I liked Talia Felix’s Etymonline post about A.1. Sauce so much I thought I’d share it; it’s a nice bit of philological/historical investigation:
In personal curiosity I was looking at a webpage about the history of H.P. Sauce. The page also included a history of A.1. Sauce, which some people evidently think tastes similar. It claimed that this latter sauce was invented by the chef of King George IV and that the king himself gave it the name of “A-1.” While I felt an initial burst of excitement – I’m a big fan of George IV or “Prinny” as he was long known – I also had some skepticism. Prinny died in 1830, several years before our first attestation of A-1 as slang (1837, in Charles Dickens). And I’ve read Aspinall’s collection of Prinny’s letters – A-1 doesn’t sound like the way Prinny talked, even when he was being informal (drunk). Likely he’d have favored a French word or something out of Grose: elderly monarchs aren’t known for being on top of slang trends.
I started looking on Newspapers.com for some indication that A.1. Sauce was really that old. Almost immediately I turned up an advertisement from 1881 where the company’s own product description said it was invented in 1862 for the International Exhibition, and that the Chief Royal Commissioner was the person who called it A.1.
So where did all this stuff about George IV and the sauce being from the 1830s come from? Well the rest of my day got spent trying to untangle that. Short version is: none of that Prinny stuff is correct; but because Wikipedia got hold of it, it’s hopelessly all over the place now, and all your AI answers will say it’s true. It looks to have resulted from perhaps legitimate confusion (or perhaps deliberate exaggeration) of certain facts.
Click through for the details, which can have their own interest; I particularly like this parenthetical:
(Note that most sources say the International Exhibition was in South Kensington; but one of the entrances was at Hyde Park Corner and another required crossing Hyde Park. Maps of the exhibition show the “refreshment rooms” were near the entrances by the park.)
Always check maps!
Forgot to mention this bit:
Zisnosakouska?!
Zisnosakouska
Image here. It is described as “the Royal Army and Navy Relish, a Russian Condiment (compote de chôses divers).” The blogger who posted it is mystified as well: “I haven’t found ‘Zisnosakouska’ anywhere outside Brand’s ads. A ‘закуска’ is a Russian pre-meal snack / hors d’oeuvre, but the Brand’s condiment sounds rather more like the Romanian ‘zacuscă’, a savoury mixed-vegetable spread.”
“Zis zakouska?”
“Zis no zakouska!”
“You put sheet on bed, I keel you!”
anchovy sauce
Patum Peperium? (aka Gentleman’s Relish, dates to 1828, so ‘Prinny’ might have encountered it.)
zakuska in Russian is also something one eats withn vodka (I guess, pairing is a suitable English word) . zisno doesn’t sound like a Russian word at all. If we have to fit it into Russian, maybe it’s a corruption of известная (well known). Similar Ukrainian word is звісна [zvisna] which also means “usual”. I’ve used fem. forms because zakuska if fem. Maybe Polish has something similar or even more phonetically close.
Saying that HP sauce tastes anything like A1 is a sign of civilization’s demise.
If one questions the quality of the ad’s transcription of Russian, it also has “Kromoskeys à la Muscovite”, which is competent. Dunno if French cromesquis was available at the time.
Ah, Wikipedia peddling bullshit: Old school! We tend to forget this in these latter days when so many things have gotten so much worse, but Wikipedia is not and never has been actually good. I refuse to fall into the fallacy of thinking it is pretty good, except in the areas of my expertise. The baseball history pages are hopeless. And no, I am not going to make it my life’s work to fix them and keep them fixed despite the best efforts of a horde of “editors.” An acquaintance of mine tried to do that and got shouted out.
The rule for Wikipedia still stands: It is a good enough source of good enough information, when “good enough” is all you need, but even this is with the exception of any topic that is controversial. Also, non-experts can’t know what is and is not controversial. Good luck!
@do
The veggie spread seems to be a Rumanian zacusca eaten e.g., in Poland under that name. For the first part all I could come up with is Polish jesienna (“autumn”).
It was not until well into the Showa Era (during the MacArthur regency interlude) that the 19th-century UK style of “brown sauce” achieved its apotheosis at the other end of Eurasia as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonkatsu_sauce.
Etymonline is hardly in a position to throw stones at Wikipedia: it too has plenty of material that’s just copied out of obsolete sources, such as mythical etymologies for raccoon, persimmon (ultimately from the same 1907 source as the “raccoon=scratches with hands” myth), and hackmatack that professional dictionaries dropped decades ago. It doesn’t even have “citation needed” or “incomplete etymology” tags as Wikipedia and Wiktionary do.
There’s a certain phonetic similarity to shakshouka. I have no idea if there’s a connection:
WikiP claims an etymology:
Of course, WikiP also says:
OK, what’s the first from?
[Chaouia is a Berber language]
Finally, the Turkish one:
Meanwhile, Wikt claims that shakshouka and chakhchoukha are spelling variants of the same dish.
At this point, my understanding is bubbled and mixed up, and also torn into small pieces.
ktschwarz, thank you for calling out those entries. Talia has begun to comb the sources on “raccoon” and made some changes in the text. (My books all are in moving boxes currently.) Neither of us has experience in those languages, and we don’t use online sources, but we lack a modern dictionary of Algonquian languages, one that would be considered authoritative here. Perhaps you can suggest one.
There are many Algonquian languages, some with good dictionaries, some without. Unfortunately many of the English loanwords are from Virginia Algonquian, which is poorly documented, and verification often requires interpolation from other, better-documented languages or from other words, and that takes some understanding of the grammar and of the historical linguistics.
In general, I would not use any source which says, “said to be from…”, or which says “from Algonquian” (a language family, not a language), or worse, “from Algonquin” (a specific language spoken in Québec, which gave its name to the language family).
Online sources are often right, but without references you can independently check, they are not useful. Here at the Hattery standards are usually high in that regard (e.g., if I may, my comment on gopher).
I should add, not just Virginia, but all of the southern Eastern Algonguian languages, like Carolina Algonquian, Nanticoke, Powhatan, etc., are poorly documented.
Beyond “southern Eastern Algonquin” things often get worse rather than better. Look at the extraordinary amount of blank space in what’s now the eastern U.S. on this map showing the historical territory of various language families.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Americas#/media/File:Langs_N.Amer.svg
Now, much of the continent was at various points quite lightly inhabited, but these mapmakers did not view that as an obstacle to “filling in the blanks” farther west. But in the east they were more cognizant of what they just didn’t know. Presumably there are rival maps that fill in a bunch of those blanks, and it would be an interesting exercise to work through the differences and learn why more cautious mapmakers did not find proposed solutions to fill in the eastern blanks sufficiently non-speculative to follow.
Two explanations suggest themselves:
The wholesale destruction of indigenous people and cultures began a good bit earlier in the East. By the time linguists had got round to documenting the remnants, there was nothing much left to document in the areas where it started.
I notice that the big blank area in the US coincides to some extent with the heartland of US chattel slavery. I suspect slavers have less than average interest in the languages and cultures of people unlike themselves, and a greater than average propensity towards exterminating them.
Slavery did not cease to be a thing in the more northerly parts of the U.S. East Coast until long after the indigenes had been dispossessed and their languages either documented or not. And I’m dubious that the various indigenes of North America found the non-slaveholding sort of white people to be consistently less aggressive invaders/dispossessors than the slaveholding sort.
Now, the map does have a blank for the known territory of e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cusabo_language, perhaps because of a dispute about classification, and maybe that could have been handled differently – put it on the map and mark it as an isolate by default even if you’re not sure?
By contrast, there were situations like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittlesey_culture (in present-day Ohio) where the group itself essentially disappeared before any significant contact with either Anglophones or Francophones that could have generated evidence for future linguists, in part because the indirect effects of contact (military, political, and/or epidemiological) often extended much further inland than the actual physical advance of the incomers. It seems more likely than not that the Whittlesey people either spoke something Algonquian or something Iroquoian (or even conceivably something Siouan-Catawban?) rather than a mysterious isolate or some more far-fetched possibility, but there’s maybe no particular grounds to think one of those plausible options more likely than the other(s).
Beyond “southern Eastern Algonqui[a]n” things often get worse rather than better.
Indeed, but just focusing on languages which were the source of English loanwords, I think most or all are known languages, even if sparsely documented. Are there any English words which come from a presumed but unknown Native American source?
I notice that the big blank area in the US coincides to some extent with the heartland of US chattel slavery. I suspect slavers have less than average interest in the languages and cultures of people unlike themselves, and a greater than average propensity towards exterminating them.
Not exactly. They had great propensity toward enslaving them. From the little I have read (and I don’t like reading this kind of thing), early colonial Carolina was a hotbed of kidnapping Indians for slavery, often by the agency of other tribes. I imagine that the very multiplicity of polities and ethnicities made it easier to pit one against another. Naturally, the slavers eventually became enslaved or dispersed or killed as well.
It’s also notable that the distribution of peoples in the Southeast known only by a name, from Florida on up, fairly matches the path of Hernando De Soto’s expedition in the 1500s. I wonder if early depopulation through disease introduced specifically in that voyage has something to do with it. Of course there were other devastating introduced epidemics afterwards, and possibly before.
Douglas Harper: I’m glad to hear you’re willing to re-check those entries. The first sources you should have looked at are the Random House Dictionary (1987 or later) and the American Heritage Dictionary (1992 or later), because — as I’ve gathered from expert etymologists commenting here — those had their North American etymologies vetted by Ives Goddard. When Goddard deleted an old etymology, that means he (one of the most respected Algonquianists ever) thought it was wrong, and no, there’s nothing to replace it with, no matter how much you *want* there to be an answer. (OED3, also with Goddard as consultant, comes out and says “of unknown origin”.)
Even by the 1990s, recent dictionaries were saying boringly just “Of Virginia Algonquian origin”, while the cool and romantic “he scratches with the hands” (sounds like what you’d expect from an Indian word!) was dropped by everybody except the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, which is an assemblage of old sources of varying reliability (just like Wikipedia). Now why do you think that is? Is it because Barnhart was smarter and knew something everybody else didn’t? If you say “posh” is origin unknown and my uncle on Facebook says it’s “Port Out Starboard Home”, is it because he’s smarter and knows something you don’t?
“Neither of us has experience in those languages”? Honesty is the best policy. Why not add a warning on those entries, e.g. “We have no expertise to evaluate this claim”? That would be a courtesy to your readers.
“without references you can independently check, they are not useful.” Of course exactly the same applies to paper. Paper does not magically create reliability: it didn’t for Barnhart!
Douglas, chimpanzee is another one where it was a mistake to trust Barnhart: he seems to have been confused by a formatting problem in his source. There, too, you could have compared it with AHD.
Mii Dash Geget has a collection of sources on Algonquian languages and historical linguistics (unless those sources all somehow became wrong by being scanned and put online).
ktschwarz, and others, thank you for useful information. Your surmise likely is correct, that etymonline got the objectionable etymology from Barnhart. And thanks for the tip on chimpanzee.