavor is like the saliva generously exchanged by lovers in kissing.”
That may be the only racy poem ever written about eggplant.
Even today, the Touaregs say that if you eat eggplant daily for 40 days you will go insane, and they cite the case of a scoffer who tried it and at the end of the emerged from his tent crying, “I’ve been eating eggplant for 40 days and now I’m insane!” QED.
Han Ah Reum in Catonsville (SW corner of U.S. 40 and Rolling Road), is alleged to be the largest Asian grocery in the world: I’ve always assumed this means the largest outside of Asia. It always has five varieties in stock, including the long skinny purple ones and the little round green and white ones. I’ve forgotten know which is the Italian eggplant, which the Thai, and so on, but anyone in the Baltimore area could easily get five kinds there, and I am not talking about mere color varieties like the white or streaked varieties that sometimes turn up in ordinary groceries.
The Eastern Armenian is [patəldʒan].
Here’s the Anglo-Finno-Russian-Scandinavian food glossary. Which includes the various words for eggplant. The icelandic word, eggaldin, means, literally, eggfruit.
Thanks, that was great! That is one looong word-borrowing chain. Does anyone know any that are longer? (excluding morphemes that just get passed down a language family, obviously)
Entirely unrelated addition: the Japanese is “nasu” (may refer to a slightly variant plant) which was originally “nasubi” but got shortened somewhere along the line, possibly by Heian court ladies.
The most popular etymology is that nasubi was a variant on “natsu + mi” (summer fruit), and the word is indeed usable as a “summer” season word in formal haiku. Other proposed etymologies include “nasu + mi” (fruit that grows) and “nashi + mi” (pear fruit).
Bonus information: There is a related plant, a kind of nettle I think, called “warunasubi” (bad nasubi) or “oninasubi” (ogre [oni] nasubi) because it is thorny and stubborn and not useful to humans, IIRC.
As far as long borrowing chains go, orange gives aubergine a run for its money — Middle English from Middle French from Old Provencal from Old Italian from Arabic from Persian from Sanskrit. Or something like that.
The Spanish word is normally spelled berenjena.
Russian has a way around this — a colloquial synonym for баклажаны, coming from Ukraine and Southern Russia as I understand, is синенькие (“little blue ones”).
A west Indian dish of fried aubergines is gemerally spelled “bal and gen”.
Yes, Ukrainians call them синенькие (“little dark blue things”) as do some Russians. They also describe their color as dark blue (синий) and not purple. In Egypt during late summer-early fall they were small, dense and rather wrinkled, took much longer to cook, and had a stronger flavor. I assumed that was the variety that could withstand 60+ degrees C.
Hi, thanks to your link to my site (Vocabolario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana) I discovered your blog, that will become a regular reading.
Just a word about the italian melanzana.
The alternative form “petonciano” is almost unknown in Italy, but up to a 100 years was the more common form.
Pellegrino Artusi’s cookbook, the most famous italian cookbook and still often reprinted, was published at the end of XIXth century and uses the form “petonciano”, with the result that today’s reader often do not understand what the book speaks about!
For some reason the Plant Names Database page doesn’t have aubergine as a name in English. We call them aubergines here in Britain and it was a long time after I came across eggplant that I actually learned what it meant.
in romanian the name is pătlăgică vânătă(lit. dark blue pătlăgică)but usually just vânătă.
P.S. the tomato is pătlăgică roşie(red pătlăgică) again usually just roşie
Just to give folks a taste of the morphological delights of Romanian, the plural of vânătă is vinete (both stressed on the first syllable).
michael: You’re right, and I’ll fix it; I took the old spelling from an old source. Normally I’d double-check everything in a post, but in this case… you understand…
The Polish name is bakłażan but the plant itself is rare (only available at all for about 10 years now).
For Spanish, my dictionary also has berenjenal as an alternate (masc. while berenjena is feminine) and I would assume there are some regional names floating about.
I like the spelling with g better, it looks more spanish somehow (phonologically it’s weird I think, I’m suprised it hasn’t gotten reduced to something like berejena which is easier to say).
“Tres cosas me tienen preso
de amores el corazón,
la bella Inés, el jamón
y berenjenas con queso.”
http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/poesia/trescosa.htm
by Baltasar del Alcazar
In Moldova in everyday speech they say pătlăgică(pl. pătlăgele) for tomato and use a russian word for eggplant.
“in romanian the name is pătlăgică vânătă(lit. dark blue pătlăgică)but usually just vânătă.
P.S. the tomato is pătlăgică roşie(red pătlăgică) again usually just roşie ”
That mirrors Mandarin. ‘qie2zi is eggplant and tomatoes are ‘fan1qie2″ – foreign eggplants.
‘Rice’has a fairly twisted history too.
I bet there were similar twisted borrowing chains in North America around words like ‘cat’ and ‘pussy’.
Jim:
Pussy
In Australia, we call them eggplants. The Croatian name is patlidzan (the z should have a hachek on it).
Cheers
In Kannada, brinjal is Badh-ney-ka-yi. (Ka-yi is the generic term for nut)
Bengali has beigun or baigun.
John,
Thanks for that. I hadn’t known that “puss” was a slang term for hares. That’s the connection for that part of the meaning – hare = rabbit = coney > cunny.
But I meant the cat end of the word. Mary Haas once used a borrowed form from some language in northern California or southern Oregon as an example of how hard it can be to recognize a loanword even when it comes form your own language. In that gaining language the way you form a diminutive is to glottalize the intial consonant, front the vowel, palatalize the final vowel and reduplicate the syllable, so you get puss > p’ishp’ish. We were all convinced and edified by this example.
In Yiddish פּאַטלעזשאַן (patlezhan).
In Slovene, “jajčevec” is also very common, perhaps even moreso than the borrowing “malancan” (no “a” at the end). “Jajce” means egg, so “eggplant” may not entirely be the odd man out, but I don’t know the word’s etymology. BTW, “-evec” is a common noun ending.
I just checked and “malancana” is a correct alternative form of “malancan.” I’ve never heard it used, so I suspect it’s a regional variation, at least to a certain degree. I prefer “jajčevec” anyway.
In Serbian “patlidžan”. As we can see, almost all the names mentioned above have the suffix “gon” (džan, djan, žan etc.). Obviosly, it is connected with the “movement” (go, Germ. gehen, Serb. goniti…).
It seems, if we want to go any further in our explanation we have to understand why such a suffix is used here at all.
We called them brinjals in South Africa, aubergines in the UK.
We called them brinjals in South Africa, aubergines in the UK.
Peter Desmond posted a delicious translation on Baltazar del Alcazar poem in Apres moi,
My Three Loves
(by Baltasar del Alcazar)
Only three things hold my heart
love-captive in a prison vault:
gorgeous Betty, Spanish ham,
and eggplant roasted au gratin.
Betty, guys, knew what to do
to rob me of the slightest clue.
I held as hateful and as petty
everything that wasn’t Betty.
I spent a year without a hunch
until one day she served me lunch
consisting of some Spanish ham
and eggplant roastedau gratin.
Betty was the first to score,
but I’m not certain any more
which of them happens to control
the battlefield that is my soul.
In taste, in measure, and in weight
I think the three of them are great!
Now I want Betty, now it’s ham,
now it’s eggplant au gratin.
Betty’s beauty can’t be beat,
but Aracena’s ham is sweet;
and ancient chronicles attest
that Spaniards loved their eggplant best.
And, so in balance are the three
that, judging quite impartially,
all are equal: Betty, ham,
and eggplant roasted au gratin.
At very least, my new-found squeezes
(ham, and eggplant drenched in cheeses)
may induce my Bettykins
to charge less money for our sins.
For she will find as counterweight,
if she fails to negotiate,
a generous slice of Spanish ham
and eggplant roasted au gratin.
(translated by Peter H. Desmond)
8/04/2005 10:23:57 AM
Diccionario de la Real Academia Española: Del ár. hisp. baḏinǧána, este del ár. clás. bāḏinǧānah, y este del persa bātingān
El Rey, señor de Fugena, *
la cadena
vos eche que mereçedes,
pues tenedes
los ojos de berengena;
de Purchena * a Camarena, *
de Taraçena * a Carmena *
vos fagan luego trocar
e folgar
en la nao so el antena.
AÑO: 1406 – a 1435
AUTOR: Baena, Juan Alfonso de
TÍTULO: Poesías [Cancionero de Baena]
CORDE
That’s utterly delightful!
I recall hearing that the Arabic derives from “baida”, egg, and “jan”, demon, djinn: i.e. “devil’s egg”. The etymology is very appealing (as is the vegetable), but I don’t know if the Arabic permits it.
The Arabic word is from Persian, as I said above. Folk etymology is a popular sport the world over.
http://www.whimsyspeaks.com/archives/2004/12/
Scroll down to Dec 26 for a review of The Aubergine Anthology. All of the poems end on that word, in playful response to a comment in The New Yorker that “you can’t end a poem with ‘aubergine’ .”
m.
thank you for the nice comments on my poem!
while i’m sure it would be harmful to my career to be known as a one-vegetable poet, i thought i would post here a work which was recited in public this last Bastille Day in a happier New Orleans, at a celebration of the aubergine, which was sponsored by a local farmers’ market.
it is one of six works that survived the scrutiny of the editorial committee. i’m sorry to have missed the event, which featured both a cooking lesson (eggplant recipes, natch) and a parade of french poodles.
i enjoy following this blog.
peter desmond
Auberdoing It
Longfellow’s “Evangeline”
doesn’t mention aubergines.
When Baudelaire first published “Spleen”
he too forgot the aubergine.
Not one ballet by Balanchine
contains a single aubergine!
Even Esquire magazine
neglects the shapely aubergine.
Wagner was a Philistine —
his operas shun aubergines.
Elizabeth, the virgin queen,
never dined on aubergines.
I hiked the Upper Engadine
and did not find one aubergine.
In Rome, the Vatican’s Sistine
Chapel boasts no aubergines.
Though Aristotle’s Golden Mean
should guide our use of aubergines,
when I returned to New Orleans,
I gorged all night on aubergines.
For colds, take antihistamines.
For everything else, eat aubergines.
The Yiddish word for eggplant, patlezshan, could be from Turkish as well. MMarvin (Mikhl) Herzog wrote in Mendele:
Turkish origin words in Yiddish,derived either direc at some appropriate period in history or, perhaps via Ukrainian, should no surprise. As prestigious a word as “yarmulke” and “lehavdil” (and, perhaps, as notorious a word as “pots”, are likely of Turkish origin.
Mikhl Herzog
Peter! Nice reading you here!
Wow…I’m astonished by the french poodle parade 🙂
The first stanza of the del Alcazar poem looks suspiciously like a Celtic triad.
Japanese loanwords from English are so heavily japanned they’re practically impossible to recognize: what uninstructed anglophone, hearing /oeru/, would identify it with the (unfamiliar) English phrase office lady, acronymed and rhotacized?
I’m told by one of them that among Iranian youth, once two of them are at the point where one addresses the other with the -جان suffix (of endearment; Parviz-jaan, Maryam-jaan and so on; -joon, in Tehran, in practice), the response is often بادنجان , our bādinǧān above.
It’s perhaps a little silly to add more words at this point, but the Georgian is ბადრიჯანი badrijani. One of many Georgian loans from Persian.
It’s never silly to add more words, especially Georgian.
It’s thought that the Cid Hamete Benengeli, the alleged original Arabic author of Don Quixote, has a surname that is meant to suggest berenjena.
The variations on the Croatian coast seem to be countless: balancana, balancan, balančana, melancana, malancana, melancan, malancan, marancana… Sometimes I almost wonder if people are improvising on the spot.
“in romanian the name is pătlăgică vânătă(lit. dark blue pătlăgică)but usually just vânătă.
P.S. the tomato is pătlăgică roşie(red pătlăgică) again usually just roşie ”
That mirrors Mandarin. ‘qie2zi is eggplant and tomatoes are ‘fan1qie2″ – foreign eggplants.
In Serbia it’s still common to call it plavi patlidžan, even though crveni patlidžan for tomato isn’t commonly heard anymore. Google suggests it’s more common than just patlidžan. While comparing those, I was pretty surprised to come across plavi paradajz (blue tomato), but apparently it’s quite popular – 7400 hits.
In Sudan eggplants are called ṭamāṭim aswad, which would mean ‘black tomatoes’, except that ‘tomatoes’ is banadōra, and ‘black’ is azrag, historically ‘blue’: aswad is apparently now really something like ‘ill-fated, accursed’. Meanwhile, when written, banadōra (if lacking the dots of the tāʔ marbūṭa) could be read as ‘we love him’.
The CA word is properly bāðinjān, with ð from Persian d. Or rather Persian must have formerly had ð but changed it back to d. Similarly with Arabic ustāð ‘master, professor’ from Persian ustād.
Similarly with Arabic ustāð ‘master, professor’ from Persian ustād.
That sounds like a beautiful candidate for a false etymology of usted.
In Polish, the culinary name is bakłażan, and the official botanical one, oberżyna. It’s hard to see that they are ultimately cognate.
‘palavra’ in Turkish means
lie, hot air, boasting, applesauce, bragging, baloney, boloney, bounce, braggadocio, bunk, bunkum, claptrap, cock-and-bull story, eyewash, fish story, flubdub, flummery, gaff, jazz, palaver, talkee talkee, tall story, shits [sl.]
you get the idea.
Now, every linguist will immediately notice resemblance to Spanish palabra (word, speech) from an ecclesiastical Latin sense ‘discourse, allegory’ of Latin parabola ‘comparison,’ from Greek parabolē
It turns out Turkish got the word via Ladino
Palavra: “yalan haber” [ Osman Cemal Kaygılı, Argo Lugatı, 1932]
«Palavra» kelimesi matbuata ilk defa bundan altı yedi sene evvel [1925-26] «palavra edebiyatı» şeklinde girmiş ve ondan sonra «palavra edebiyatı», «palavracı muharrir» tabirleri herkesin ağzında klişe haline gelmiştir.
from Ladino palavra söz, laf << İsp palabra a.a. < from Latin parabola simge, mesel, vecize, anlamlı söz, parola.
I wonder how exactly a Ladino word meaning "word" came to mean "lie, hot air, boasting, bragging, baloney" in Turkish.
Must be an interesting an interesting story involving Jews of Saloniki.
The semantic development is not unlike English palaver (from the Portuguese contribution to West African Pidgin, ca. 1700) ‘speech, talk’ > ‘too much talking’ > ‘(unnecessary) dispute; idle talk, rigmarole’.
Japanese loanwords from English are so heavily japanned they’re practically impossible to recognize:
Or matahara (マタニティー‐ハラスメント, matanitii harasumento)
OP: vātingana-; most sources attribute the latter form to Sanskrit, but I don’t find it in my dictionaries.
The Sanskrit words are vātigagama- ~ vātigaṁgaṇa- (according to Monier-Williams), also vaṅga-, bhaṇṭākī. All these forms look like folk loans from more than one (ultimately related) Dravidian sources: Tamil var̤utalai, var̤utuṇai, Malayalam var̤utina, var̤utini, Telugu vaṅga, vaṅkāya, Kannada badaṇi. The Proto-Dravidian ‘eggplant’ word is reconstructed by Krishnamurti as *waẓ-Vt- (*ẓ = retroflex frictionless continuant).
See also
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~fsouth/Proto-DravidianAgriculture.pdf
All these forms look like folk loans from more than one (ultimately related) Dravidian sources: Tamil var̤utalai, var̤utuṇai, Malayalam var̤utina, var̤utini, Telugu vaṅga, vaṅkāya, Kannada badaṇi. The Proto-Dravidian ‘eggplant’ word is reconstructed by Krishnamurti as *waẓ-Vt- (*ẓ = retroflex frictionless continuant).
DEDR 5301 for வழுதலை et al. I don’t understand the w beginning BK’s reconstruction, when all the DEDR words begin with v or b(h).
வங்கணம் (vanganam) is in Tamil as well. I wonder where the now more common கத்திரி (kaththiri) comes from. Madras Lexicon doesn’t offer a source, so it doesn’t seem to be a loanword (?).
(Everybody having their own transliteration scheme brings out the Qin Shih Huang Di in me. R with two dots underneath does not make me think of ழ at all. ẓ doesn’t make that much sense either but at least we’re all used to z(h) for ழ.)
I don’t understand the w beginning BK’s reconstruction, when all the DEDR words begin with v or b(h).
B. Krishnamurti, The Dravidian languages (2003: 142):
I prefer to use /w/ in my reconstructions for Proto-Dravidian and also for Telugu. Several authors write v instead but they do not mean that the sound that they are representing is a labio-dental. The choice seems to be purely arbitrary.
Whether written *v or *w it patterns with semivowels.
The traditional Austrian term is Melanzani (sg. and pl.) – Italian, only not quite.
Eierfrucht has been spotted somewhere in Germany.
I’m getting umlaut envy.
So much.
BTW, you just invented your own for Chinese. :p
I’m so glad this thread got revived; it’s definitely a classic.
BTW, you just invented your own for Chinese. :p
That was a pun on Su Shih!
Ok, ok, that was a mistake. 🙂
Lazar: That sounds like a beautiful candidate for a false etymology of usted.
It’s been done: http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/arabic-%D8%A3%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%B0-ustaadh-and-spanish-usted.112999/
Finnish munakoiso is a compound of muna, which has a pan-Uralic etymology (“egg”, “testicle”, “penis”) and koiso, which, according to Nykysuomen etymologinen sanakirja, refers to various solanaceous plants, such as punakoiso (Solanum dulcamara) (“red koiso”) and is either an old Germanic loan or a later Scandinavian loan, derived from the same root as the Swedish kvesa “pimple; rheumatism, severe pain in the finger”. The reconstructed form is *kwaisōn originally meant “abscess, boil”. The shift in meaning occurred because punakoiso (Swedish kvesört, kvesved) was principally used as a medicinal plant.
kveisa, according to Cleasby-Vigfusson, means:
KVEISA u, f.
a whitlow, boil;
hafa kveisu í fæti, Hrafnkels Saga (D. II.)14;
kveisa er komin í hönd þér, Pr. 470;
kveisu-nagli, the core of a boil, Hrafnkels Saga (D. II.) 14, 15, Njála (D. II.) 244;
kveisu-sullr, a boil, Biskupa Sögur (D. III.) ii. 168:
in modern usage, of shooting pains, iðra-k., colic: as also, flug-k., shooting pains. kveisu-flug, a shooting pain, Málshátta-kvæði kveisu-gras, n., botan. Gentiana.
BTW, I’ve noticed a strange similarity between kova and kowai:
こわい2【強い】 ﾛｰﾏ(kowai)
〔かたい〕 tough; hard; stiff; inelastic; inflexible; 〔頑なな〕 feisty; obstinate; stubborn; inflexible.
▲こわいひげ a ┌bristly [stiff] beard
･髪の毛がこわい have ┌coarse [stiff, bristly] hair
･情がこわい unemotional; cold; not easily moved emotionally; not sentimental
･こわい飯 hard(-boiled) rice.
▲このシャツはのりがききすぎてこわい. This shirt is starched too stiffly.
･このご飯は少しこわい. This rice is ┌rather hard [on the hard side]. | The rice hasn’t been boiled with quite enough water.
Like in Uralic, EGGPLANT is linked to DICK in Hokkien, so Sinitic cognate «kiô»（茄） for EGGPLANT was a euphemism for DICK. I’ve never heard EGGPLANT called «kiô» in a Taiwanese (or any) context. In Taiwan Hokkien it’s called «ângchhài»（紅菜）, literally REDDISH VEGGIE. «Kiô» doesn’t seem to be in the vocabulary — of younger people at least. I don’t think most people know about the euphemism either.
Not sure what EGGPLANT is called in idiomatic Vietnamese, but Sinitic cognate «cà»（茄） comes up in the dictionary, and TOMATO is called «cà chua», literally SOUR EGGPLANT … while words for TOMATO in Hokkien include «chhàukhī-á» (STINKY PERSIMMON) and «kammábít» (from Luzonese — most likely Tagalog — “kamatis”, but reinterpreted as literally TANGERINE HONEY)…
Not sure what EGGPLANT is called in idiomatic Vietnamese, but Sinitic cognate «cà»（茄） comes up in the dictionary
Well, Wikipedia tiếng Việt gives the names as “Cà tím hay cà dái dê” (which Google translate helpfully renders “Eggplant and tomato goat testicles”), for what that’s worth. The article is oddly focused on the history of Western names for the eggplant, which suggests it was translated, probably from English, by someone who didn’t bother to localize it.
This reminds me of the infamous translation of the Chinese name for beef with tomatoes as ‘barbarian eggplant cowpork’.
This reminds me of the infamous translation of the Chinese name for beef with tomatoes as ‘barbarian eggplant cowpork’.
I am now disappoint that the “barbarian” qualifies the eggplant and not the intended consumer.
Technically yes. But I’m sure the semantics overlap onto both. Tomatoes, after all, are a New World vegetable. By 1544 Italians were already thinking of them as a new type of eggplant; the analogy to apples came slightly later. Scientifically, tomatoes are Solanum lycopersicum, whereas eggplants are S. melongena (and potatoes, while I am at it, are S. tuberosum).
“Cowpork” is spot-on.
the plural of vânătă is vinete (both stressed on the first syllable).
I’m getting umlaut envy.
In Sindarin, umlaut is the normal method of forming the plural, historically from a Proto-Elvish plural ending -í, shortened in Quenya to -i (as in quendi ‘elves’) but lost entirely in Sindarin. However, unlike Germanic umlaut it affects every vowel in the word: thus adan ‘Man’, pl. edain; ithron ‘wizard’ pl. ithryn; onod pl. enyd ‘Ent’. There are different rules for final and non-final syllables (where monosyllables count as final, hence alph [alf] ‘swan’ pl. eilph).
These are partitive/distributive plurals: the endings -ath, -hoth form collective plurals. Thus for orch ‘an Orc’ the distributive plural is yrch, which Tolkien himself glosses ‘orcs, some orcs, des orques’, vs. orchoth ‘the Orcs’ as a whole.
I missed this thread. For good measure I’m going to supply the Mongolian for eggplant, which is ᠬᠠᠰᠢ / хаш khash. In Inner Mongolia, ᠲᠦᠪᠡᠳ ᠬᠠᠰᠢ / төвд хаш tövd khash, literally ‘Tibetan eggplant’, is the word used for tomato. I’m not sure why they attribute it to the Tibetans, but the naming does parallel Chinese 番茄 fānqié ‘foreign eggplant’ (which was given by Jim more than a decade ago).
(A couple of Mongolian-Inner Mongolian vegetable name differences can be found at my site here.)
Excellent, the more words the better!
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-called-an-aubergine/answer/Raveen-21?ch=15&oid=319803408&share=f6c4e6bd&srid=Q43H&target_type=answer
Barbarous indeed.
Wortatlas der arabischen Dialekte 10. Pflanzen has an Auberginen map and some interesting notes. (I suppose 50¢ a page for an ebook isn’t insane by academic standards. More worth it if you have access to an institution with it.)
YM’s “devil’s egg” is apparently sometimes considered euphemistic bēḏ̣ il-ǧānn “Eier (Testikel) der Dämonen”.
Like what George Gibbard notes for Sudan, an Egyptian dialect has ṭamāṭim sōda “schwarze Tomaten”.
For the more usual color-association direction — a similar idea to the Chinese “foreign eggplant” — this and the following Tomaten headword note Lane‘s “black, white, or red bádingáns.”
This thread has indirectly illuminated a mystery for me: the Kusaal for “tomatoes” is kamantɔɔsi, which must surely be derived from the English word somehow; however, while the intrusive n is common in words taken from English, presumably because English vowels after nasal consonants sound nasalised to Kusaasi, the initial k is mysterious.
Or was: I hadn’t thought of the aubergine/tomato thing. Kusaal kɔma “aubergines.” Tomatoes are obviously an exotic kind of garden egg.
In Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish we call eggplant as “Bacana resh”. Literally it means “black bacan” . For pronounce “c” in kurdish is mostly like english letter of j. How to pronounce kurdish word “bacan”? Try “bajan” or “Ba” as but without t and “can” just as john! , ba-john. An İnteresting another word is for tomatoes. In Kurmanji Kurdish tomatoes is “bacana sor” Literally meaning “red bacan”.
Among the people, pepper is jokingly called green bacan. Or in kurmanji kurdisjih “bacana kesk” 🙂
Possible Dravidian sources were discussed by Piotr Gąsiorowski and fisheyed above; the OED concurs in its 2001 etymology for melongena, which had a short and obscure life as an English word. They trace it through post-classical Latin, medieval Greek, Arabic, and Persian to “Sanskrit and Pali vātiṅgaṇa (in Sanskrit also vātigama; Prakrit vāiṃaṇa) < Dravidian (compare Malayalam vaṟutina, Tamil vaṟutuṇai).” AHD (2011) at aubergine also agrees that the Sanskrit and Pali words are “ultimately of non-Indo-European origin; akin to Tamil vaḻutalai, vaḻutuṇai.”
< Reconstructed Proto-Dravidian *waẓVtV.
(Duplicating earlier comment by Piotr Gąsiorowski.)
Good to have it brought up again, because I’d forgotten, and it’s a wonderful etymology.
One more: Eggplant in Surinam Dutch is boulanger. The linked webpage proposes a tentative connection with French boule but also refers to an obsolete synonym béranger, which itself is compared to Spanish berenjena. (Perhaps it might be from Portuguese beringela with r/l swapped?) In any case the /u/ seems hard to account for. There is always the possibility of a folk etymology or a process of modifications to make it more similar to a better-known word (what’s the linguistic term for that?).
Murray Emeneau, in a review of Mayrhofer’s Kurzgefasstes etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindischen, fascicles 13–14. Language 36(4): 539–544 (1960), p. 542:
The reconstruction given by Krishnamurti (pp. 12 and 531) is *waẓ-V-t, not as given in WAry, which I quoted above.
Cross-reference: discussion of African names for Solanum aethiopicum, known in English as Ethopian eggplant, garden egg, or various other names.
OED at garden egg (revised 2017):
David Eddyshaw’s comment (September 9, 2023) indicates that “garden egg” may refer to S. aethiopicum as well as melongena.
“Garden egg” can also mean Solanum macrocarpon, another species grown in Africa.
https://www.clovegarden.com/ingred/ns_gardepz.html
https://medcraveonline.com/JAPLR/mini-review-on-two-species-of-garden-egg-s-aethiopicum-l-and-s-macrocarpon-l-found-in-nigeria.html
ETA: I don’t know whether either “garden egg” or “African eggplant” can refer to any species other than these three.
According to Niggli’s dictionary, Mooré nasaar-kʋmbre “European Solanum aethiopicum” means Parkinsonia aculeata, “Jerusalem thorn”; the WP picture does show fruits that look a bit similar:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cf/Parkinsonia_aculeata_4.jpg/3840px-Parkinsonia_aculeata_4.jpg
“Tomato” in Mooré is tomaato, which is construed as plural, with the excellent singular back-formation tomadgo (cf kʋdgo “old”, plural kʋto.) Mooré really likes interpreting loanwords as plurals, and resingularising them.
Parkinsonia aculeata is a palo verde. I did not see that coming.
Wikipedia says it’s native from Argentina to Mexico, barely reaching the U.S., so etymologically it is to Europe as turkeys are to Turkey. .WP further says it’s an invasive weed in some other parts of the tropics including parts of Africa. It tops the list of Weeds of National Significance in Australia.
so etymologically it is to Europe as turkeys are to Turkey
Well, Nasaara is not really “European”: it’s basically “white person”, which in traditional West African terms includes not only tradpale Europeans but the great majority of Americans (probably including most “Black” Americans, and definitely all “Hispanics.”)
(I’ve previously mentioned my Sri Lankan colleague in Ghana, who objected to being called a Nasaara, on the grounds that he wasn’t “white.” He certainly was a Nasaara as far as the locals were concerned, though. He learnt to deal with it …)
WP quotes out of some book the non sequitur “The name ‘Jerusalem thorn’ stems from a mistranslation of the Spanish/Portuguese word girasol (‘turning toward the sun’).” Parkinsonia aculeata does not turn toward the sun, looks nothing like a sunflower, and Spanish names for it include espina de Jerusalén and likewise azote de Cristo.
“The name ‘Jerusalem thorn’ stems from a mistranslation of the Spanish/Portuguese word girasol (‘turning toward the sun’).”
It sounds like someone confused Jerusalem thorn with Jerusalem artichoke.
According to Niggli’s dictionary, Mooré nasaar-kʋmbre “European Solanum aethiopicum” means Parkinsonia aculeata, “Jerusalem thorn”; the WP picture does show fruits that look a bit similar:
That entry in Niggli really looks confused too. (The Wikimedia image that was linked to shows the flower buds, not the fruits, which at maturity are dry pods.) Here is more of the entry in Niggli from the Webonary:
Compare in the same dictionary:
(‘European Paradise-Tree’?) Perhaps these entries were adjacent in some version and they got mixed up through electronic text entry or conversion or lemmatization errors? The fabaceous Parkinsonia aculeata is nothing like any plant of the genus Solanum to which the name eggplant is applied. P. aculeata is a small tree, its masses of showy yellow flowers (edible!) are nothing like the the flowering of any Solanum, its fruits are leathery or woody pods (seeds edible!), not fleshy berries (in the technical sense). The only thing they have in common might be spininess ~ prickliness.
Compare the entries for zaka ‘compound, inner courtyard’ and zaka ‘tithe’ in the same dictionary, where the first is given a laconic etymology (arabe) that really looks as if it should go with the second (compare Arabic زكاة zakāh ‘almsgiving, alms, tax applied to fulfill Islamic alms obligations’). This was discussed on LH some time ago here.
It is odd that Niggli’s entry for nasaar-kʋmbre ‘kind of eggplant’ contains the epithet aculeata, since one four groups of cultivars of S. aethiopicum (that is, kʋmbre) is Aculeatum. I wonder if there was confusion of Parkinsonia aculeata and Solanum aethiopicum Gp Aculeatum at some point. If I recall correctly, Aculeatum is a minor group that contains only very bitter varieties originally grown as ornamental plants in Europe, for their showy scarlet fruits, but it is now also used as disease-resistant rootstock for tomatoes in commercial agriculture, so it might find some use in Burkina Faso.
Yes, I puzzled over Niggli’s “Arabic loan” comment on zàká “compound” for some time before finally seeing what had gone wrong.
It’s not a bad dictionary as these things go, but it’s quite hopeless on the sources of loanwords anyway. It’s also not to be trusted on species identifications.
I think a muddle is indeed likely with nasaar-kʋmbre; analogy from the other WOV languages would strongly suggest that it ought to mean Solanum melongena.
The SIL dictionaries are shockingly badly proofread. The Toende Kusaal one unblushingly tells us, for example, that na’ap “chief” is “imperfective aspect”; I think what’s gone wrong is that somebody did an ill-considered search-and-replace on the text and nobody ever checked the result. And the primarily-Francophone ones frequently have erroneous English renderings of the French glosses.
The Android app versions seem all to be built with the same painting-by-numbers toolkit, which introduces sundry novel formatting errors on top. Unfortunately, they are often the only thing there is other than the web versions: most don’t have downloadable PDF versions.
Still, one must be grateful that they exist at all.
A lot of the web versions seem to have been abandoned half-finished years ago. I get the impression that SIL is more and more being pressured to push through Bible translations and to cut back on basic linguistic work, including lexicography (they’ve never been much cop at grammar in the Oti-Volta area.)
I suspect this may be related to something Roger Blench was complaining about: the US fundamentalist financial backers have a kind of eschatological idea that it’s all about “translating the Word” into as many languages as fast as possible, and the historical emphasis of organisations like SIL on combining this with general literacy work is being undermined. Let’s have lots of Bibles! Who cares if nobody can read them? Who cares if they’re bad translations?
[There is, for example, now a translation of the whole Bible into Bimoba. But the online Bimoba dictionary is hardly worth the honourable name of “dictionary” at all, and the only grammatical sketch I’ve ever seen is an embarrassingly amateurish syntactic sketch of seven pages.]
Let’s have lots of Bibles! Who cares if nobody can read them?
I get the distinct impression the last thing Fundamentalists want to do is read a bible (even in English/even (especially not) a careful translation) — as opposed to sort of brandishing it as a badge of honour.
Then does SIL need do any more than translate ‘Holy Word of God’ for the cover? They can put gobbledygook inside, for all anybody’s going to look.
The pity of it is that SIL has done a lot more than that, in the past; and moreover, the organisation has learnt from its mistakes, and adopted an approach that was much more culturally sensitive than it was initially. Which is good in itself, obviously, but actually also made them much better at their original objective of communicating the gospel.
SIL’s Ghana polyp, GILLBT*, has done a lot of solid literacy work. (And the Kusaal Bible was actually their very first Bible translation – somewhat surprisingly. And the revised versions have been genuine improvements, incorporating a truly sensitive understanding of the language.)
I think the trouble is that SIL is being crowded out financially by organisations which not only lack the kind of linguistic sophistication that SIL has acquired over many decades, but are run by people who don’t even see the problem. US far-right types who think all expertise is a communist plot, and who have an essentially magical view of the Bible.
* Significantly, this stands for the Ghana Institute of Linguistics, Literacy and Bible Translation – in that order. I should own up to personal gratitude to them as an organisation too: they were very helpful to a strange ophthalmologist who turned up on their doorstep in Tamale wanting to know if they had anything that might help him learn Kusaal better; also helpful later on, in letting me cite freely from stuff they own the copyright to.
[I wish I’d stolen WAA Wilson’s notes on Dagbani grammar from them when I had the chance, though. Somebody really ought to put those online. Information wants to be free …]
I get the distinct impression the last thing Fundamentalists want to do is read a bible (even in English/even (especially not) a careful translation) — as opposed to sort of brandishing it as a badge of honour.
I think it varies a lot. There are probably some fundamentalists like what you’re describing.
FWIW: Maybe similarity between girasol and Jerusal- ?
That’s the usual explanation for “Jeruslaem artichoke”, which is a sunflower (Helianthus tuberosus), but as Y said, the Jerusalem thorn we’re talking about (Parkinsonia aculeata) is a legume that doesn’t turn to face the sun and has no resemblance to sunflowers.
(ETA: There’s another shrub called Jerusalem thorn, Paliurus spina-christi, but as the scientific name says, legend makes it the source of Jesus’ crown of thorns.)
Though this does leave the question of how Parkinsonia aculeata got connected to Jerusalem. The OED’s only citation is
and I haven’t been able to find out anything else. As far as I can tell, the species isn’t native to Jamaica. On that subject, I made a mistake above—its native range isn’t from Argentina to Mexico and border areas of the U.S., since it’s not found in central and southern Mexico or in Central America.
Mooré arzãn-tɩɩga itself (as opposed to the “European” sort) is apparently Moringa oleifera, itself an introduced species. Dunno why it gets to be a “paradise tree.” In Kusaal, arezana, despite its obvious Arabic source, is sometimes merely “sky”, but Moringa oleifera doesn’t seem to be particularly tall as local trees go.
Dagbani WP claims that the Dagbani name for this tree is jɛŋgbɛyɔɣirili “Hausa rafter”, and Kusaal WP, which has quite an elaborate article on it (though one obviously translated from English WP), calls it zaŋgbeduan “Hausa dawadawa tree.” The consensus is evidently that it’s foreign, anyway, even if not quite so foreign as to qualify as “European.” Just mildly exotic.
@DE: Thanks for the reminder about nasaar, which I’d forgotten.
The fascinating Moringa oleifera isn’t particularly blue either…
Kew Gardens Plants of the World Online (cited by Wikispecies) says it *is* native to Jamaica and other Caribbean countries; all parts of Mexico except Southwest (where it’s introduced); and four countries of Central America, missing only Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.
The common name “Jerusalem thorn” (in the West Indies) was associated with Parkinsonia by 1774. I’d think the most likely explanation is that it was named after the Old World one, Paliurus spina-christi, although that one seems to have been much more commonly called “Christ’s thorn”; the only earlier use that I could find of “Jerusalem thorn” for (probably) the Old World kind was a German traveller’s report that in London ca. 1710 he saw “ein Stuck von einem Dornstrauch; daben stund: Jerusalem thorn the like as our Savior was crowned with. Er hatte gewaltige grosse Spitzen odern Stacheln, kleinen Fingers lang under Feder-Kiels dick.”
That’s a good antedating. I notice that that 1774 book says the Jerusalem thorn was introduced to Jamaica from the mainland (Spanish Main). Maybe Kew Gardens is the most reliable of all these sources. Anyway, I insist that I was wrong to say “Argentina to Mexico”.
I suspect you’re right about the application of the name. Our previous discussion of botany led me to think of English names that have different meanings even between Ohio and New Mexico, e.g., “skunk cabbage”, the amazing heat-producing Symplocarpus foetidus in the East and Veratrum californicum (which has no smell that I can detect) here. At least they’re both monocots.
The concept of “Southwest Mexico” is difficult for me. As shown in Kew Gardens’ map, northern Mexico Southwest is north of a significant amount of Mexico Northeast, and eastern Mexico Southwest is farther east than any part of Mexico Northeast.
That’s an interesting point. Does anyone ever speak of western Chile or Italy, or southern Gambia or Nepal?
Southwest clearly makes sense in a Mexican context. I imagine that one first conceptualizes an eastern and a western shore and a northern and a southern and perhaps a central part of the country. From that you can derive a Mexican north-south-axis. Whether it follows the continental divide or the midway lines between the shores or whatever is of little consequence. Now you can divide further so that the parts west of the axis are western and those east of the axis are eastern. Or those along the respective coasts.
When I’ve seen or heard the phrase “ oeste de México” “México occidental” it’s been in reference to areas including Jalisco and Michoacán so the phrase “southwestern Mexico” makes me think of the coastal regions stretching from the state of Colima past Puerto Vallarta up to the state of Nayarit. Maybe it helps to think not of the map of Mexico as a whole but in relation between Mexico City and places west(ish) and southwest(ish) of it.
@Pancho: Kew Gardens’ “Mexico Southwest” is the coastal states from Nayarit to Oaxaca, I believe.
@Trond: You’re thinking of imagining Mexico straightened out so Chiapas is south of Oaxaca and the southernmost point is in either Chiapas or Quintana Roo? Kew Gardens seems to have used a method like that, but running the fuzzy notional center line into the Pacific around the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
Of course, you could also imagine straightening Mexico out so the U.S. border is on the west. But that would be silly.
Jerry, allowing for the fact that the actual boundaries used ave more to do with some combination of ecoregions and state borders rather than fidelity to compass points, I don’t have a problem seeing the Kew “SW Mexico” as the western part of southern Mexico”. Or you could call it the southern part of the west coast. I suppose if you count all the Pacific coast as “west coast” as Trond seems to suggest, that’s equivalent to straightening Mexico out, but I don’t think you need to think that way to reach the same result.
On the other hand, I mentally can’t accept the idea of “north east Victoria” unless I actually look at a map, so either my judgment or the whole idea of using the compass this way has issues somewhere.
I was moaning some years ago here about what a peculiar term “West Africa” is (referring, as it does, exclusively to the southern half of the bit that sticks out at the top left), but as I recall, nobody else felt the same way.
*I* agree; that is, “West Africa” is non-compositional (you can’t deduce its meaning from combining “west” and “Africa”) and therefore needs to be defined in dictionaries: e.g. AHD, geographically:
or MW, politically:
(that list is the definition of the UN Statistics Division, with some variation on small island countries).
@Jonathan: For me, “the western part” has to have a more or less north-southish boundary, so I’d like “the southern part of the west coast” better. But I’d really prefer “central Pacific”.
And I think there may indeed be something wrong with using compass directions this way.
@ktschwarz: I don’t know how non-compositional that is, beyond the fact that “exactly how far west counts as ‘western'” is perhaps never fully determined by abstract first principles. The only arguably idiomatic point is that “Africa” = “sub-Saharan Africa.” But that’s a ubiquitous issue. Immigrants from what is in a boringly literal sense sufficiently northwestern Africa don’t count as “African-American” in a US context any more that those from sufficiently northeastern Africa do.
But even apart from that, and contra Jerry Friedman, there must be other instances where “West[ern] X” contrasts with, and does not overlap with, “North[ern] X” including the more westerly portions of “North[ern] X.”
Note that the UN/Merriam-Webster definition of “West Africa” pretty closely tracks the old imperialist definition of “Afrique-Occidentale francaise” as contrasted with “Afrique-Equatoriale francaise,” once you add in bits that weren’t French-ruled. I don’t know how much that delineation (which originally did not account for then-German Kamerun) was the result of exhaustive and scholarly consultation and discussion versus being an ad hoc line on the map drawn by a single bureaucrat in Paris on a random tuesday afternoon after no more than a minute’s thought.
Some dialects and idiolects seem to want strongly to be able to classify locations (generally physical, but sometimes metaphorical) as belonging exclusively to one of two or four sides, often plus a center. For climatological, historical, and cultural reasons, it’s east to distinguish North Africa from everywhere else. However, the boundaries of East, West, Southern,* and Central Africa are less clear. I would say that Mozambique is located in both East Africa and Southern Africa, but plenty of sources on the Web seem to insist on placing it in either one or the other.
* Use of “South” is, of course, blocked by the Cape Union.
@ Brett: I think a paradigmatic four-chunks-plus-a-center division is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Oz. Or consider the less mathematically clean way (however pragmatic and historically sensible) in which the state of Texas is divided into its Northern, Eastern, Western, and Southern subparts for federal court purposes: https://www.texasalmanac.com/articles/federal-courts-in-texas
“Africa” = “sub-Saharan Africa” is indeed the problem, for me. The previous discussion was here in 2020 (DE: “a bit weird … because the term excludes all the equally Western bits of Africa north of the Sahara”; languagehat: “Language is not logical”).
The OED’s definition of West African (created in 2024, which was long overdue) does include Cameroon: “the western parts of sub-Saharan Africa, especially those north of the Gulf of Guinea … esp. the region including Cameroon, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone.”
But even apart from that, and contra Jerry Friedman, there must be other instances where “West[ern] X” contrasts with, and does not overlap with, “North[ern] X” including the more westerly portions of “North[ern] X.”
I didn’t say anything about other instances. If there are any, I might have problems with them too.
Yorkshire famously has only North, West and East Ridings (a fourth Riding would of course be etymologically objectionable, and Yorkshire people take a dim view of playing fast and loose with etymology. Appen.)
It seems “West Asia” and “Southwest Asia” mean the same thing, while “Northwest Asia” is a tendentious label for what is usually called European Russia (possibly excluding Kaliningrad?).
@David E.: I have read that the Jacobins who had seized control of England in the early 1970’s purported to disregard the traditional tripartite arrangement of Ridings and create a new ASSR called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Yorkshire. I assume all right-thinking Yorkshiremen and -women deny ontological reality to this aggressive innovation.
Of course.
@J.W. Brewer: Yes, I should have thought of The Land of Oz, with its color-coordinated regions. I remember my younger brother explaining the regions of Oz to my parents.
I think I already mentioned somewhere on Languagehat that East Frisia is hundreds of kilometers to the West of North Frisia (but at least it’s to the East of West Frisia).
I assume all right-thinking Yorkshiremen and -women deny ontological reality to this aggressive innovation.
The real offence against Yorkshire folk was ‘Humberside’. As if building a bridge carrying a motorway [**] would somehow unite counties. Friends born and bred in Hull flatly refused to use the word. They were resolutely East Riding.
[**] To be fair, there was also a bike route, giving access to some splendid cycle touring in Lincolnshire.
There’s a bit of Virginia that’s west of all of West Virginia.
AntC, your description of Humberside is too charitable, as at the moment of the county’s creation there WAS YET NO BRIDGE linking the two sides of the estuary.
What exactly is the objection to technically inaccurate geographical terms, such as “West Africa” being used for something more specific than simply the western-most 50% of the continent of Africa? It seems to me there are three possibilities.
The first is pure pedantry. Presumably the people whose objection falls in this category refer to redheads as “orange heads,” and pinecones as “pine ovals.”
The first serious possibility is that it might be disrespectful to the people described. But this is easily determined by simply asking. Presumably, in a case like this anyone not from Ghana, Nigeria, etc., would have nothing to say on the topic.
The last possibility is that we have convinced ourselves that it’s confusing, that novice students of geography will go looking for West Africa in Morocco. But this simply isn’t how words work. When we talk about “South Asia,” we all know it’s a replacement term for “what old people mean when they say India, i.e. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and possibly Bhutan or Maldives.” People treat proper noun phrases as lexical units, usually barely considering the literal meaning unless they learned the phrase entirely out of context.
michael farris says
January 17, 2006
For Spanish, my dictionary also has berenjenal as an alternate (masc. while berenjena is feminine) and I would assume there are some regional names floating about.
The Spanish suffixes -ar and -al are used to form masculine count nouns meaning ‘field, orchard, patch, etc. where this or that fruit, vegetable, or other plant grows or is grown’, as in manzanal ~ manzanar ‘apple orchard’ and cañaveral 1. ‘field of reeds’. 2. ‘field of sugarcane’ (the meaning of the second element of the English place name Cape Canaveral is now clear to anyone who was wondering). Either you have misread your dictionary or it has a misprint. A berenjenal or berenjenar is a ‘field, etc. of eggplants’.
One percent of Irish nationalist objection to Northern Ireland is the inaccurate name, since the jurisdiction excludes the island’s northernmost county. Historically, nationalists have denied its legitimacy by refusing to use the official name “Northern Ireland”, resorting to a range of circumlocutions; while “the Six Counties” has been the most common of these, forms like “the North East” convey the extra jibe that the name is not merely illegitimate but inaccurate.
———
When the Berlin Wall fell, Eastern Europe was quick to rebrand itself Central Europe.
gido says
September 21, 2025 at 10:09 am
[…] a process of modifications to make it more similar to a better-known word (what’s the linguistic term for that?).
The process has two names: the blending of paronyms and paronymic attraction.
See:
Nyrop, Kr. 1918. Histoire étymologique de deux mots français (haricot, parvis). Copenhagen. Det Kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab.
See especially pages 14 and 15.
The first is pure pedantry.
That’s basically it, I think. But there’s no harm in pedantry taken in moderation and used according to the guidelines provided by your local epistemologist…
@mollymooly: the pedantic objection to “Northern Ireland” could easily have been addressed by retroceding Co. Donegal to British rule. Did any of these nationalists favor that solution to the problem?
I wholly accept MK’s point that terms like “West Africa” are set expressions, like “blackbird”, so that objections that they don’t simply reflect the meaning of their components in isolation are just a kind of etymological fallacy.
However, I think I can concoct an ideological objection to “West Africa”: the term takes it for granted that northwest Africa is quite unconnected with “West Africa” (and is, of course, also dependent on the mindset that baulks at the assertion that Egypt is in Africa.)
In fact, the historical links across the Sahara were of enormous cultural and economic significance, a state of affairs which persisted until the European incursions on the West African coast and the consequent reorientation of the economy towards the large-scale export of slaves to the Americas, and then to other forms of resource extraction by European states, with their focus of power in West Africa remaining predominantly southern/coastal.
So the name “West Africa” carries colonialist baggage (in the sense that it reveals a very particular and historically invalid European view of the region.) It’s true enough that nobody in West Africa actually cares now, though (cf “ECOWAS.”)
The Sahara was a pretty substantial barrier though. A state like the Mali Empire could become extremely wealthy by controlling trade routes used by gold and salt caravans, and that was only possible because the desert put such stringent limits on the trade.
The first is pure pedantry. Presumably the people whose objection falls in this category refer to redheads as “orange heads,” and pinecones as “pine ovals.”
You can object to a term but still use it. I object to “American Robin”, but I haven’t quite started my campaign to replace it with “Northern Rufous-bellied Ouzel”.
I should think it’s not so much whether people in conventional-scope “West Africa” object but whether the Moroccans and Algerians (and perhaps the advocates of independence for the former Spanish Sahara?) object to being excluded from “West Africa.” It’s not my impression that they do, but maybe there’s something I’m unaware of. But how does one conventionally talk about subregions of Africa in Maghrebi Arabic? They could in principle have a set of regional labels with boundaries that don’t match up with those of the labels used in English or French.
David: Yes, the historical connotations could be a fourth objection, if we can isolate them in some way from the other types of objection.
Interesting side note: in this case, I always associated including the Maghreb in “Africa” as a more suspicious red flag. Much like the people who used to call Istanbul “the Orient,” calling Tangiers “Africa” feels very Euro-centric, as in Africa is whatever you see when you look south from Europe. If someone said they’re going to Africa, and it’s Tunisia, they sound like they should be wearing a pith helmet and an ascot. When I was a child in school, insisting on sub-Saharan Africa as the default referent for the word “Africa” was treated as an attempt to sweep away European ideas in favor of the realities of local culture and history, quite the opposite of what you describe. I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just think it’s very likely that intent and context will matter more than the term itself when trying to apply our anti-colonialism objection.
@MK
Are you sure the pith helmet and Ascot-tie were worn together? Maybe at an expat fancy dress party?
If someone said they’re going to Africa, and it’s Tunisia, they sound like they should be wearing a pith helmet and an ascot
Feeling that calling Tunisia “Africa” is excessively excoticizing it has a certain irony to it, as this is the area “Africa” originally referred to…
@MK:
The
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Union
is well known for the pith helmets and ascots.
The costume is also mandatory for officials of the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation_of_African_Football
Kwame Nkrumah was often to be seen in his trademark pith helmet, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-African_Peoples'_Conference
I will never understand the enjoyment some people get from pretending to not understand what another person is saying.
@de
I was looking for an image, but Google AI told me ‘The phrase “African Union member in a pith helmet” likely contains a historical or visual contradiction. Pith helmets symbolize European colonialism, while the African Union (AU) represents post-colonial African independence, unity, and self-determination’
I am not saying there was no dress uniform featuring both pith helmet and tie, but the typical soldier I find in image search has a button up jacket to the chin or fatigues with open neck. But I bow to your superior experience.
I think everybody enjoyed your elegant shorthand. Light-hearted sidetracks run from lifted minds..
I will never understand the enjoyment some people get from pretending to not understand what another person is saying.
As Trond says, it’s just light-hearted riffing, which is standard conversational practice in these parts. I’m sure nobody intended to diss your thoughts!
I should probably apologise. This is not something I do frequently, except when I am being passive-aggressive.
PP: I should probably apologise. This is not something I do frequently, except when I am being passive-aggressive.
I’ve probably told before that my son has been volunteering in conversation training in Norwegian for exchange students. One of the things he claims to be telling them is “Be very careful with takk and unnskyld. Those are often passive-aggressive, and that’s rude.”
In Kusaal, it’s normal to say m pʋ’ʋsya in much the same contexts as you’d say “thank you” in English, but to say m bɛlimnɛ “please” to someone not greatly your social superior would probably be interpreted as taking the piss. (Literally, it’s “I’m begging”, presumably calqued on Pidgin a bɛg, but it still comes across as pretty servile in Kusaal. The idiomatic equivalent of “please” is – nothing.)