We’ve had a number of posts on printers’ terms (e.g., Wayzgoose, Printer’s Pie), but this one has leaped to near the top of my list of favorites:
German
Etymology
Zwiebel (“onion”) + Fisch (“fish”), originally “fish of low quality”, then “low quality, clutter”.
Pronunciation
IPA(key): /ˈt͡sviːbl̩ˌfɪʃ/
Noun
Zwiebelfisch m (strong, genitive Zwiebelfisches or Zwiebelfischs, plural Zwiebelfische)
1. (printing) A character that is by mistake printed in a font different from the rest.
2. misprint
That’s great on so many levels I can only doff my hat in awe. Also, Zwiebel is from Late Latin cēpulla, diminutive of Latin cēpa ‘onion,’ which makes sense but is unexpected. (The Latin word is “A borrowing from an unknown, possibly Anatolian source.”)
I’d wondered about Zwiebel, though never enough to actually look up the etymology. Latin would not have occurred to me …
What’s the -w- doing in there?
Ah: folk etymology, apparently:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zwibollo#Old_High_German
cepa
Kusaal has gabʋ, which looks related somewhere along the line (it’s an obvious loanword, but I’m not sure from where. Dyula has jàbá.)
Seeing the headline, I mismapped Zwiebel to Norw. tvil “doubt” and thought it was patterned on babelfish. I loved the coinage and the concept, and then reality hit.
Or doubt, as it were. No thanks for that fish
Mooré gèbré “onion”, backformed from plural gɛba, is presumaby from an alternative Manding form jɛ̀bá; (WOV velars for original palatals is standard in loanwords.)
Most languages in those parts have words derived from Arabic البصل, which this obviously isn’t.
Mysterious Wanderwörter in the Sahel usually seem to turn out to be Berber. Lameen?
(What would be really cool would be if it turned out to be a loan from Latin …)
“Die dt. Formen werden im ersten Bestandteil bereits im Ahd. angelehnt an ahd. zwi- “zweifach, doppelt”, im zweiten Bestandteil an ahd. bolla “Knospe” […] und im Sinne von “zweifache (vielhäutige) Bolle” als Kompositum aufgefaßt. In der Schriftsprache setzt sich die von Luther bevorzugte Form Zwibel durch.” (Pfeifer, Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen).
But why the Zwiebel in Zwiebelfisch in the first place, if this is originally Alburnus alburnus (English bleak)?
For the English term onion-fish, the old entry in the OED here:
Does this just repeat the etymology given in the Century Dictionary (1889–1891) here? But the OED then quotes from David Badham (1854) Prose Halieutics, Or, Ancient and Modern Fish Tattle (here, boldface added):
I haven’t checked the OED3 because I get kicked off for logging in too far away from where I usually log in.
Also note on the genus Cepola, from the page on Acanthuriformes here at the ETYFish Project:
I don’t know how any of this about Cepola might apply to the very dissimilar bleak (Alburnus), which I can’t remember ever having eaten. Very large eyes, maybe?
Also an actual dish with fish and fried onions.
Close enough – that’s Zweifel.
I know. I came to my senses quickly.
Why do they assign cēpa (however tentatively) to Anatolian? Is there more than “another agricultural Wanderwort”?
A Berber loan in Latin, that would be cool.
The SIL Moba dictionary has gabug “oignon” (with a noun-class suffix added, as is only right, unlike the Kusaal.) The entry also says “du haoussa gabu“, but this alleged Hausa word is not in my dictionaries.
De Vaan has only “Probably a loanword from an unknown language; the same word might be reflected in Gk. καπια.” The latter word is not found in modern dictionaries. According to Hesych it means “‘onions’ among the Κηρυνηται”. Who were the Κηρυνηται ?
People from Κερύνεια? That may take us to Achaean, but not to Anatolian.
Z
wiebelfischWaama has kaabu “oignon” (there’s no /g/ phoneme in Waama), which must be the same etymon; but that may be remodelled after kaabu “Diospyros mespilliformis” (= Gulmancema gààbu.)
Nawdm has gáábú “feuilles d’oignon séchées”, and the dictionary says it’s borrowed via the Grusi language Tem from the (Songhay) Dendi gáábú: that’s not in Petr Zima’s Dendi dictionary, but it’s a fairly short dictionary.
The SIL Kabiye dictionary has káábʋ́ “oignon”, and says it’s from Hausa gábúú. Again. But its Grusi neighbour Lama has the more widespread Arabic-derived form àlàpásǝ̌r.
Whatever else, it’s clearly a local Wanderwort. Odd variation in both vowel length and quality. Mooré seems to be the only case with the front vowel, though.
Fulfulde goes its own sweet way with tingeere.
Onion-fish is marked obsolete in the OED3 (2004), which gives the current names:
As the old entry already indicates by “; also …”, the “eyes” explanation applies only to the second fish; it’s the first one that “peels into flakes”. The revision supplies a quotation for the second fish:
However, they neglected to create an entry for onion-eye grenadier, or its other current common name, roughhead grenadier (which, according to some places on the internet, has “the largest eye-to-head ratio in the world”). Perhaps those are waiting for a full revision of grenadier?
Fishbase has the current common names, but not the obsolete onion-fish.
Kassem, too, has gabugu, plural gaburu.
Tondi Songway Kiini has gábù “cultivated onion”; Heath doesn’t tag it as a loanword. (Getting fairly far from the geographical zone where Hausa loans are commonplace, too, though I gather that they sometimes climb up the Niger from Zarma to the other Songhay languages.)
It’s beginning to look to me like Songhay may be the central player in all this. Which is not to say that Songhay might not have borrowed it in turn. I’d really like this to be a Latin loanword … a non-starter if it’s not in Berber, though.
As we are discussing printing terms, maybe someone can explain how smout came to mean a compositor doing occasional work. Wiki says it’s a printer, but I’ve always heard it used in reference to a compositor. https://words.fromoldbooks.org/Jacobi-PrintersVocabulary/s/smout.html
“ Etymology
From Middle Dutch smout (“melted animal fat, oil”), from Old Dutch *smalt, from Proto-West Germanic *smalt, from Proto-Germanic *smultą.”
source: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/smout
Is there any interest among growers in developing new, extra spicy varieties of onions? You never hear about that kind of project the way you do about people breeder ever spicier and spicier kinds of peppers. In contrast, people seem to talk about making really sweet onions instead—which does make sense, since one of the best things about cooking onions is the way they caramelize and undergo Maillard reactions.
I have wondered about this for a while, since I once got a mutant onion with some quite remarkable features. It was a jumbo onion, but when I sliced in half for the stew we were making, it turnout to have only four layers (making each layer about a centimeter thick). More significantly, it was by far the strongest smelling onion I have ever worked with. We had to clear the kitchen and open all the windows (after dropping the onion quarters into a bowl of water) to get the miasma to clear. Since then, I have sometimes wondered whether we should have replanted the onion pieces and tried to raise a new variety of extraordinarily lachrymose bulbs.
I think Trond’s link was meant to go to either to the Achaean Κερύνεια or to Κερύνεια (Girne) in Cyprus. (I will stay away from all the variations of the name.) I don’t know why de Vaan has Κηρυνηται. The new edition of Hesychius by Alpers and Cunningham (2020) gives Κερυνῆται:
On the meaning of the ethnonym Κερυνῆται in Hesychius, I noted the following comment by Otto Hoffmann, Die griechischen Dialekte in ihrem historischen Zusammenhange mit den wichtigsten ihrer Quellen dargestellt (1891), vol. 1, p. 118, on the following Hesychian gloss:
Of this Hoffmann says:
Singular, Κερυνεύς. I don’t know whether that has held up since 1891. Hesychius gives other forms that he specifies as belonging to Cypriot varieties of Greek, as from Paphos.
The full W-Ary etymology for cēpa reads,
All this looks reasonable enough, but I wish they’d quote a source. They only refer to De Vaan, but that is not the source of most of this. But if we go with the Arabic theory, that leads to Hebrew קוֹבַע ~ כּוֹבַע qôḇaʿ~kôḇaʿ ‘helmet’, first mentioned in 1Sam as worn by… Goliath, visiting here from the other thread. Noonan, Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible, p. 117, notes that the q~k random alternation (both appear in 1Sam 17 and in Ezekiel) is a strong indication of a loanword. Both it and סִרְיוֹן~שִׁרְיוֹן širyôn~siryôn ‘body armor’ were worn by Goliath, and both, says Noonan, are Hurrian loans.
For the latter, writes Noonan,
(References omitted.)
However, getting back to the onions, the Greek loanword indicated by Noonan, κύμβαχος ‘crown of a helmet’, shows very different phonology than κάπια. This needs to be explained if one is to argue that the Greek ‘onion’ and ‘helmet’ words are related.
Always bearing in mind the awesome power of sheer coincidence, it does still seem to me that the West African *ga(a)b- “onion” looks uncannily similar to this Cypriot *ka(a)p-.
Interesting that they say “ancient Africa knew the cultivated onion only in the north”; but the way they’ve put it suggests that this is actually just an assumption based on the fact that that most languages thereabouts use an obviously Arabic name for “onion.”
And whatever else, it’s clear that there is in fact another widespread word in the West African Sahel/savanna which is not from Arabic (although the fact that the reflexes are still all quite similar suggests that the word has not been around for all that long.)
I wonder if there is any non-linguistic evidence for how long onions have been known in West Africa? (Calling Roger Blench …)
κάπια· τὰ σκόροδα. Κερυνῆται
The proparoxytone accentuation of κάπια (neuter plural) does not inform us about the length of the first alpha. And so, if we are merely looking around for a sound sequence kap- in a semantic field (heh!) related to garlic and onions, it’s right there in Doric κᾶπος ‘garden’, Attic-Ionic κῆπος. The formation would be the exactly the same as ἄγριος ‘wild, uncultivated’ from ἀγρός ‘field (as opposed to garden); the country (as opposed to the town)’. Our κάπια could be a plural of the substantivized neuter of an adjective *κᾱ́πιος, ‘of the garden, cultivated’.
One could speculate in all sorts of ways, especially since Hesychius’ glosses are not meant to be exhaustive descriptions, but just that—brief glosses—allowing for considerable uncertainty, or latitude for speculation, according to one’s inclinations… (Is κάπια simply garlic (σκόροδα)? Or is a specific kind of garlic at Ceryneia? For instance, maybe κάπια was some cultivated variety of Allium that was otherwise normally picked wild. A variety of A. ampeloprasum, for instance. Or something else? In Kurdistan there are all sorts of wild Allium that people pick on the mountain and then sell in the bazaar, and I am at a loss to identify any of them.)
I just came up with this idea myself, but this line of interpretation of Hesychian κάπια is not new at all, I see. Edward Ross Wharton (1891) ‘Loan-Words in Latin’, top of p. 184, has this etymology (sneaking in the length on the alpha), and so does Walde–Hoffmann (1938) here, p. 201. One doesn’t have to believe any of this at all, of course. Ernout–Meillet in their Latin etymological dictionary simply take the Latin and Greek as loanwords from an unknown source, with no further discussion: ‘Sans doute emprunt, d’origine inconnue.’
A borrowing from an unknown, possibly Anatolian source.
Hittite kappi- is ‘small’, by the way. See Kloekhorst, p. 429 here.
κάπια (neuter plural)
I meant to write κάπια (neuter plural?). Also, Walde–Hofmann. Not the same person as Otto Hoffmann mentioned earlier in the thread.
Johann Siegmund Popowitsch, Versuch einer Vereinigung der Mundarten von Teutschland als eine Einleitung zu einem vollständigen teutschen Wörterbuche mit Bestimmungen der Wörter und beträchtlichen Beiträgen zur Naturgeschichte (1780) on the Zwiebel in Zwiebelfisch(lein) (‘bleak, Alburnus’), p. 616 here:
Because the taste of the fish is mediocre and needs disguising? And so different from the etymological motivation for English onion-fish and the Italian terms mentioned earlier in the thread. I haven’t looked through Popowitsch’s text to determine the general value of the other etymological remarks he makes. Maybe other LH readers would be interested in doing that.
The only smout I know is a young salmon – the DSL has senses extending that to a small insignificant person, but not explicitly to an occasional or unimportant person. It doesn’t seem any *more* unlikely than a connection to animal fat, though!
I don’t know why wiktionary has picked on that etymology – the OED has the printers’ smout as a variant of ‘smoot’ and just says ‘Of unknown origin’.
“Zwiebelfisch” was also the name of a German journal on typography and literature issued in the first decades of the 20th century, and the name of a language column that used to appear in the Spiegel by Bastian Sick, who has been mentioned here occasionally.
For a while now the Spiegel website has been annoying me with verzwiebeltes “s”. All occurrences of “s” appear in a font different from that of other letters. They also sag below the apparent line on which non-“s” tailless letters sit. It doesn’t matter whether the position of “s” in a word is initial, medial or final.
This is most annoying with “ss”. For example here, which will change from day to day because it’s just “spiegel dot de”. But you will always find an “s” or “ss”.
Correction !!!: It occurred to me that this might be an artefact of the browser I use, namely Chrome. And sure the fuck enough, I don’t see this phenomenon with Firefox.
There are several different fonts specified in my Chrome settings: Times New Roman, Arial, Consolas. I don’t know what the cause of this is. Plain ol’ “s” !?
I’ve half a mind to write the Republicans that they should deport all but one font.
I did mean the Peloponnese town (which is said to be one of the original 12 cities of the Achaeans and the hometown of the colonizers in Cyprus), since I thought that was more likely to be mentioned by demonym in Hesych. I reserve the right to change my story if other evidence now points to Cyprus.
I don’t know why the link didn’t work. Maybe I missed a character in κάπιpasting.
I don’t know why wiktionary has picked on that etymology – the OED has the printers’ smout as a variant of ‘smoot’ and just says ‘Of unknown origin’.
Thanks, Jen. That printing glossary I cited above has, for reasons unknown, this as a synonym for smout: “ Grass hand. A compositor temporarily engaged—a practice common in newspaper offices.” https://words.fromoldbooks.org/Jacobi-PrintersVocabulary/g/grass-hand.html
At least it’s not yet another fish.
In Zarma, gabu apparently refers specifically to dried onions, as opposed to the Arabic loan albasan “onion”. According to AkyaLab’s dictionary “Hala boro ga ba gabu, boro ga albasan tutubu k’a yandi wayna ra”: when one wants gabu, one crushes onions and lays them out to dry in the sun. Perhaps this was originally done with a different allium.
In Bambara, Dumestre’s dictionary specifically indicates that jàba refers to multiple varieties of allium, including shallots as well as onions; that too points towards the possibility of a change in the main species referent.
Norw. smolt “very young salmon”. I must vaguely have assumed a relationship to the “melt”~”fat” complex, but now that I think of it, Scand. smal “thin, narrow (as opposed to “wide”)”, Eng. small looks like a better fit.
One connection between typography and animal fat is that greasy fingers make smudgy letters.
Is smolt related biologically or etymologically to English smelt? Wiktionary’s etymology seems to assume the metal-working term and the fish word are cognate, without offering a rationale. Was smelt processed like garum?
That means part of “the “melt”~”fat” complex”. I probably have seen it somewhere, then, and not just vaguely assumed it. My etymological dictionaries don’t treat smolt, and that is no omission, because my standard dictionary says it’s from English. I didn’t know the fish smelt, but it’s no big surprise. We’ve seen before that unrelated species with vague similarities may end up with the same name.
I suggest that the fishes were named for being full of fat. Salmon is a fat fish, and the young fish are fatter than the old.⁵
Alternatively, the basic meaning of *(s)melt- is something like “dissolve”, so the fish(es) could have been named for not gathering in shoals. But that may not even be true.
I always sort of figured that smelt and smolt came from the fish being fatty, but I never bothered to look it up and check.
OED on smelt, attested since the 700s:
That entry hasn’t been revised since the original edition.
Orel, A Handbook of Germanic Etymology, reconstructs *smeltaz and derives it from *smeltanan, “a variant of *meltanan”, ‘to melt’.
English smolt doesn’t show up until the 1400s, but maybe that is because it’s a less-sampled (northern) regionalism?
I wonder if there is any non-linguistic evidence for how long onions have been known in West Africa?
Dishearteningly, Dolores R. Piperno (2006) Phytoliths: A Comprehensive Guide for Archaeologists and Paleoecologists, p. 48, table 3.2, lists Allium under the heading ‘Crops where Research Reveals No to Few Phytoliths of Little to No Taxonomic Significance’ (here). Maybe there is hope in carbonized remains from cooking fires? I am told that Native Americans in the southwest braided some native Allium species and then suspended them over a fire to roast.
Interestingly, apparently only one species of Allium is endemic to sub-Saharan Africa, A. dregeanum.
There’s a pretty good bar/restaurant called Zwiebelfisch at the Savignyplatz, Berlin (or at least there was the last time I was in Berlin, c. five years ago or more). One of the e’s in their logo is a Zwiebelfisch, and a note on the printed menu explains the name.
‘Crops where Research Reveals No to Few Phytoliths of Little to No Taxonomic Significance’
I know what it means, but it’s overnegation or something. Fun chiasmus of “no to few” and “little to no”, though.
Wikipedia offers nothing re how long onions have been grown/eaten in Subsaharan Africa, but for Supersaharan (as it were) Africa offers the interesting tidbit that “Onions were used in Egyptian burials, as evidenced by onion traces found in the eye sockets of Ramesses IV.” It also advises that by now, in the 21st century, Angola and Mali are among the world’s leading producers/exporters of onions.
onion traces found in the eye sockets of Ramesses IV
Reminds me of “Lipstick Traces (on a Cigarette)” (YouTube; it’s a great song).
Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipstick_Traces:_A_Secret_History_of_the_20th_Century would have been a better book if titled _Onion Traces_?
I’ve been recommended to look out for when smelt is in season, it’s not a fish you usually see in stores but it’s supposed to be pretty good. And North Germanic has smelte = ‘melt’ as the normal verb, beside German and Dutch, so I’d think it was pretty secure in PG even if it may have arisen as a variant there. (The Danish verb is not in WT.en, but I found it in the ODS. Originally strong smelte/smalt with causative smelte/smelte, but now regular as smelte/smeltede both intransitive and transitive).
The zweibelfisch in the Zwiebelfisch logo is the b, and it’s a pretty extreme zwiebelfisch, not the sort of thing that would happen accidentally or be missed by a proofreader.
http://www.zwiebelfisch-berlin.de/
Nobody is at all curious about the eye onions ? Did they function like the apple in the mouth of roast pig ? At the funeral, did everyone get a slice of baked pharoah ?
speaking of shocking things
as so many people are these days
i noted an incident
in a subway train recently
that made my blood run cold
a dignified looking
gentleman with a long
brown beard
in an absent minded manner
suddenly reached up and
pulled his own left eye
from the socket and ate it
the consternation in the car
may be imagined
people drew away from him
on all sides women screamed and
fainted in a moment every one
but the guard and myself
were huddled in the end of the car
looking at the dignified
gentleman with terror
the guard was sweating
with excitement but he stood
his ground sir said the guard
you cannot intimidate me
nor can you mystify me
i am a wise boid
you sir are a glass eater
and that was a glass eye
to the devil with a country
where people can t mind their own
business said the dignified
gentleman i am not a glass eater
if you must know and that was not
a glass eye it was a pickled onion
can not a man eat pickled
onions in this community
without exciting remark
the curse of this nation
is the number of meddlesome
matties
who are forever attempting
to restrict the liberty
of the individual i suppose
the next thing will be a law
on the statute books prohibiting
the consumption of pickled onions
and with another curse
he passed from the train
which had just then drawn up
beside
a station and went out
of my life forever
archy
>Nobody is at all curious about the eye onions ?
Egyptian pharaohs were sometimes portrayed as the personification of sacred animals — the Apis bull, the falcon of Horus. Maybe Ramesses IV’s was a grenadier fish.
Since the forms of *gabu look very similar, the word probably spread recently, and there’s no need to posit that Allium was grown in the Sahel before it was introduced together with the word. A Wanderwort for a wanderwort.
That doesn’t exclude the opposite, though. Dried onions might have been brought as a foreign spice and consumed as a luxury long before somebody brought whole bulbs. When that happened, I have no doubt that West African gardeners would have known what to do with them.
Lameen’s point suggests that the *gabu word may have referred originally to something other than “onion”, so it may actually be a Wanderwort based on a calque (which is certainly consistent with a fairly recent arrival of onions in West Africa.)
*Gabu clearly isn’t of Oti-Volta origin (hardly surprising); it looks to my inexpert eye pretty typical for Songhay from a phonotactic point of view. The Hausa gabu is mysterious: it seems to be a ghost word, judging by the dictionaries I’ve got, but more than one source claims that it actually exists.
Slightly surprising that Kusaal goes with the most widespread *gabu type rather than the Mooré gɛba, which seems likely to be from Dyula jàbá in the first instance.
Does Manding have many loans from Songhay, incidentally? There seems to be evidence that Manding actually had a preexisting jàbá referring to onion-ish plants; but if Manding is the source, how did the most popular form elsewhere end up as *gabu instead of *gaba?
Could it be the “griot” phenomenon we discussed elsewhere, where the loans are based on the Manding form with the “article”?
Or as the old folksong has it:
(Maybe best known these days from the soundtrack of the Onion King)
Actually, if the loans outside Manding are indeed based on the form jaboo, with the determiner, it would explain the odd *gaba/*gabu alternation, and also be evidence that Manding is the actual source of the West African Wanderwort.
And if jàbá “refers to multiple varieties of allium, including shallots as well as onions”, which apparently it does, that means that Manding is also a good candidate for being the original calqueriser.
Naden’s Mampruli dictionary (much the best of his dictionaries) has gabu glossed specifically as “dried onion greens”, matching the Zarma form that Lameen cited above; it also has the more circumstantial “Katsina Hausa gabuu“, which certainly argues against all these Hausa gabu‘s being merely imaginary, even though it isn’t in my dictionaries.)
It also cites a proverb: Kpeendaana binni nyuusiri la gabu “The strong person’s faeces have a smell of onion leaves”, to which I can only respond, “How true!”
Looking more carefully, the Kusaal dictionary also gives “dried onion leaves” as the first sense of gabʋ, and “onions” only second.
Dagbani has gabo “onion-leaves, pounded, formed into balls and dried.” (As against alibasa “onion.”)
Nawdm gaabu is, again, specifically “dried onion leaves.”
This might be an East versus West thing: the Dyula and Mooré dictionaries unfortunately give no actual examples, just the bare gloss “onion”, but both feature pretty pictures of actual onions rather than leaves or pounded products, and Heath has “cultivated onion” for Tondi Songway Kiini gábù.
Mali is more into onion-growing than the countries to the east are, so I can imagine the westerners being more familiar with the plant and the easterners more familiar with the processed products.
For Hausa, Bargery gives:
I would guess Hausa borrowed the word from Songhay, given its distribution and uninflectability.
I don’t understand the first consonant alternations: I’d expect it to be borrowed into Songhay with j, unless the borrowing was quite old.
Xerìb found this when we were discussing “griot”:
https://languagehat.com/griot/#comment-4579678
On the other hand, it wouldn’t be problematic if Songhay was the donor and Manding the recipient (though in that case, I don’t understand the final -a of jàbá.)
The word must presumably be fairly old for it to turn up in a Mamprussi proverb; though proverb creation is still an active process in West Africa, of course. Hausa has Ba dama teshan Kano “No chance in Kano railway station” (i.e. “at all.”)
And then there’s gabu II. [ga/bu”] ‘Any febrile cattle disease as a result of which carcases appear watery and do not set.’
You say “onion”, I say “febrile cattle disease as a result of which carcases appear watery and do not set.” These fine distinctions are beyond me.
That gabu II sounds like anthrax !
Do carcasses usually set?
That must lead to misunderstanding. I mean, what do they call a culinary failure where your cake of dried onion leaves remains watery and refuses to set?
You should be very careful what you order from a menu.
Do carcasses usually set?
I think so. DE should have the necessary physiology 101 knowledge.
The title of this article seems to contradict that: Absence of rigor mortis in goat with anthrax.
I’m not sure how to interpret this (defective ESL) sentence from there:
#
Progression of the disease [anthrax] is rapid and premonitory signs may go unnoticed often animals are found dead with no rigor mortis.
#
I think it means that the animals were found dead long after they actually died – because no signs of impending death were noticed. It would not be surprising that no rigor is in evidence at that late time. It vanishes after a number of hours in any case, depending on ambient temperature.
Party venues are often found to be free of overflowing ashtrays – if you arrive long enough after they are over, and the cleaning people have come and gone.
>I’m not sure how to interpret this (defective ESL) sentence from there:
I’m not sure either, Stu. I started to look into it, but having just pursued information about a local campus graffiti incident that led me to an interview with an anarchist urging me not to blithely give up on violence as a means to my political ends; and then having followed various links about threat vectors against election officials for my work, I decided this is not the time for me to add “carcass desiccation timeline” to my google history.
@Ryan: definitely TMI. Sometimes you just have to let it go.
I was struck by the use of the verb “set” to apparently describe rigor mortis, as if the carcass were a butterscotch pudding or a tomato aspic that was intended to thicken as it cooled. My grandmothers were alas already a few generations removed from actual farming life, so they did not have much occasion to talk about dead livestock so I don’t know if that folksy/homey approach would have been used. (I suppose my maternal grandfather talked about cement or concrete, setting while leaving the puddings and aspics to my grandmother on that side.)
Bargery’s definition specifies or suggests many signs of anthrax in cattle: fever, abrupt onset, pervasive oedema, sudden death (which is inevitable without immediate administration of antibiotics), bloody discharges from all orifices, partial or complete lack of rigor mortis, rapid putrefaction. See for instance the Merck Veterinary Manual online here.
Interesting from Bargery:
I gather the other synonym, ruwa is ‘water; rain’ in general.
From this article:
I gather the other synonym, ruwa is ‘water; rain’ in general
Yup. You can say ruwan sama “sky water” if you want to be specific, but “it’s raining” is just ana ruwa “it’s watering.” Given that ruwa doesn’t look much like an Afro-Asiatic word for water, I imagine that it actually started out as meaning “rain” and has displaced the original word for “water.”
Western Oti-Volta has a quite different etymon for “water” from all the rest of Oti-Volta, as with Kusaal ku’om versus Gulimancema ñíma. The usual Oti-Volta word looks very much as if it ought to be related to the verb “to rain”, as in Kusaal ni, which would make sense. But it’s difficult to imagine why just one subgroup of Oti-Volta would have succeeded in preserving the original inherited word for “water.”
None of the Oti-Volta languages actually conflates the nouns “water” and “rain”, like Hausa does. Instead, “rain” is usually related to “sky.”
Phytoliths are little… quartz grains, basically, that are found in various plants – grasses especially.
Weapons-grade onions!
schmelzen – schmolz – geschmolzen “melt”, Schmalz “lard”, checks out.
Schmelz “enamel”, though (for some kinds of enamel, e.g. on teeth).
@David Eddyshaw: How does Hausa (etc.) refer to dew? I have always felt that was the most understudied form of precipitation, linguistically speaking (and probably otherwise as well).
There’s a separate word for it: rāɓā.
You may be glad to hear that “dew” is reconstructable to proto-Oti-Volta (where it also has no connection with any words for “water”):
Kusaal mɛligim; Mooré méenem; Buli māglīm; Nawdm máléém; Gulmancema mángū; Moba mànm̀; Ditammari tīmá̰á̰ntì; Byali mēēm̄; Mbelime māàǹtè:
proto-Oti-Volta *mẽlg-ma (the -n- is the regular reflex of non-initial *l in those languages which show it, except Mooré, where it’s due to a rule *l > n after nasal vowels.)
There’s something odd about the *g suffix in *mẽlg-ma, which may in fact have been replaced by *s in the Nawdm (where non-initial *s > zero is regular), and may just be absent, rather than lost by sound change, in the Gurma and Eastern Oti-Volta forms.
And *g is not common at all as a noun-deriving-suffix, either.
It’s just occurred to me that this strongly suggests that the word is derived from a verbal root, and, lo and behold, I see that there are actual reflexes of this in at least Gulimancema màndí “be wet, seep” and Mbelime mɛ̄ǹtā “cover with dew.” Waama mɛri “push into (mud)” might be cognate too. It works as far as the form is concerned, though the meaning is a bit off.
In verbs, a suffix alternation *-g/-s/zero alternation is well attested in Oti-Volta: *-g is a monactional suffix and *-s is pluractional.
Huh. The things you find out when trying to explain things.
There’s also a Western Oti-Volta *mel- “vanish, disappear”, but, romantic as the idea is that dew might be named for its evanescence, the tones are wrong. Sadly, the phenomenon appears merely to be named for its seepy wetness.
Fascinating, thanks!
When did humans domesticate vegetables?
Or rather not what came first, but how did their role in our diet change?
And did medieval Africans cultivate them?
Context:
When I read this – https://archive.org/details/b2201486x/page/n5/mode/2up?q=onions – I thought onions are local staple food.
When I read this – https://www.google.com/search?q=disparaged+%22vegetable+stews+that%22 – I thought “Bedouins”.
But I’m thinking of the above.
When did humans domesticate vegetables?
Presumably by “vegetables” you don’t mean “plants”, because then you would be asking “how old is agriculture?” What do you have in mind?
And did medieval Africans cultivate them?
Long before the middle ages. The words for “yam” and “okra” (if that’s the kind of thing you mean) are reconstructable to proto-Oti-Volta, for example. (The “yam” etymon is even cognate with the Miyobe word, so even older than that.)
When did humans domesticate vegetables / plants ?
In a sense it’s also the other way around – plants and prey laid the groundwork for domesticity. If there had not been so many tasty, colorful things to eat (with and without cooking), humanids might have stayed as they were. Plants, ingenuity and opposable thumbs were all hard at work making us what we are today.
When did humans domesticate vegetables?
Or rather not what came first, but how did their role in our diet change?
it’s quite complicated, because close human/plant relationships can come in a lot of different forms, most of which don’t look much like contemporary (y’know, the last millennium or two) agricultural systems. james scott’s Against The Grain goes into this in a fair amount of detail, synthesizing the state of research as of 2017. but a lot of his point is that there wasn’t really the kind of “agricultural revolution” or “plant domestication” moment that most historical narratives take as an axiom.
And see Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything.
I meant the range from eating mostly vegetables to eating mostly cereals. It depends on region, climate and whether you’re a bedouin or not, but it occured to me that cultures shift within this range (and within one region and climate).
@DE, I intended it to be a stupid question; I know too little about what people grow and eat in Africa and this knowlege would have changed little and second I have no idea what is the range of cultivation of yam within Africa (weirdly, yams in Russian. Is this English plural? Where did they read it? Weird, because the combination of sounds yams sounds more foreign a Russian ear than yam). But thinking of this, I also have no idea about ranges of cultivation of cereals. I think rice in the West, and wheat in the North…
“Vegetables” here are a human category: what we call “vegetables” (I don’t know if plantains count). Which has to do with our naïve idea of how people cook and what we will find on the table rather than with Grand ideas about human civilisation.
No, the -s is there in the original and was reanalyzed as the plural ending in English.
As I told above, it was triggered by
1. Denham’s and Clapperton’s travelogues.
Dixon Denham was much ridiculed, duly or unduly, over the 19th century because he joined a “ghrazzie”, a raid of Arab slavers. The raid was unsuccessful. I rememeber (but without confidence) the sultan tricked them and used their company in his warfare with the Fula, who thoroughly defeated them.
I did not really read the travelogue, yet I remember he spoke of locals growign onions. When I read it for the first time, I though that something about local conditions (or cuisine) makes onions very important.
Now I thought that comparing them to myself is a silly idea. I eat 4 kinds of cereals (rye bread and buckwheat as a good Russian and as everyone wheat bread and pasta. Also rice in pilaf or sushi, otherwise I don’t like it) but there are cultures who’re enthusiastic wheat eaters or rice eaters and have been so since Antiquity.
Meanwhile every child here will name many vegetables, but there is no reason to think same is true for people Denham spoke about (and their every child).
2. Abu Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments. I know this text well, because it is one of several random texts I used for practicing English-to Russian translations (only ot learn what difficulties I’ll encounter in the process).
But I am ready to recommend the book or at least some chapters as… Hm. As a text shedding some light on certain poetic genres that we know.
In the line you’ll find in google if you follow the second link Bedouin praise “dry” desert food (for some reason they classify both cereals and dairy products as “dry”) and complain at vegetable stew they eat now.
DM,
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yam : “Borrowed from Portuguese inhame and Spanish ñame, likely from Wolof ñàmbi (“cassava”) or a related word. The term was spelled yam as early as 1657.”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ñàmbi#Wolof : “Compare Bambara ñambu (“manioc”).”
In what language does it have an s?
From the Wiktionary and Wikipedia translation list, German has Yamswurzel and Yams; Swedish, Norwegian and Danish have jams; Finnish has jamssi, which seems parallel to Russian ямс. I wonder if German got yam from English, formed Yamswurzel, and then the s was reanalyzed as part of the word before it was loaned further on. Looks like David M has the direction of reanalysis backwards.
“Vegetables” here are a human category
Indeed Vegetables Don’t Exist (botanically). See there for linguistic and historical discussion.
The origin of yam beyond Portuguese/Spanish is murky and disputed, often attributed to Wolof ñam ‘food’ or a cognate in some other West African language. Somebody put the ‘cassava’ word into Wiktionary without bothering to cite a source, so there’s no way of knowing how reliable it is — perhaps the same source used by AHD, which offers “Bambara ñambu, manioc” as an alternative to Wolof?
My problem here is that cassava (synonym of manioc, Manihot esculenta, if I understand correctly) is from the New World, so any words for it in African languages can’t go back before Columbus. Was cassava already being eaten in West Africa, and called by that name, by the time Europeans picked up the word (Portuguese in 1567, Spanish in 1557, according to the old (1921, unrevised) OED entry)? Or did ñambu or ñàmbi mean something else at that time? Does the source, whatever it is, address those questions?
Polyglot Vegetarian has sources that the old OED didn’t, demonstrating that the word existed in Africa, and was known to Columbus, before he sailed west, so it obviously didn’t mean ‘cassava’ then:
Bambara ñambu seems to be nonexistent.
Dyula has bananku “manioc”, ku “yam.”
I see that Mooré has borrowed bãndaku “manioc.” The word looks to me like a borrowing (at several removes) of Spanish mandioca.
Manding does not strike me as a very likely source for Atlantic creole words anyway. I suspect that the mindset is “‘from a West African language’ is pretty lame. Can’t we find something plausible in a dictionary of some West African language or another?”
“Yam” from Wolof “eat” is out of the same playbook, I reckon. It does happen that people call their staple food after the verb “eat” (Gulimancema dibu “millet” is an example.) As far as I can make out, the staples in Senegal are rice and millet. I don’t know what “yam” is in Wolof.
In a spirit of enquiry, I looked up “cassava/manioc” in various Gur languages; none of these words is recorded as meaning anything other than “manioc”, incidentally:
Western Oti-Volta:
Mooré bãndaku. From Dyula, most likely, though possibly Songhay.
Toende Kusaal bãndaku.
Mampruli bankyi.
Dagbani banchi.
Farefare baŋki.
These look like compounds of ki “millet” with the same first element as in Dyula bananku, or may just be folk-etymological remodellings of the same basic word by analogy with “millet.”
Dagaare kpoŋŋo. Dunno.
Other Oti-Volta:
Buli banchibik. Borrowed from WOV. Second part is “fruit/seed.”
Nawdm kpeerŋu. Dunno. But Nawdm is like that.
Gulimancema pángùma, tángunbo. The second one may be remodelled after tán- “earth.”
Mbelime fɔ̀ɔ̀hṵ̀. Dunno.
Waama fokiwɔ̃ɔbu: a compound of “yam”: the first component looks cognate with the Mbelime word.
Outside Oti-Volta:
Kassem bancɩga, mancɩga. Borrowed from WOV.
Chakali kpõŋkpõŋ. Evidently connected with the Dagaare word. Not that that helps.
Baatonum loogo (from Hausa rogo), tanguma (from Gulimancema?)
Koromfe bʌ̃ndʌku. Obviously borrowed from Mooré, like a lot of Koromfe vocabulary.
Songhay (Hombori Senni) has bánáŋkû too, and that seems to have been the basis of most of these forms. The others were presumably repurposed from names for other plants, though in no case is there a hint as to their original reference.
No idea about Hausa rōgṑ either.
Here’s Corominas on Spanish ñame (I’m reading it through machine translation). He thinks (writing in the 1970s) it’s an unsolved problem. Columbus’s mames and niames are actually the earliest attestations of the word in Spanish, so Corominas first has to establish that Columbus brought the word to America, and not vice versa. We know this, he says, because Columbus was already using it as early as November 1492, and because later Spanish writers say ñame was being grown by African slaves in the Caribbean, but it was imported, not indigenous — as opposed to batata, aje, and other Taino words for local tubers.
Corominas then cites previous scholarship supporting an African source word, but he doesn’t trust it: “as the problem has not been examined by scholars knowledgeable in Bantu linguistics, nothing can be certain for the moment”. He thinks it’s impossible to tell whether it came from a Bantu language or was created by onomatopoeia in Portuguese creole: “We need the study of someone versed in the historical and comparative grammar of Bantu languages.”
Well, we’ve got someone versed in the historical and comparative grammar of Bantu languages right here. But if the original word was a generic ‘food’, then the question is, why did Columbus, and later Spanish and Portuguese speakers, think it meant a specific tuber? Were yams a trade item in the 1480s, when Columbus was trading along the coast of Africa as far as Ghana? Or were yams a staple food carried on ships to feed the crew? Aren’t they too bulky and perishable, compared to grains?
It’s no surprise if some amateur went flipping through dictionaries and put whatever sound-alike they found into Wiktionary, without knowing anything about the history of which tuber was cultivated where. It is surprising if AHD made such a rookie mistake, but maybe they did, this once; that is, I don’t think giving a source glossed as ‘manioc’ is satisfactory, even under their space restrictions.
Well, specialisation of borrowings is a thing (Russian balyk “smoked sturgeon”, izyum ”’raisins”).
A Klingon offers a basket full of unappeting stuff and says “food”. You understand that food is the name of this unappetising stuff. Then you offer a bottle of wine and say “drink”…
Corominas seems to be under the misapprehension that West African languages are Bantu. There were slaves from Bantu-speaking regions, but they don’t seem to have left much in the way of linguistic traces compared with West Africans. (Incidentally, “eat” in Wolof is in fact lèkk. Nyaama is Fulfulde – another unlikely source for Atlantic creole vocabulary.)
But this would of course relate to a significantly earlier period than the later massive Atlantic trade. The Portuguese in particular raided further south: Congo, Angola.
I hadn’t really thought about Bantu. There is in fact an extremely widespread “food” etymon, certainly going back to proto-Volta-Congo if not further: proto-Oti-Volta *nêm-tʊ, proto-Bantu *-nyàmà. It turns up in e.g. Kusaal nim, Nawdm námgú, Swahili nyama. It even turns up in Hausa nama (presumably borrowed from VC.) This may well be what is behind some of all this stuff about a supposed nyam “eat”, now I think of it. I suspect that the Niger-Congo enthusiasts have tried to link it with Fulfulde nyaama too.
However, it is also abundantly clear that what this Volta-Congo etymon actually means is meat, and certainly not “food” in general. In fact, it sometimes turns up in the sense “game animal.” All it’s got in common with “yam” is that you can eat it. And it’s a noun, not a verb.
I think the Niger-Congo lumpers making out that *nyam- is proto-Niger-Congo for “eat” are just trying to compensate for the awkward fact that proto-Volta-Congo *dɪ- “eat” has no cognates in Atlantic at all, despite being highly conserved in all the actually related branches:
Kusaal di, Kassem dí, Miyobe lè, Samba Leko lí, Gbeya ri-, Twi di, Bété li, proto-Bantu *dɪ́ -… hell, maybe even Dogon (Toro Tegu) lɛ́ …
Atlantic hasn’t even got *kul- “tortoise”! I mean … talk about basic vocabulary!
“The Portuguese … raided further south” – no reason to think this isn’t what Corominas meant)
*kul- “tortoise” – whence Latin culus))) (I think I’ll say that I’m kidding. who know who’s reading this)
whence Latin culus
My observations suggest that some are rounder (and thus more tortoisely) than others. It is possible that the Romans were particularly favoured in this area.
It had not previously occurred to me that culotte derives from this word.
Poking around, I think Wolof ñam is actually primarily “taste”; it seems always to be “taste” as a verb, though “nourriture” turns up for it when it is used as a noun.
And ñambi is Wolof for “cassava.”
https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/languages/PeaceCorps/Wolof/Wolof%20Dictionary.pdf
My efforts to discover the Wolof for “yam” remain unfruitful.
https://jangileen.kalam-alami.net/dictionary/search?query=igname&lang=fr
Specialization of borrowings is a thing, but it would still need an explanation. This is not just one guy guessing a word from one dinner, it’s a whole system of traders and slavers. Corominas quotes Oviedo, in the early 1500s, writing that ñame is «fructa estrangera e no natural de aquestas Indias… la qual vino con esta mala casta de los negros», and concludes that the species *and the word* were known to the Africans then enslaved in the Caribbean, but they could have learned the word as part of the creole.
The Portuguese in particular raided further south: Congo, Angola. — yes, but that’s not where Columbus went and it’s not what Corominas was talking about. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to start trading and slaving on the Guinea coast, during Columbus’s youth; Wikipedia tells me that in 1482 they built Elmina Castle, which would become the first of many “slave castles”, and that Columbus went there.
So “Bantu” is pretty much irrelevant as far as the earliest African slaves in the Americas are concerned.
Yams as a staple are pretty much a feature of the Côte d’Ivoire though to Nigeria part of West Africa, I think, so that would match with the African origin story too. (But not with an Atlantic source for the word, though.)
…and ñamñamñam is the corresponding ideophone, obviously.
it’s a whole system – it is always a system.
Looks like I was wrong about the origins of W African slaves in Columbus’ day:
So Wolof-speakers were likely well in evidence.
Central Africa was involved quite early, but the victims ended up in Brazil rather than the Caribbean:
https://www.aehnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Manning.Slavery-and-Slave-Trade-in-West-Africa-1450-1930.pdf
A strange Mandara numeral in a vocabulary from Denham’s and Clapperton’s travelogues linked above.
From the travelogue, then from Frajzyngier (who too says it is odd):
1 Mtaque pállè
2 Sardah bùà
3 Kighah kíɠyé
4 Fuddah úffáɗè
5 Elibah yíɮɓè
6 N’quaha ŋ̀kwàhè
7 Vouyali vúuyè
8 Teesah tíisè
9 Musselman másə́lmànè
10 Klaou kláwà
(about the mismatch in words for 1, 2:
11 ……. kláwà jú mtùkwè
12 ……. kláwà jú bwà
13 ……. kláwà jú kíɠyé
…
…
20 Kulboa, kulla boa kúl bwà (‘ten two’)
…
100 Drimka ……..
200 Dibboo …….. – why didn’t Frajzyngier say anything about hundreds and thousands?)
I’ve come across this sort of thing elsewhere, though I can’t recall exactly where: something like “nine” being literally “Fulani eight.”
Numbers (even low ones) are very prone to borrowing in West Africa. The proto-Oti-Volta numbers seem to be reconstructable right up to a thousand, but Byali, Ditammari, Nateni and Waama have all borrowed “six” from some unknown source shared with Miyobe.
– why didn’t Frajzyngier say anything about hundreds and thousands?
I often find Frajzyngier’s grammars frustrating. He seems to be much more into abstract analytical systems than gritty details – including, sometimes, pretty important gritty details. It’s the more disappointing, in that he’s described some typologically really interesting and downright odd languages. (Chadic loves those.)
(His Hdi grammar doesn’t treat the number words at all, if that’s any consolation.)
He says multilingual Wandala (Mandara) speakers give SVO responces to requests in an SVO language, while monolinguals use an order he doesn’t count as SVO*
(I wonder if manual for field work always warn about this)
*Subject pronouns precede the verb. When there is a nominal subject, they surround the verb.
There’s a fair bit of God’s Own Preferred Clause Constituent Order (VSO*) in Chadic, sometimes alongside SVO in the same language, depending on things like aspect and subordination.
The phenomenon of informants’ word order being influenced by the language the linguist is using is actually quite well-known, and field linguists certainly are aware of it as a trap (one of many) when using elicited data. It most often comes up with languages that use word order a lot for information-packaging purposes like focusing, naturally (as opposed to marking subjects and objects.) A lot of Australian languages are like that.
Oti-Volta is mostly boringly SVO, but proto-Oti-Volta may well have been SOV.
* Classical Arabic, Biblical Hebrew, Welsh … proves my point, no?
God’s Own Preferred Clause Constituent Order
Ipse dixit:
In principio erat Verbum …
“Fulani eight.”
that’s wonderful
I made that particular example up, I’m afraid. All I can remember about the real one is that it went Ethnonym-Cardinal. It was probably West African, because I’ve read more grammars of West African languages than anywhere else, and because weirdness of the numbers 6 to 9 is common thereabouts.
“Ethnonym-Cardinal”
That’s what makes it wonderful.
(if it were 9, that would have told us something interesting about the role of 8)
Why is six afraid of seven?
Ethnonym-Cardinal
i hear he’s a contender for the triple crown this time around!
And yes, my language does use word order for information structure.
Books translated from SVO languages often keep this SVO order and I think it is understood as a register.
Also my ex-wife forwarded to me some joke form the Internet, an instruction for converting texts into Biblical, followed by an example (literally from Russian, but not the exact words of the joke… it was something about cooking or brewing tea.: “and took I kettle mine and put I it on stove mine, and boiled kettle mine”). A register too:)
Sounds a lot like Biblical Hebrew, if “mine” is a suffix.
How does he brew tea? VSO.
Maybe that should be “How did…”
Why is six afraid of seven?
It’s a love story. They’ve been a bit of an item for a long time. Actually seven is afraid. The prime reason is that on his bad days six wants to break up, but seven never does.
Thus the expression “being at sixes and sevens”.
@Jerry, that is how our Bibles work (I’m too sleepy to check which ones are more Hebrew: those based on the Septuagint or those based on both the Septuagint and Hebrew)
I was peeling an onion in order to make it “caramelise and undergo Maillard reactions” and realised that I have been thinking about Brett’s onion paradox for 8 days.
Seriously: the unusual quality of onions is what Brett called spiciness. And tears too. I mechanically thought that that is WHY people eat them.
But people use them in ways that reduce spiciness.
Does this spiciness has to do with “the way they caramelise” and products of reactions?
Don’t know which thread this belongs in:
One peculiar linguistic experience of Russian speakers has to do with water. Usually mineral water, but, for a couple of decades, not only.
That’s because of springs of the Caucasus: bottles of mineral water have exotic names, not quite in line with Russian logic. Why I’m saying this: I read ПСЫЖ PSYZH on a price tag in a shop and even though I never heard “Псыж”, I knew it is going to be mineral water.
(A certain lady, when she was 13 used weird onomatopoeias, among them “пс” and “пыщ-пыщ”)
Yep, that sounds West Caucasian.
It does. And mineral water is where Russians learn West and Northeast Caucasian.
Though the Russian name is simplified: it is Псыжв in Abaza and Псыжь in East Circassian.
A friend of mine drinks Рычал-су (when he is not drinking beer or wine (that is when he’s exercising or at noon… nevertheless, often enough)). Су is “water”, I don’t know what language is рычал, but the spring is near Цнал which is Lezgian.
Thus a curious Russian will learn that Tsnal “sounds NE Caucasian” and Psyzh(v) “sounds West Caucasian”.
@drasvi: It’s definitely the pungency that makes the Allium popular with humans. There are lots of sulfur compounds, which are nice raw but can be even more interesting and mellow when lightly cooked.
I discussed the evolutionary basis for bulbs and rhizomes being spicy or noxious a few years ago. It was perhaps first discussed by Samuel Butler:
However, Butler missed that becoming popular with humans has made some of these plants very evolutionarily successful.
@Brett, does not that contradictict what you said above? About people developing less pungent onions?
It is not pungent when (even lightly) cooked, and it’s eaten raw much less often.
Or do you mean that it is the chemicals that make it pungent that convert into something interesting but not pungent when you fry it?
P.S. Onion soaked in vinegar is sometimes served with pilaf, but I think the important component here is vinegar*. I don’t know why (though I think this “why” is widely known), but it somehow compensates for fat and oil abundant in pilaf. You want something sour. I drink pomegrenade juice when having pilaf. Have no idea if this is customary (given the importance of pomegrenade for the Iranian cuisine to which pilaf does not really belong** but which overlaps with Central-Asian cuisine) but but I like pomegrenade juice, I eat pilaf and they work wonderfully well together.
* If Denham speaks about onions as the only vegetable widely cultivated and sold around lake Chad 200 years ago – which provoked my question above – I guess it is also important for Central Asia which is a part of the region where it came from.
** Or it does, but my friends from Tehran don’t eat it.
…in Turkic, though, while r- is not Turkic. Looks like the name can be pinned down to a specific elevation in Daghestan.
drasvi: Or do you mean that it is the chemicals that make it pungent that convert into something interesting but not pungent when you fry it?
That’s part of it. Cooking converts the protective sulfur compounds into less acrid but still flavorful substances. These reactions often involve the same sugars that participate in the Maillard reaction. However, people also like to eat raw onions. I think part of what is happening is that onions can be grown larger than other related bulbs, and if they were bred to be as pungent as possible, there would just be too much sulfur in an onion slice to be palatable. So the “best” onion varieties have been bred for a balance of sweetness and pungency.
I do eat raw onion with borodinski bread. Lots of things are edible with borodinski bread which are not edible without it. Say, сало in winter. Or salt – a freind of mine will eat a slice of borodinski with some salt.
They’re edible with wheat bread too, but borodinski does a better job.
And I know a female student (well, she was a student 20 years ago) who’d mix a huge pile of pieces of onion with some crab sticks and mayonnaise. Lots of things are edible with mayonnaise (even though I am not sure if mayonnaise is edible…), but when we were making it together she told that it’s of principal importance that the pile of onions is huge.
But I think raw consumption is not why it is known and grown and sold everyhwere.
Well, people put raw onions in salads and on sandwiches, not to dilute the taste of the onion but too add spice to the underlying dish. As for myself, I like raw onions without addiition; when I was in my 20s and early 30s, I often found onions not spicy enough and would eat them cut into small slices, adding oil and vinegar, and adding pepper. At some point I stopped liking that and I haven’t prepared that dish for at least 20 years.
Onion soaked in vinegar is sometimes served with pilaf, but I think the important component here is vinegar*. I don’t know why
i suspect it’s about using the acid in the vinegar to “cook” (for lack of a better word) the onions – as it’s used with seafoods in ceviche, and in non-fermentation pickling processes. there’s a whole constellation of side-dishes/accompaniments prepared like that, that often get talked about as “pickles” in english, and i think tend to involve onions, cabbage, or both: the quickest to my mind is salvadoran curtido.
@Hans, surely we people do. But I think in [circum-Russian] cooking onions play a bigger role.
At least in all cuisines I know the role of salads is supportive. At least (again), traditionally.
[I’m less confident about sandwiches. I think humans first took out with them some bread-with-something when they learned to bake, and took dried meat when they did not know how to bake bread. There is a widespread idea that “traditionally” at home people cook and eat what they cook (not sandwiches) but there is also a widespread idea that Taliban is epitome of “traditionalism” – there is a reason to be careful with widepread ideas of traditions:)]
Also cooking some (sometimes indispensable) dishes without onions is unthinkable for people. They are more flexible with salads and sandwiches
[but that’s we who can choose from a million of ingredients. When you assemble them from locally produced ingredients somewhere in the ancient Middle East absence of onions may mean “same, but this time without onions” and disappoint you]
Yes, that lady also asks for lots of onion when ordering sandwiches in fast food restaurants and will enter an argument with staff when or if they understand it as “slighly more than usual” (and won’t eat the sandwich). Once we talked about it, she confirmed that she simply loves onions.
Perhaps, as in your case, more passionately when she was younger.
“[…] – come home, chop onions, decide what to eat!”
Quote from some intarwebz or other. And TIL one of my sisters puts onions in broccoli soup.
@rozele, I thought so because pomegrenade juice (many people find it too sour and add sugar or water – of course some manufacturers do it too) works well and those sour onions are somehow appropriate too.
And because why serve something so simplistic? But yes, the idea can be simply “let’s serve some vegetables with it”, and then vinegar is used to “cook” it as you said.
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“[…] – come home, chop onions, decide what to eat!”
@DM, in the context this made me laugh.
And I don’t know if I’d have realised it is funny without this context.
PS but I think it was meant to be funny)
Pomegrenade juice: the full sotry is that pilaf is a “big” dish which you won’t cook every day. (Same for Central Asia) For this reason when I eat pilaf I usually also drink wine. And the taste of wine seriously depends on what you’re eating with it. With pilaf wine is… less tasty. Angered with that once I replaced is with the juice and it solved the problem. There is a drawback that it does not contain alcohol, but sadly, with years I’m growing more tolerant of sobriety:( And it can be drank out when you’ve switched from pilaf to something else.
Now I’m wondering if there is an Arabian dish intermediate between Central Asian pilaf and Maghrebi couscous.
Unless, of course, couscous was brought to NW Africa by invading Khorasani soldiers – as a wheat-based replacement to rice-based pilaf:))))
One of my favorite parts of Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence’s description in chapter 46 of how they banqueted on kabsa when they were in camp, with the honor and responsibility for preparing rice and meat for all the nobles and dignitaries rotating nightly from one family to the next. This is one of the book’s frequent discussions of the day-to-day practicalities of Bedouin life—and of food especially. In a well-supplied camp, with family groups, the men stuffed themselves every day, to make up for the scarcity they sometimes faced when traveling, when the only food available for days might be flatbread made of flour, water, and salt, cooked beside their open campfires.