Kim Severson writes in the NY Times (archived) about an appetizing new book:
Used judiciously, the snappy tidbits of food etymology in “Romaine Wasn’t Built in a Day,” a new book by the medieval scholar Judith Tschann, could make you a hit at dinner parties.
Say someone shows up in a seersucker suit. You could inform her that the British took the word seersucker from the Hindi sirsakar, which itself came from a Persian word meaning milk and sugar. The smooth stripes are the milk, the bumpy ones the sugar.
Over the Caesar salad, you could casually mention that the English word romaine comes from the medieval French laitue romaine, or Roman lettuce, which possibly arrived in France along with the popes who moved to Avignon from Rome to escape some nasty politics in the early 1300s.
But here’s a pro tip: When sharing food lore at a meal, it’s easy to cross the line. Do your friends dipping into a bowl of guacamole need to know that the word avocado started out as ahuacatl, a Nahuatl term that the Aztecs likely used as slang for testicles? Or that soufflé comes the French word for blown, which stems from the same root as the word flatulent?
“Language is just so amusing. It has playfulness built into it, and so does food,” said Dr. Tschann, who taught English and linguistics for many years at the University of Redlands, in California. The etymologies of food words, she said, are a path through the history of how we eat and cook.
Take the word recipe. It’s the imperative form of the Latin verb recipere, which means to receive or take. In Western medieval and early modern manuscripts, it was used to instruct people how to take medical prescriptions: “Recipe honey with codfish oil,” for example. (Rx is a medieval abbreviation of the word.)
Mushroom first appeared in English at the end of the 14th century, borrowed from the Anglo-French musherum and the Central French moisseron. […] Relish came from the Old French relaisser, to release, which came from the Latin relaxare, to relax. The idea is that relish releases flavor, she said.
And that Starbucks mocha you just ordered? Mocha is a toponym — a word derived from a place. In this case, Mukha, a port city in Yemen that handled coffee shipments in the 18th century. Other toponyms include vichyssoise, from Vichy, France; Tabasco peppers from the Mexican city; bialy from Bialystok, Poland; and lima beans from Lima, Peru (not Lima, Ohio).
Conversely, some geographic names started with food. Topeka may derive from a Dakota word meaning a place for digging potatoes. Chicago comes from the word for wild leek in Miami-Illinois, another Indigenous language. […]
Compounding is another way food language grows. Bibimbap comes from the Korean pibim (to mix) and pap (rice). The espressotini is a mix of espresso and vodka. The martini, by the way, was originally named for Martinez, a town in California where the drink was developed for Gold Rush miners. At some point, the Italian vermouth maker Martini & Rossi elbowed its way in and the “ez” fell away. […]
Ms. Tschann is careful to offer caveats when caveats are due. No one really knows if balls of fried cornmeal batter are called hush puppies because they were tossed to howling hounds to shut them up, or if pie came from cooks who observed magpies filling their nests with a collection of disparate objects.
Was the Reuben sandwich named for Reuben Kulakofsky, a Nebraska grocer in the 1920s and ’30s? Or was it based on the Reuben’s special, which Arthur Reuben created in 1914 at his New York City delicatessen?
Whatever the case, there are plenty of established facts to hang one’s dinner napkin on. Taco is a 20th-century word from Mexican Spanish that means plug or wad, a reference to part of an explosive used in silver mining. Ceviche is likely from Quechuan, the language of the Inca Empire, where people used the word siwichi to describe fresh or tender fish. […]
The evolution of the word cocktail is one of Dr. Tschann’s favorites in the book. It comes from the docking of a horse’s tail, which then stood up like a rooster’s and was referred to as a cock-tail. Thoroughbred racehorses did not have their tails docked, but if a horse had docking in its lineage, it was considered of mixed breed. By the 19th century, cocktails had come to mean mixed drinks.
She is also fond of junket, like the kind of trip a politician might take. It derives from the French jonquette, a sweet made with boiled milk, which has connections to the medieval Latin joncata, a type of soft cheese. In English, junket came to mean sweetened curds.
She can’t pinpoint exactly how cocktail made the leap to a beverage and junket made the leap from food, though. Language is always changing, and accounting for semantic evolution is not always possible.
As usual, there’s more at the link; I like the fact that she acknowledges it when we just don’t know something. (Thanks, Bonnie!)
*groan* Not this again! That sentence doesn’t quite say anything actually false, but it’s extremely misleading by leaving out the salient facts that (1) the primary meaning was always the fruit and (2) the only evidence for the secondary slang meaning is a single entry in Molina’s 1571 Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary; there’s no support in other texts or present-day Nahuatl, so maybe it was a regionalism.
Checking the actual book to see if the reviewer represented it fairly:
Well, Tschann does at least say “besides” the fruit, but “can mean” in the present tense is unsupported, and no, there has not been “considerable debate”.
I know, I shouldn’t let one error spoil the whole book, and for sure it’s a very big plus when a popular book takes some care with what is *not* known, especially when it’s emphatic enough that it’s part of the reviewer’s takeaway. I expect Tschann is reliable on foods relevant to her own specialty of medieval England, where she can consult primary sources.
@ktschwarz
Thank you for beating me to it! As we discussed at length in a not too recent conversation about aguacates and paltas and avocados over at Dave Wilton’s wordorigins.org, there are many problems with that supposed etymology. For me, the most obvious is the lack of evidence in Spanish sources. There is nothing in the corpus of the RAE to support the claims regarding avocado. If I recall correctly, you found evidence of a much later, documented origin for avocado.
Are there other examples of foreign /w/ transcribed as Spanish <v>?
At some point, the Italian vermouth maker Martini & Rossi elbowed its way in and the “ez” fell away.
Um, I’m not following. Presumably ‘Martini’ was some dude’s name [yes, says wp]. And they concocted some blend/a vermouth [Rossi did that, says wp]. In Italy, not California.
And somebody put the vermouth branded ‘Martini’ into a cocktail with gin (or possibly vodka) and bitters and stuff.
“this [‘Martinez’] theory isn’t unanimously accepted” it says at Tschann’s link. Too right! sounds like a just-so story to me. I want more evidence than a chatty piece in a foodie blog.
“America’s classic cocktail”? To me it’s always been an Italian classic cocktail — that’s where I’ve drunk it. They’ll be telling next that it wasn’t until America people thought of putting stuff in gin to hide the flavour. Note ‘London dry gin’ says wp.
‘Gin’ of course ultimately from Latin ‘juniperus’ — with a thoroughly European lineage.
And while we’re on “cocktail” …
Thoroughbred racehorses did not have their tails docked, but if a horse had docking in its lineage, it was considered of mixed breed.
A docked tail is a heritable trait? How would you know if a horse “had docking in its lineage”? Especially if there was an incentive to ‘forget’ that detail.
And anyhoo, the piece doesn’t explain how did “cocktail” come to mean a drink.
wp has an explanation after saying The origin of the word “cocktail” is disputed.. “evolved from the French coquetier, for an eggcup” sounds equally plausible (which is to say ‘not much’). A noggin or stirrup-cup before starting the hunt seems a much stronger link with horses.
Ceviche is likely from Quechuan, the language of the Inca Empire, where people used the word siwichi to describe fresh or tender fish.
Strewth! Another rubbish claim easily checked against wp. My ears pricked up at ‘Quechuan’ after recent debates. Inca = mountains. Fish = sea. Does not compute.
“The origin of ceviche is from the ancient Moche culture and Vicús culture, which today corresponds to the modern day countries of Peru and Ecuador. The technique of macerating raw fish and meat in vinegar, citrus, and spices (escabeche) was brought to the Americas from Spain and is linked to the Muslim heritage in Spanish cuisine. However, archeological records suggest that something resembling ceviche may have been indigenous to western South America as early as 2,000 years ago.” [wp]
Both those cultures are on the (Northern) coast of Peru/nearly in Ecuador. Not Quechua until only just before the Spanish conquest. But hold my Martini …
the word has the same etymology as the Spanish term escabeche, which derives from Mozarabic izkebêch, in turn descending from Andalusian Arabic assukkabáǧ, which also derives from Classical Arabic sakbāj (سكباج, meaning meat cooked in vinegar).[10][11] It is ultimately from the unattested Middle Persian *sikbāg, from sik (“vinegar”)[12] and *bāg (“soup”),
Tschann seems to be talking a load of ahuacatl.
siwichi might be a Quechua word — but GTranslate offers ‘slowly’ — not obvs to do with raw fish. ‘sushi’ is a sound-alike?
P.S. “archeological records ” for raw fish?
The Martinez cocktail is distinct from, and older than, the Martini (with one key distinction being the use of sweet vermouth in the former versus dry vermouth in the latter). Yet it’s hard not to believe that the latter developed from the former. The etymology of the former is certainly not undisputed, with “associated with Martinez, Calif.” being one conjecture but certainly not the only contender. How one got from “Martinez” to “Martini” is also unclear. The “Martini & Rossi” angle seems suggestive, and maybe the thing is overdetermined, but back in the first golden age (late 19th century) of cocktail creation, “Italian vermouth” generally meant sweet/red and “French vermouth” meant dry/clear(ish), and indeed M&R, as an Italian producer, did not per wikipedia even add a dry option to its portfolio of products until 1900. Per wikipedia one of the earliest extant published recipes (1907) for a “Dry Martini” specified “French vermouth” without giving a brand name.
The martini is very much an American-style cocktail as of the time of its origins, probably not known in Italy until the misguided U.S. experiment with prohibition caused a boom in U.S.-style cocktail bars in tourist-heavy places like Paris and Venice. (Also Havana, which did not require so long a sea voyage to visit.) To this day Italians and Spaniards will if left to their own devices drink vermouth by itself or mixed with soda — the idea of mixing a smaller portion of it with a significantly larger portion of whiskey or gin is not a concept of Mediterranean-basin origin. I’m not sure why AntC would not have drunk martinis in the U.K. – they mastered the knack of them some generations ago, at least in London. The bar at Duke’s Hotel in St. James’s Place is particularly legendary for its competence in this regard.
Separately, the DeGroff hypothesis re coquetier->cocktail does not fit the available evidence, since he attributes it to Antoine Peychaud, who didn’t really get involved in the cocktail business (in New Orleans) until maybe circa 1840. DeGroff may have developed his hypothesis before the word (in the explicit alcoholic-beverage sense) was antedated by lexicographic research to at least 1806 via the discovery of the newspaper article from upstate New York referenced in the same wiki piece. Debunking the DeGroff hypothesis does not, of course, itself prove any particular rival hypothesis.
Quechuan
Linguistic/copyediting nitpick: The book has “Quechua”, as does the page linked from the review (at Penn, which teaches classes in it). “Quechuan” does have some use as an adjective, e.g. in “Quechuan languages” as a *family*, but I don’t believe it’s correct as the name of *a* language. It isn’t New York Times house style; they have over a thousand uses of “Quechua” on their site to a couple-dozen “Quechuan”, some of which are adjectives. I’m sure this is just the reviewer’s mistake.
One San Francisco bar used to advertise itself as “Home of the blender martini”. They didn’t really mean it, I don’t think.
I wonder if siwichi is a Quechua borrowing of ceviche, not the other way around. Either way, the /w/-<v> correspondence needs to be justified.
I’m not sure why AntC would not have drunk martinis in the U.K. – … at least in London.
Have you been to U.K./London? Is there anything about its grey skies and dour climate would suggest drinking cocktails? In London I can recommend Fuller, Smith & Turner (Chiswick Ales) ‘London Pride’, or their ‘Old Mild’ — especially for drinking all evening in the Brewery Tap, Brentford.
No surprise Martini & Rossi are Italian.
I did bring back a bottle of Martini from my first trip to Italy. Never found an occasion to open it.
A docked tail is a heritable trait?
Telegony.
How would you know if a horse “had docking in its lineage”?
Stud-books.
Ceviche: This actually isn’t in the book, according to Google Books; the book mentions Quechua only as the source of jerky and quinoa, which are uncontroversial. The review ends with a direct quote from Tschann, which sounds like it came from an interview; maybe that’s where the reviewer got that detail?
Wiktionary notes that the origin of the Spanish word is disputed. The Arabic source quoted by AntC is the only one considered by the RAE dictionary (though with quizá ‘perhaps’, which Wikipedia omits), as well as AHD; Random House mentions Arabic and also (“possibly”) Spanish cebo ‘fodder, bait’. No other English dictionary gives a source beyond Spanish.
The Quechua origin is attributed (when it’s attributed at all) to Javier Pulgar Vidal, a 20th-century Peruvian historian and geographer — not a linguist or etymologist, and suspiciously, I don’t see anybody giving a direct reference to whatever he may have written! Here’s a blog in Spanish that checks some Quechua dictionaries and concludes there’s no such word.
Sloppy of the reviewer to quote an “established fact” that isn’t even in the book, especially as a contrast with “Ms. Tschann is careful to offer caveats when caveats are due.”
I hate to trash a book whose introduction contains such admirable paragraphs as:
And this book isn’t written for Hatters, it’s written for general readers who have never looked up an etymology in their lives. Those readers could do a lot worse; we’re not talking about Daniel Cassidy here.
Still, it’s clear from the book’s list of sources that Tschann didn’t go to primary sources, except within her own specialty; she’s just passing along tidbits from dictionaries and secondary sources like The Oxford Companion to Food, and doesn’t seem to have thought about the limitations of those sources. The acknowledgments thank editors, family and friends as usual, but say nothing about any vetting or fact-checking by subject-matter experts.
If you’re looking for a (popular, accessible) book about food that’s also by an actual linguist who checks primary sources, you want Dan Jurafsky’s The Language of Food.
cuchuflete: I think you may be slightly misremembering this thread. There is no question that Nahuatl ahuacatl (spelling hu representing /w/) is the source of Spanish aguacate, which is the source of English avocado. (Tschann skips over the Spanish step.) The only problems are with (1) suggesting that the Nahuatl “actually” meant testicle, which is like saying that huevos rancheros means “rancher’s testicles”; (2) whether the form avocado was ever used for the fruit in New World Spanish (the RAE dictionary has it with that meaning in the Philippines only); (3) whether that form was eggcornishly influenced by an obsolete form of the Spanish word for lawyer. Those last two are the ones that you were doubting, and couldn’t find supporting evidence for. The difference in sound systems between English and Spanish could be enough to explain the change from Spanish aguacate to English avocado, perhaps also with some influence on the ending of a lot of other Spanish words ending in -ado, with no need for the lawyer eggcorn.
Y: This is not an example of foreign /w/ transcribed as Spanish <v>, nor does the book say it is. The v spelling is in English, and French, and Phillipine Spanish; Portuguese has b. I wonder, did French and Phillipine Spanish actually get the v through English?
“Whatever the case, there are plenty of established facts to hang one’s dinner napkin on. Taco is a 20th-century word from Mexican Spanish that means plug or wad, a reference to part of an explosive used in silver mining.”
Spanish taco is of unclear origin. Possibly, it is more than one word, diachronically speaking, each with its own etymology.
@Y “Are there other examples of foreign /w/ transcribed as Spanish <v?”
at least vagón ‘car, carriage [of a train]’ (< French wagon ‘idem’), Valaquia ‘Wallachia’ (hence also valaco ‘Wallachian’), valdense ‘Waldensian’, vals ‘waltz’, vatio ‘watt’, volframio ‘wolfram’ (but also wolframio), and velintonia (but also wellingtonia).
I thought Chicago came from an Indian word meaning “big stink”. Did I get this wrong all these years?
In the first place, it’s always sikbaj, not sakbaj, in Arabic.
Though the name literally means “vinegar stew,” there is good reason to believe that it was always served cold so that the soured meat juices could gel — in other words, it was a sort of lamb aspic. (This is what I’ve found when cooking sikbaj recipes.) In “Il Liber de Ferculis di Giambonino da Cremona,” Anna Martellotti even proposes that “aspic” arose as one of the many fumbling attempts to spell Arabic words in medieval Latin medical texts — al-sikbaj, Andalusian pronunciation as-sikbij, >asicpicium etc. So sikbaj entered Europe through a learned route beside the vulgar escabeche (via Catalan; if direct to Castilian it would be escabej). At the very least, this is a vastly more probable etymology than the one deriving “aspic” from “asp.”
It seems plain to me that sikbaj (<Middle Persian sikbag) continues the pre-Islamic Persian taste for meat served in jelly (pa-awsart).
I thought Chicago came from an Indian word meaning “big stink”. Did I get this wrong all these years?
Sort of. Wiktionary says:
So strong odors are definitely relevant, but aren’t the actual etymological meaning.
@ktschwarz:
The undisputed authority on Arabic loanwords in Iberian Romance is Federico Corriente, and this is what he has to say on the matter:
Is there anything about its grey skies and dour climate would suggest drinking cocktails?
Yes, the grey skies and dour climate.
At least for an American a cocktail is traditionally something you drink indoors in a bar. We are not generally Aperol Spritz kind of people (well, Florida maybe). An Old Fashioned or a gin martini strike me as a perfect winter drinks. Beer is the drink for outdoors at a barbecue or on the beach. Growing up in New Hampshire I remember pitchers of gin and tonics were very popular in the summer, but that doesn’t quite reach the level of “cocktail”, that’s just a mixed drink.
The young lady who sang the “I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar” parts of the Human League’s worldwide smash hit “Don’t You Want Me” was born and raised in Sheffield (where the band was formed), where I daresay things may have been even greyer and dourer than down in London.
Sikbaj > cebiche strikes me as a couple of sound changes too far. But it is true that sikbaj was one of the meat recipe ideas that Spaniards adapted in vegetarian form for fast days. Buraniyyah >alboronia is another.
Perhaps, but I’ve never seen it outside of English.
Sheffield (where the band was formed), where I daresay things may have been even greyer and dourer than down in London.
Aww but Sheffield was great for bands back in the day. And still is, apparently
(Must admit I didn’t go there for their Martinis.)
Beer is the drink for outdoors at a barbecue
I guess you think beer should be served chilled (silly person): England is famous for warm beer. (I would link to the Boddington’s advert ‘nice and warm’, but that seems to be gone. Here’s ‘cream of Manchester’ instead. Since we’re kinda in Italy, they also had one with a gondola on the Manchester Ship Canal; and a ‘hefty lass’ throwing her boyfriend overboard because he brought a cocktail not Boddingtons.)
> (Rx is a medieval abbreviation of the word.)
>> Perhaps, but I’ve never seen it outside of English.
I’ve seen it in my Bulgarian ophthalmologist writing to an Austrian optometrist. In English. The Austrian optometrist wanted either German or English. It was a picture from his phone. That’s how ridiculous they can get.
How they can even recognize what alphabet they’re using is beyond me. It’s all squiggles to me.
EDIT: they defaulted to English, but no English I can easily read.
Alon Lischinsky: Thanks for the reference! AHD changed its etymology of ceviche from the Spanish to the Arabic source between the 2000 and 2011 editions — somebody there must have studied Corriente. The previously proposed origin from Spanish cebo is attributed by Spanish Wikipedia to a Peruvian journalist in 1952, who probably wouldn’t have been knowledgeable about Arabic loanwords.
Y: “I wonder if siwichi is a Quechua borrowing of ceviche, not the other way around. Either way, the /w/-<v> correspondence needs to be justified.”
FWIW, Quechua doesn’t have /v/ or /b/ or /β̞/ and does have /w/. There’s precedent for that correspondence in Spanish>Quechua borrowings: according to Omniglot, greetings in Cusco Quechua include wuynus diyas, wuynas tardis, and wuynas nuchis (the native allin p’unchay is also an option).
(Caveat: nobody has provided evidence yet that the alleged siwichi is actually used in Quechua, or if so, whether it is considered code-switching or a Quechua word.)
More examples from Wiktionary’s Category:Quechua terms derived from Spanish:
hawas < Spanish habas ‘fava bean’
karwa < Spanish cabra ‘goat’
kawallu < Spanish caballo ‘horse’
liwru < Spanish libro ‘book’
ripuwlika < Spanish república
siwara < Spanish cebada ‘barley’
siwulla < Spanish cebolla ‘onion’
uwa < Spanish uva ‘grape’
waka < Spanish vaca ‘cow’
wuru < Spanish burro (derivative: lata wuru ‘metal donkey’, i.e. bicycle)
I searched for siwichi in the Willay dictionary of Quechua (based on this compilation), and it lists the word in three southern varieties (or just orthographies, it’s not too clear), all with that form and meaning ‘seviche; comida peruana de pescado’.
Great, thanks!
In the other direction, at a quick glance, borrowings from Quechua words with /w/ into Spanish all seem to come out spelled with u, o, hu, or gu, not b or v: for example guano, quinua|quinoa, and regional Spanish guagua ‘baby’.
Looks definitive to me: siwichi can only be a Spanish>Quechua loan, not vice versa.
D’oh, sorry: I missed some words where Spanish *did* borrow Quechua /w/ as v (in spelling), when it was followed by /i/. With some more pulled out of es.wiktionary and the RAE dictionary:
aravico < Quechua harawikuq (Inca poet)
chivillo < Quechua chiwi (scrub blackbird)
sirvinacu < Quechua sirwiñacu (trial marriage)
vicuña < Quechua wik’uña
vincha < Quechua wíncha (headband)
viravira < Quechua wira-wira (medicinal plant)
vizcacha < Quechua wisk’acha (chinchilla-like rodent)
My bad, evidently the consonants are possible. Still, for siwichi>ceviche you have to explain why the vowels don’t all come out the same, whereas for ceviche>siwichi isn’t that what’s expected since Quechua doesn’t phonemically distinguish i from e?
Drahtesel “wire donkey”!
(Ridden by Pedalritter “Knights of the Pedal”.)
If Quechua has stressed [i] vs. unstressed [ɪ], that problem is solved.
The passage about romaine lettuce that I quoted approvingly above has a problem, too: “shows up for the first time in English in 1577”? Wrong, the OED says laitue romaine shows up in *French* in the 1500s, not English (and it’s 1567, not 1577) — it didn’t appear in English until three centuries later. Tschann must have misread the OED’s etymology, and not looked at the citations. If you do look at the citations, you see something else interesting: the name “romaine” came into American English directly from French, while British English kept the older “cos” until recently. (Romaine was discussed a few months ago at Language Hat.)
Also in the review: “Topeka may derive from a Dakota word”? Sanity check: is Topeka in the Dakotas, or anywhere where Dakota was spoken? Or is there some other reason for taking the name from Dakota? No, no, and no. Actually the name of Topeka is widely attributed to the Kansa language, spoken in, yes, Kansas. Dakota and Kansa are both Siouan languages, but they’re not the same. Tschann must have uncritically picked up a garbled fact from a less-reliable source, even though she cites Bright’s Native American Placenames of the United States, which does say Kansa.
One more, from the book preview: Tschann says French fries are called French because they’re French-cut, i.e. into long thin strips. Sounds plausible at first glance, but the chronological evidence is against it: the OED only has “French cut” starting from 1943, while “French fries” goes back to the 19th century in American usage, with “French” meaning deep-fried. (See Wordorigins on French fries; the 1886 citation there was discovered by Fred Shapiro on ADS-L over a decade ago, but still hasn’t been incorporated into the OED entry.)
That’s more mistakes than I can tolerate, and too little depth. I’d file this book next to Mario Pei on the Baby’s First Etymology shelf: not useful to us here, but maybe it’ll spark an interest in people who have never heard of etymology, and maybe they’ll graduate to better sources. There are already better popular books on the topic of food etymology, e.g. besides Dan Jurafsky, those by Martha Barnette and John Ayto.
Too bad; I guess I should just assume new language books are full of crap unless proven otherwise.
…huh.
The frites part of pommes frites?
Yes, that’s covered at the Wordorigins link.
In “Il Liber de Ferculis di Giambonino da Cremona,” Anna Martellotti even proposes that “aspic” arose as one of the many fumbling attempts to spell Arabic words in medieval Latin medical texts — al-sikbaj, Andalusian pronunciation as-sikbij > asicpicium etc.
Charles Perry, this is very interesting! Thank you for that reference. I can’t wait to read Martellotti’s work.
Thank you ktschwarz for doing all the much needed debunking here!
Are there other examples of foreign /w/ transcribed as Spanish <v>?
An interesting case is the pair of doublets vincha (mentioned above) and huincha, from Quechua wincha.
Rodolfo Lenz (1904) Diccionario etimológico de las voces chilenas derivadas de lenguas indígenas americanas offers a number of other words in which Quechua and Mapuche /w/ was adapted with Spanish v (along with words from Mapuche—from recordings of Mapuche that I listened to on YouTube, the Mapuche sound is [w] as well). The section on V is here.
One interesting form that Lenz mentions is vinchuca ‘kissing bug (Triatoma infestans)’ (the benchuca mentioned in Charles Darwin’s diary):
Can we add some precision to this etymology? The form aravico < Quechua harawikuq ‘Inca poet’ that ktschwarz cites is interesting in this regard for the loss of the final -q of the participle. Harawikuq would be the participle of harawikuy ‘to speak or say harawi songs’. The Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua (2006) Diccionario Quechua–Español–Quechua offers these two entries:
The latter can be broken down as
And so ‘the one that throws itself down’ or the like, with spirantization of the -k- to [x] (which Lenz writes as j) as in frequent in Quechua varieties. Perhaps vinchuca reflects this or a similar form derived from wikch’uy, wikch’u- ‘throw’ with other suffixes. Perhaps this or a similar form derived from the root of wikch’uy ‘throw’ lies behind vinchuca? (To explain the final a of vinchuca, perhaps a *wikch’u-ka-q, with the ‘passive-accidental’ suffix -ka- indicating events outside the control of the participant or the speaker?) Parker, Ibañez et al. (1964) English–Quechua Dictionary: Cuzco, Ayacucho, Cochabamba offer wisčuy ‘to throw’ as a variant for Ayacucho, and the same form also seems to be in use in Sucre. Still, the phonetic match in this etymology remains imprecise. Where is the Spanish nasal from? I wonder if we can find parallels to the adaptation of a Quechua non-nasal cluster with a Spanish nasal as in vinchuca? Or is it influence from Spanish chinche ‘bedbug, kissing bug’?
<w> is [w] throughout Mapudungun, as seen and heard in this wonderful database.
Wow, that database is amazing.
It is, but the phonetic transcriptions are oddly far from the recordings! Don’t use it to learn IPA.
Are they off in a consistent way?
Maybe. What they call [c] seems to be consistently a bit farther front than what they call [k], it’s just still velar, not palatal by any stretch. Their aspirates are sometimes more fortis than their unaspirates, but not always. Their distinction of [ʊ] vs. [ɘ] seems largely consistent, though I think [ɘ] is actually the most common sound of Polish y, while here I hear a boring [ə]. The diacritic under their /a/ points in the wrong direction…
The same website (menu at upper left) has similar detailed phonetic surveys of several European language families. What they call Greater Polish has ɘ̟ all over the place (which sounds right to me). The transcribers are probably different.
Rusyn (Ruthenian) from Maramureş!
…each using their own “international” phonetic alphabet.
([ɘ̟] is probably accurate for much of Polish.)
Whoa! I didn’t even know that was a thing!
Xerîb: “The form aravico < Quechua harawikuq ‘Inca poet’ that ktschwarz cites is interesting in this regard for the loss of the final -q of the participle.”
I’m confused about this final -q; harawikuq is what the RAE dictionary says, but the AMLQ dictionary instead gives harawiku ‘Lit. Poeta. Creador de poemas.’ FWIW, if there was a -q, dropping it would be typical for Spanish borrowings according to Wikipedia’s article on Lima, which is from Quechua Limaq (pronounced with l in coastal Quechua, but with r in highland Quechua), meaning ‘speaker’ and referring to an oracle. That means lima beans are another food with a name uncontroversially from Quechua—which is also in the Tschann book (I overlooked it before).
Me: “the OED only has ‘French cut’ starting from 1943, while ‘French fries’ goes back to the 19th century”
Hmm, I shouldn’t have taken that 1943 date as definitive, since (as is always likely) it can be antedated—for example, Wyoming Farm Bulletin, August 1915: “Cook ten beets in boiling water until tender, cut into shape (slice, dice, or French cut).” (This is the vegetable sense, not the meat, hairstyle, clothing, or glass senses.) The OED also has “Frenched” in the vegetable sense (cut into thin strips) from 1903. Nevertheless, it’s still well established that “French fried potatoes” was already in use for cut fried potatoes before the shape became standardized.
(I hadn’t heard of the “French cut” myth before, but it seems to be common around the internet, especially on Quora, and (sigh) the AP Stylebook. If you’re just going to recycle stuff you heard somewhere on the internet without checking it, why should publishers/readers pay for it? Just have ChatGPT write the book.)
How does ‘French cut’ relate to ‘julienned’?
I’d only heard that in the sense vegetables cut in strips, but that cite gives the soup as earlier, 1841 /French 18c. wp cites a French cookbook 1722.
I’d also heard (this must be folk etymology) it was named for the inventor of a machine to julienne veggies, a sort of multi-bladed chopper.
And then there’s a mandoline — which has always scared me witless/no fingers near that, thank you!
Say, what does the food slicer have to do with the musical instrument? The OED and the TLFI list both usages but don’t say how one became the other.
@AntC
TLFI has
Étymol. et Hist. 1691 gastr. Julienne (Massialot, Cuisinier roial et bourg., 61-2 ds Quem. DDL t. 3); 1691 potage à la Julienne (Id., ibid., 283, ibid.). Prob. dér. du prénom Julien ou Julienne; l’évolution sém. demeure obscure.
This seems a bit uncertain. There is a part of Veneto called veneta giuliana. Here is a bean soup with grated potatoes and diced carrots associated with Veneto, but I don’t know how old the dish is or whether anyone ever called it zuppa (or sópa) alla giuliana.
https://ricette-utenti.cookaround.com/zuppa-di-fagioli-alla-veneta.html
Everything has always already been discussed on Language Hat, is the way to bet! The story of sikbāj, escabeche, and ceviche was investigated in magnificent detail by Dan Jurafsky back in 2009, and linked from here: SIKBAJ, CEVICHE, FISH & CHIPS. Pretty much everything said here was already said at that post, except for the reference to Corriente’s 2008 dictionary and the distraction with Quechua. To summarize from Jurafsky:
* Escabeche (fried fish in vinegar and/or citrus and onions) was known in Spanish cookbooks since the early 1500s, probably via Catalan.
* One of Pizarro’s soldiers reported that the coastal people ate fish raw; Peruvian tradition says they flavored it with chiles.
* Therefore, ceviche appears to be a fusion of these two traditions, “although we may never know for sure — the word doesn’t appear in writing until almost 300 years later in an 1820 song, spelled sebiche.”
Hmm, fried herring in vinegar (with onion and a few cloves and peppers black and Jamaica), is echt Danish lunch fare, to the extent that that is what stegte sild means. (Herring is otherwise served smoked or matured in salt and marinaded. The bones are small and annoying, some will always be left after filleting but vinegar softens them enough that they don’t register. [We don’t eat any other fish that way]. And after warm smoking they are somehow much easier to remove).
Should I ask for escabeche at the fishmongers’ next time? (Also there’s a Peruvian food truck randomly appearing at various food festivals here, I had a very nice ceviche some years ago).
“Escabeche (fried fish in vinegar and/or citrus and onions) was known in Spanish cookbooks since the early 1500s,”
That date can now be pushed back to 1487 or 1486. Diego de Valera’s Crónica de los Reyes Católicos, published in one of those years, contains two instances of the word, which are listed in the Corpus Diacrónico del Español (known for short as CORDE), viewable on the website of the Royal Spanish Academy (http://corpus.rae.es/cgi-bin/crpsrvEx.dll?visualizar?tipo1=5&tipo2=0&iniItem=0&ordenar1=0&ordenar2=0&FID=200423\012\C000O20042023121921252.1036.1032&desc={B}+{I}+escabeche{|I},+en+{I}1200-1495{|I},+en+todos+los+medios,+en+{I}CORDE+{|I}+{|B}{BR}&tamVen=1&marcas=0#acierto0).
One instance of escabeche, not two.
I’m confused about this final -q; harawikuq is what the RAE dictionary says, but the AMLQ dictionary instead gives harawiku ‘Lit. Poeta. Creador de poemas.’
On the loss of final -q (as the ending of the participle) in Quechuan varieties, there is information with further references in the section “The Inca lingua franca” in the Wikipedia article on Classical Quechua.
The following is the entry containing harawikuq ‘poet, bard’, participle of harawikuy ‘recite (Quechua epic)’ from Julio Calvo Pérez (2022) Nuevo Diccionario Español–Quechua Quechua-Español, p. 247, a dictionary developed in collaboration with over a hundred collaborators from the region of Cusco:
(The abbreviation [Ag.] is for “agente” (“es actividad propia de [hum.] y menos de [anim.], que son los rasgos clasémicos que generalmente figuran”). [efect.] is “efectuado” (“se corresponde generalmente con [+act.], elididoen muchos verbos por su carácter recursivo”).)
No, no, and no.
As ktschwarz notes, Tschann’s treatment of Topeka is particularly disappointing. Even more so because the potatoes in question are apparently not the common, ordinary potato introduced to North America from Peru after European contact, but something else entirely, deserving description in depth. Here is Bright’s account (Native American Placenames of the United States, 2004, p. 508) of the name:
The Indian potato here is the very interesting Apios americana, one of several plants going by the common name groundnut. I really enjoyed this webpage on the cultivation of this plant, ‘The Diggers of Groundnuts’, which discusses a few more placenames deriving from indigenous names for Apios americana.
>> Y : Say, what does the food slicer have to do with the musical instrument? The OED and the TLFI list both usages but don’t say how one became the other.
I suspect as much as spaghetti alla chitara have to do with the musical instrument of the guitar. The implement for making spaghetti alla chitara actually looks more like a square lute.
Wikipedia seems to be DDoSed currently, I wanted to link to the spaghetti alla chitara article.
@Y, @V yeah an avalanche of non-information.
Wikt gives both sense in one entry; but no earliest dates of usage nor explanation how one came from the other. Etymonline has only the musical instrument. Wikip has separate entries for each, cross-linked but not what you’d call referenced. Musical instrument at least by 1629.
The Flatback version of the instrument 1850’s. “The [sound hole] has been sometimes modified to an elongated hole, called a D-hole.” (stop that sniggering at the back of the class). So I guess could be put flat on a table, veggies run across the strings (something like a cheesewire), with the grated output dropping into the elongated hole? I’m wildly speculating.
spaghetti alla chitara.
Maybe early 1800’s. I’m struggling to imagine how you can cut pasta with merely wires. ?Origin of the phrase “push spaghetti through a sieve”? Even worse would be trying to cut veggies with a wire. You need steel blades, surely(?)
Wikipedia seems to be DDoSed currently
Yes I’ve been experiencing that quite often recently. My being in the New Zealand timezone often means I’m hitting US/European smaller sites in offline mode. But wikip? Perhaps I’d better volunteer them some cash, like they’re always asking.
I’m struggling to imagine how you can cut pasta with merely wires
Like an egg slicer, perhaps?
French Wikipedia sends you to Mary Ellen Snodgrass’s Encyclopedia of Kitchen History, which says that the mandoline “may have been a nineteenth-century invention from Alsace, France, for sauerkraut making.” Nothing else. German WP shows a picture of a fellow operating such a tool, over a tub of shredded cabbage. Catalan ditto says, “Se li dona aquest nom perquè el moviment del canell d’un usuari especialitzat recorda com es mou el canell en un intèrpret de mandolina.” That’s a very nice idea, but, no references.
(stop that sniggering at the back of the class)
Ha. I see there is a video entitled “Hot Thug shoves everything up his D-hole for cash”, but it isn’t about guitar playing, despite the general resemblance of “Hot Thug” to a rap monicker.
What you cut is the dough, the actual paste, not the dried noodles.