Vegetus

I apologize that posting here has been so light this year, but other demands on my time have taken priority. I have tried to adjust this post to the recent Google Books changes; please let me know if any of the links are misbehaving.

The first post here was a footnote to the history of the word vegan, which was coined around 1944. Just about a century before that, the word vegetarian was coined. It really took hold with the formation of The Vegetarian Society in 1847, but is attested before that.

Most authoritative etymologies form vegetarian irregularly from vegetable and -arian, somewhat along the lines of unitarian. So the OED, AHD and Skeat. Weekley says, “Currency of barbarously formed vegetarian dates from formation of Vegetarian Society at Ramsgate (1847).” Partridge has a slightly different take:

From ML vegetāte comes the ML adj vegetālis, whence EF-F végétal, whence E vegetal, EF-F végétal has derivative végétarien, whence végétarianisme: whence E vegetarian, vegetarianism. (s.v. vigor)

Though I am not sure on what evidence; most sources trace végétarien to English, not the other way around.

An alternative derivation is directly from Latin vegetus 'vigorous' without any intermediate vegetable. For example, in a letter to “Ask Ms. Natural” in the 1981 Vegetarian Times. The Souvenir of the XVth World Vegetarian Congress, India, 1957 (pp. 104-106) excerpts Carlos (Charles) Brandt's The Vital Problem (a translation of El fundamento de la moral), where he traces vegetarianism through vegetus and its uses in Latin to other cognates. (In the version on the IVU site, the editor inserts a disclaimer about the starting assumption.) He credits Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon (6th edition, not 18th; s.v. Vegetarismus) for being the only reference source he consulted that got the etymology and meaning right. The masthead of The Vegetarian, the organ of the Society from the 1880's, has a scroll beneath the title that reads, “Vegetus — Vital, Healthful, Vigorous.” I have not been able to find an image of this online, but an advertisement promising the inaugural issue on 19th December (1881) says similarly, “Vegetus — Signifying all that is Vital, Healthful, and Vigorous.”

One of the reasons for promoting this was that the name made mockery of vegetarians like that in Punch shortly after the Society's foundation easier. (Although there would certainly be something else in any case; a review of such satire in various places, languages and times might make for another post.)

As the Wikipedia points out, this proposal is rather suspect. (For one thing, there are earlier uses than the society, like this.) In other words, it is a learned folk-etymology. But it does come with some interesting learned associations.

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Thirteen Satires of Juvenal (leaving out, as often happens, II, VI, and IX, though the work isn't really intended for younger students) is, or was, a minor monument of Victorian scholarship. Its author, John E. B. Mayor, was Professor of Latin at Cambridge University. The commentary is intended less as an aid to understanding and more as an exploration of the environment through a collection of references to related works. Gilbert Highet's Juvenal the Satirist says, “A text with very learned notes on all satires except 2, 6, and 9; the comments consist chiefly of parallel passages, and do not go deeply into problems of text and interpretation.”

Mayor was a philologist and delighted in the details. He contributed five notes to the first volume of Notes and Queries, the Victorian group blog; and nine articles to the first volume of The Classical Review, which was edited by his brother, Joseph. He wrote an article on Latin lexicography for the Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, in which he summed up his destiny, “there still remains work enough to keep the memory and the understanding employed to the end of life; there will still be new facts to collect, or forgotten facts to recover, to store up, and to classify.”

A . E. Housman succeeded Mayor as Latin Professor, a chair that was then renamed for Kennedy — an honor that Kennedy had refused while alive. (Mayor wrote a two part obituary of Kennedy for CR.) In his 1911 Inaugural Address, Housman attributes to Kennedy's Sabrinae Corolla (a collection of translations of English poems into Latin and Greek) his “genuine liking for Greek and Latin.” (Kennedy became Regius of Greek at Cambridge; in Stoppard's first scene, AEH tells this and has digs at him and Jowett, the Regius of Greek at Oxford. We still used an edition of Kennedy's public school primer in Form I Latin in the late '60s; I imagine they still uses it today.) Housman then goes on to say of Mayor:

Most good scholars are much fonder of learning than of teaching, and to Munro the duties of his office proved uncongenial and irksome. He resigned the Chair after a tenure of three years, and in 1872 it passed to the venerable man who left it vacant only last December; a scholar who in learning, if that word is taken to mean range and thoroughness of reading, had no equal in England and no superior in Europe. To dwell on the erudition of John Mayor is not merely superfluous but presumptuous; and I will now speak rather of a characteristic on which speech perhaps is not unnecessary. It is well known and sometimes lamented that for all his amplitude of knowledge he left behind him no complete work and no work having even the air of completeness. This regret I do not share; I am much more disposed to recommend for imitation the examples of one who recognized his own bent and followed it, and whose inclinations were exactly in harmony with his talents. Many a good piece of work has been spoilt by the vain passion for completeness. A scholar designs to edit a certain author, a complete edition of whom would involve the treatment of matters to whose study the editor has not been led by his own tastes and interests, and in which he therefore is not at home. The author discourses of philosophy, and the editor is no philosopher; or the author writes in complex metres, and the editor's metrical education stopped short at Porson's canon of the final cretic. It then sometimes happens that the editor, having neither the humility to acknowledge his deficiency nor the industry or capacity to repair it, scrapes a perfunctory acquaintance with the unfamiliar subject, and treats it incompetently rather than not treat it at all; so that his work, for the sake of ostensible completeness, is disfigured with puerile errors, and he himself is detected, not merely in ignorance, but in imposture.

It is the absence of any such vanity, the abstention from all misdirected effort, which redeems and even converts into merit what might else appear defective in the works of Mayor. The establishment and the interpretation of an author's text were not matters in which he took the liveliest interest nor tasks for which he felt in himself a special aptitude: his likings pointed the same way as his abilities, to the collections of illustrative material. I said while he was alive, and I shall not unsay it because he is dead, that this labour is labour bestowed upon the circumference and not the centre of the subject. But this also is work which must be done, and which no other could have done so thoroughly. ‘If a man read Richardson for the story’, said Johnson, ‘he would hang himself’; and much the same may be said not only of Mayor's Juvenal but of a still more celebrated book, Lobeck's Ajax of Sophocles. When you have finished Lobeck's commentary you have imbibed a vast deal of information, but your knowledge and understanding of the Ajax has not proportionally increased. Lobeck himself in his preface admits that this is so; τὸ μὲν πάρεργον ἔργον ὣς ποιούμεθα [, τὸ δ' ἔργον ὡς πάρεργον ἐκπονούμεθα. 'we treat our by-work as work, and perform our work as by-work. ' Agathon, frag. 11]. He in his commentary is not principally the critic nor the interpreter, but the grammarian; and Mayor in his is principally the antiquarian and the lexicographer: his main concern is not with what the author wrote or meant, but with the words he used and the things he mentioned. These he carried in his mind through the whole width of his incomparable reading, and brought back from the limits of the literature all the parallels and imitations and echoes which it contained. What he has bequeathed us is less an edition than a treasure of subsidies: there he saw his true business, and to that business he stuck: and ‘it is an uncontrolled truth’, says Swift, ‘that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them’.

(Housman, too, would edit a Juvenal, with just an English introduction and no notes.)

Around 1880, Mayor joined the Vegetarian Society and in 1884 was elected president. At Cambridge, he was not known as a particularly effective lecturer, tending to deliver unadorned citations, as in his commentaries. But he was a proselytizer. M. R. James recalled in his memoir Eton and King's: Recollections, Mostly Trival, 1875-1925 (pp. 181-2):

There was never any translation, or any explanation of an interesting point. Of course Mayor, imagining that everybody was as conscientious as himself, thought that one would go home and look up all these references and copy out the passages in a neat hand. But! At the end of the lecture there was an oasis. I used to carry Mayor's books back to his rooms in St. John's, and he would reward me with a copy of the last number of the Vegetarian Magazine, or refresh me with the reading of a letter he had written to, or received from, one of the Old Catholic Bishops. Innocency, charity, the purest enthusiasm for learning were seen at their best in Mayor: accompanied by a want of sense of proportion (and humour) which could hardly be exaggerated.

In 1886, he greatly expanded the “Advertisement” at the head of his Juvenal, which had been previously unremarkable — the early editions just noting that he had purposely not read anyone else's English edition and containing the ultimately unfulfilled promise to do all sixteen satires, and the enlarged second edition just providing some more details on the text. In this fourth edition, it became a wide-ranging discourse on various matters, including in particular vegetarianism and temperance, only barely managing to return to the topic of Juvenal at the very end. There was so much new material that it was also published separately as a supplement to the first volume.

All of which explains why Mayor's Juvenal, in its final edition, contains a footnote on the etymology of vegetarian. To be specific, it refers to an address he had given, which was issued as a pamphlet, titled What is Vegetarianism? I have not had any luck tracking down a copy of this; it is just possible that it is included in the collection of essays, Plain Living and High Thinking (see here), but I have not been able to track down a copy of that, either. (Suggestions would be welcome.) Only one library lists it in OCLC, I suspect because others catalog it differently, perhaps because it it's in a box with other Vegetarian Society ephemera. Still, it is possible to piece together much of it from quotations in the Mar. 1907 Vegetarian Magazine and a note by William E. A. Axon in the Christmas 1909 Notes & Queries (snippet only in GB; note that he says that as of then the word had only been traced back to 1845, just before the Society's founding).

The name was born with the Society. [...] No lexicographer has learnt our secret, ‘fruit and farinacea’. The vulgar error that we devour a wheelbarrow load of cabbages at a meal is fostered by definitions like these:

[Here everyone omits Mayor's inventory of “wrong” definitions from various lexica, which is too bad, since that is just the sort of thing this blog is all about.]

Would you be surprised to learn that as Vegetarians, looking at the word etymologically, not historically or in the light of our official definition, we are neither required to eat all vegetable products, nor vegetable products only, nor even vegetable products at all? Far from committing us to abstain from milk and eggs, the name derives its connexion with diet exclusively from the definition given to it by our Society.

When librarian means an ‘eater of books,’ antiquarian ‘an eater of antiques,’ even then vegetarian will not, cannot, mean ‘an eater of vegetables.’ Your learned townsman, my old friend Mr. Roby, has cited many nouns substantive and adjective ending in arius = Engl. arian. All of these are derived from nouns substantive or adjective, none from verbs. Prof. Skeat was misled by a borrowed definition. Antiquus, ‘ancient’; antiqua, ‘antiques’; antiquarius, ‘one who studies, deals in, has to do with, antiques an antiquary or antiquarian.’ So vegetarius, ‘one who studies, has to do with, vegeta.’ What vegetus means you shall hear from impartial lips :—

Vegetabilis is not used in good Latin at all. Cicero's word for plants is gignentia.

‘Vegetus, whole, sound, strong, quick, fresh, lively, lusty, gallant, trim, brave; vegeto, to refresh, recreate, or make lively, lusty, quick and strong, to make sound.’ Thomas Holyoke, ‘Latin Dictionary,’ London, 1677.

Ainsworth adds to the senses of ‘Vegetus,’ agile, alert, brisk, crank, pert, nourishing, vigorous, fine, seasonable; and renders the primitive ‘vegeo’ to be lusty and strong, or sound and whole; to make brisk or mettlesome; to refresh.

The word vegetarius belongs to an illustrious family. Vegetable, which has been called its mother, is really its niece. Vegetation, vigil, vigilant, vigour, invigorate, wake, watch, wax, augment; the Gr. ὑγιὴς (sound) ; Hygieia, the goddess of health; hygiene, the science of health; all these are more or less distant relatives.

The Vegetarian, then, is one who aims at wholeness, soundness, strength, quickness, vigour, growth, wakefulness, health. These must be won by a return to nature, and the natural food for man is a diet of fruit and farinacea, with which some combine such animal products as may be enjoyed without destroying sentient life.

In his clarification, and in specifically addressing his footnote to Sir Henry Thompson's work on diet, and Eduard von Hartmann's essay “Was sollen wir essen?” 'What should we eat?', Mayor is also addressing an issue which would be framed in modern terms as the difference between vegetarians and vegans. His opponents claim that vegetarians, transparently eaters only of foods with vegetable origins, are deceptive when they also eat animal protein like eggs or milk. So, there is position to be won by showing that vegetarian actually refers to a healthy diet in which those are permitted. (This being before it was clear how one might manage to get complete protein without them.) This same idea is presented by Josiah Oldfield in reply to two articles by Thompson and he gives a similar derivation from vegeto 'invigorate'. Eustace Miles rejects the name, since animal protein is needed for his athlete's vegetarian diet. Henry Salt hedges his bets a little:

Mind, I am not saying that the originators of the term “vegetarian” had this meaning in view, but merely that the etymological sense of the word does not favour your contention any more than the historical. (The Logic of Vegetarianism, p. 5)

(In other words, he goes one step beyond the argument that etymology exposes the true meaning of a word, because it does so even when the coiners did not know or intend it.)

In August, 1907, the Third Universal Congress of Esperantists was held in Cambridge. Mayor (then 83) took advantage of the opportunity to learn enough of the language to deliver a speech in Esperanto on the last morning (apparently he addressed them at other times in English that had to be translated). The Times (Mon., Aug. 19, 1907) reported:

Professor J. E. B. Mayor, professor of Latin at Cambridge, addressed the congress amid a scene of the greatest enthusiasm. He said that in their meetings miracle followed miracle, and he had ceased to be astonished at the mutual comprehensibility of all nations. It had come to be plainly seen that their Esperanto Congresses had resulted in the discovery of a new international nation, of which Dr. Zamenhof was the Christopher Columbus. They had witnessed a new Pentecostal festival, as shown by the different nationalities there represented. Professor Mayor proceeded to say he considered it a great mistake for people to suppose that the learning of Esperanto would interfere with the study of other languages. He was convinced that if a child of five learnt Esperanto he would afterwards learn with ease French, Latin, German, &c. Esperanto was, in fact, the lernigilo for all other languages.

See also here and here. I wonder whether a copy of this speech survives someplace.

For more information on Mayor, see the DNB, the obituary by J. E. Sandys in The Classical Review, the “Memoir” in Twelve Cambridge Sermons, and John Henderson's Juvenal's Mayor: the Professor who Lived on 2^d a Day. (I do not agree with the Wikipedia that this last portrait is "unsympathetic," though it is indeed "idiosyncratic." It aims to strike some balance between Mayor as a useless old kook and ignoring his quirks. See also the review of it by one of Henderson's students, Susanna Morton Braund, who is herself a vegetarian and an editor of Juvenal.) Henderson has also edited a version of Mayor's Juvenal, adding commentary on the commentary. Someone should track down a copy of the Catalogue of the Library of J. E. B. Mayor, Deceased, Comprising Upwards of 18,000 Volumes of Books and get it started in LibraryThing's Legacy Libraries project.

Mayor's predecessor as president of the Vegetarian Society was Francis W. Newman, who is best remembered today for holding less orthodox religious views than his brother, John Henry, Cardinal Newman. (There was a third brother, Charles Robert, who was an atheist and a hermit. The Grammar of Assent sums up the situation, “Thus, of three Protestants, one becomes a Catholic, a second a Unitarian, and a third an unbeliever.”) Francis was Professor of — Latin! — at University College, London. (Charles Kingsley, Cardinal Newman's adversary in the debate on Catholicism and Truth which sparked, and is given in an appendix to some editions of, Newman's Apologia, had the same tutor at Cambridge as Mayor, Dr. Bateson.) Professor Newman was a polymath, writing on mathematics as well as religion, philology and vegetarianism. (See the bibliography here.)

Newman translated some English works into Latin, as part of a scheme for facilitating teaching the language:

• Hiawatha:

  Juxta ripas Aequoris Maximi,
  Lacûs latissime relucentis,
  Nocomidis stabat tugurium,
  Nocomidis e Lunâ genitae.
  Nigra surgit pone silva,
  Atrâ contristata pino
  Atque abiete nucamentis squameâ.
  Clara jactatur in froute unda
  Praeter ripam Lacûs Maximi,
  Unda aprica, late relucens. (p. 22)

• Shorter Translations of English Poetry into Latin Verse, such as [15] “Erin's Days of Old”:

  Tempus Ierne revocet veterum,
  Prava priusquam sua progenies
  Infidè proderet ipsam:
  Quum colli déçus aurea torqnis,
  Derepta superbo invasori,
  Malachaeum laudibus auxit;
  Regesque sui, viridi elato
  Panno, miniâ fronde Quirites
  Ducebant per fera bella;
  Necdum regia nostra maragdus
  Maris Hesperii gemma refulsit
  Tempora circum peregriui. (p. 45)

  Note how the philologist cannot help inserting a footnote proposing that Curaidhe 'knights' and Quirites must be cognate, an idea that he also picks up in Regal Rome and which gets blasted by Donaldson here. Curaidh seems to be from a root *k̂ū-ro-s 'strong' and cognate with κύριος and शूर.
   
• or [61] “Peace After War”:

  Nobis hiems morosa tandem splendida
  Evasit aestas sole sub Ebŏrāceo;
  Nubesque cunctae, quae domum obscuraverant,
  Evanuere, penitus immersae mari. (p. 147)

• Robinson Crusoe (Rebilius Cruso; as much a retelling in Latin as a strict translation, and so actually missing most famous passages):

  209. Tamen neutiquam satiata est mea cupiditas. Ad cocos nuces demetendas falculam illam mecum apportavi; scalas novas ipsis in hortis relinquebam. Dum autem infra incedo, ananassas video multas, (mala pïnea vulgo nos vocamus): nunquam ego anteà has animadverti. Jam intelligo et plurimas esse et maximas, paene ex arenis cum cactis nascentes. Unam illicò vindemiavi, nec abstinui quin grande frustum comederim. (p. 55)

He prepared a text of the Iguvine Tables with interlinear latin translation.

Of Newman's translation of the Iliad, Matthew Arnold wrote, “while for want of appreciating the fourth, [Homer's] nobleness, Mr. Newman, who has clearly seen some of the faults of his predecessors, has yet failed more conspicuously than any of them.” Newman replied with Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice and Arnold rejoined.

Newman wrote a Handbook and Dictionary of Modern Arabic, both avoiding the Arabic alphabet. He produced a number of monographs on Berber languages (I am not qualified to say how these compare to the ones listed recently at Jabal al-Lughat):

• “Outline of the Kabail Grammar.” West England Journal of Scientific Literature, 1836. (Listed in Berber bibliographies here and here.)
• “Essay towards a Grammar of the Berber Language,” West of England Journal 1.5 (January 1836): 161-84.
• “On the Berber Language of Mount Atlas, generally supposed to be that of the ancient Mauritanians.”
• “Of the Structure of the Berber Language.”
• “A Grammar of the Berber Language.”
  This ought to be online, but the necessary volume (6) of Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes didn't get scanned for some reason.
• “Berber Languages.” (uncredited).
• “The Narrative of Sidi Ibrahim ibn Muhammad el Messai el Susi.”
• “Wörterbuch des Dialektes der Auelimmiden.”
• “Notes on the Libyan Languages.”
• Libyan Vocabulary.
• Kabail Vocabulary Supplemented by the Aid of a New Source. (OCLC).

Newman's solution to the naming problem was V E M ('vegetables, eggs, milk'), suggested to him by his friend Thomas Jarrett, Professor of Arabic at Cambridge and then Regius of Hebrew. Of Jarrett, Edward James Rapson, Professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge, writing in the DNB, says:

As a linguist, Jarrett was chiefly remarkable for the extent and variety of his knowledge. He knew at least twenty languages, and taught Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Persian, Gothic, and indeed almost any language for which he could find a student. He spent much time in the transliteration of oriental languages into the Roman character, according to a system devised by himself; and also in promulgating a system of printing English with diacritical marks to show the sound of each vowel without changing the spelling of the word. (Vol. 10, p. 690)

Jarrett's New Way of Marking the Sounds of English Words Without Change of Spelling is online.

Newman sported the timeless look of a center part and long scraggly gray beard. For more information on him, see the DNB, the memoirs here, and the website of the Francis Newman Society.

Mayor's successor as president was, I believe, Ernest Bell, one of the sons of the publishers George Bell & Sons, and, as far as I know, not otherwise relevant to this post.

Magnets

I'm not much of one for annual events, such as national or religious holidays. I might manage a teetotaler's Bloomsday some years. There was a Hangul Day post last year, but that is more a commemoration than a celebration.

But the gift-giving season is when retailers stock up, particularly on items aimed at children. So that is when I am the lookout for some of the things we collect.

To keep posts here from becoming too formulaic, this will be another short and superficial picture post, covering one such collection. Plastic Alphabet Magnets.

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Upon reflection, there seems to be an attraction to magnets in general, whether it is a specimen of magnetite, classic bar and ring magnets, stronger neodymium magnets, or those construction toys with magnetic rods and steel balls.

For rare books, the library copy or a PDF is often enough. But we do happen to have a copy of Athanasius Kircher's Magnes, sive de arte magnetica. (The library with an online copy listed in the texts in that Wikipedia article actually has more of his works than just those listed.) As far as I know, this is the only book we own to ever be featured on the wonderful BibliOdyssey site.

Here is a basic uppercase Roman set:

I am certain that such sets exist with accents and umlauts, but I haven't found them around here. (Despite what people may claim, I haven't even seen one with an Ñ.)

The Cyrillic set I found is made of foam rubber, not plastic, so the photo isn't as shiny:

(I probably cheated making a Й from a И and one of the minus signs.)

The Greek set has complete Greek and Roman alphabets, in both upper- and lower-case. Even the uppercase that are roughly the same shape are distinguished by choosing a somewhat different font for the two:

The Devanagari only has the independent form of the vowels:

It is actually designed here in Boston (see this article), suggesting that much of the market is expat parents and especially grandparents.

I imagine the biggest seller through the grandparent channel would be the Hebrew:

No vowel points, but extra matres lectionis.

The Hangul consists of four complete sets of consonants and reorientable vowels, in four different colors:

(With four ㅏㅓㅗㅜ pieces, but only three ㅑㅕㅛㅠ pieces.) The company that makes these has arithmetic and Roman, too, not surprisingly. (Note how the product name 한글 자석놀이 'Hangul magnet fun' is written out on the magnetic memo-board on that page.)

For Arabic, a rather different approach is called for:

The pieces are color-coded for letters with similar behaviors. When connected, the pieces attach; when not, a tail attaches instead. The kāf rotates around to its final form. The lām + ʼalif mandatory ligature is made by flipping the second letter from behind. Fortunately, I don't need to describe it all, because the product's site goes into details.

I assume more of these exist, but I have not come across them yet. I should make this post even more relevant to the blog by including some photos of vegetable fridge magnets. But the issue is that our fridge has too much nickel in its stainless and isn't magnetic (I took the Frigits and Pendumonium into the office), so I have to locate them first and it seems best not to hold up a year-end post into late January. I will update when they show up.

Ginger

Boston still has a number of used book stores, surviving, though perhaps not thriving, despite the internet, in which browsing almost always uncovers something worthwhile. And, of course, those same online dealers, while offering less serendipity, can be used to track down a particular work referenced elsewhere.

John Hill Burton, the Scottish historian, wrote in The Book-Hunter (p. 101):

The possession, or, in some other shape, the access to a far larger collection of books than can be read through in a lifetime, is in fact an absolute condition of intellectual culture and expansion.

And a couple pages on gives an image of classic works of compilation (p. 103):

There are those terrible folios of the scholastic divines, the civilians, and the canonists, their majestic stream of central print overflowing into rivulets of marginal notes sedgy with citations.

Nowadays, these are footnotes and end notes, or in a less formal medium like this, hyperlinks.

A used book find ideally suited to the purpose of this blog is Ginger: A Loan-Word Study (snippet view), by Alan S. C. Ross.

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Alan Strode Campbell Ross also wrote a book on Pitcairnese, the creole descending from the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian wives. He is best remembered for his study of U and non-U English: an essay with that title is included among the collection by Nancy Mitford in Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy. It is a condensed and simplified version (and not a reprint as Wikipedia implies) of the paper “Linguistic class-indicators in present-day English,” which appeared in 1954 in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen and is among those reprinted for the 120th anniversary issue last year, which are available online here. More recently, he has caused a lexicographic mystery by having referred to taboo words as mumfordish in a 1934 review of the OED that also appeared in that journal: the question being, who is Mumford? (See discussion at Language Log and Language Hat.)

The framework of Ross's Ginger book begins with a passage from the 1414 Records of the Grocers' Company:

Auxi tout le Gynger quest faux colore Columbyn et auxibien Maykyn il fuist colore en le color de Belendyn.

Also all the ginger which is falsely coloured columbyn, and maykyn as well, was coloured the colour of belendyn.

Then, following Heyd, a passage from Pegolotti (the text of which is apparently not online):

Giengiovo si è di più maniere, cioè belledi e colombino et micchino, …

Ginger is of several sorts, viz. belledi and colombino and micchino.

Pegolotti explains that colombino comes from Colombo (Quilon / Kollam കൊല്ലം, perhaps 'high ground') and micchino from Mecca. (The Ménagier de Paris has gingembre de mesche et gingembre coulombin, though it offers the exact opposite conclusion as Pegolotti for which is easier to cut. Note also that Power's translation 'string ginger' is incorrect.)

And a couplet from John Russell's Boke of Nurture:

For good gynger colombyne / is best to drynke and ete;
Gynger valadyne & maydelyn̄ ar not so holsom in mete.

Which is explained by the OED, “ginger colombyne (quot. c1460), ginger from Quilon (L. Columbum); g. valadyne and g. maydelyn, mentioned in the same quot., have not been identified.”

So, with two of the kinds identified, the etymological questions that remain are ginger itself and beledi.

An old Language Hat post covered the outline of the ginger etymology, but none of the comments brought up Ross's book (also, one of the links given has moved to here). Another good place to start for ginger is the entry in Hobson-Jobson (which Ross cites in a footnote).

Ginger originates in tropical Asia; the exact location is not known for certain, as it is generally not found wild. (Schumann — see also here, pg. 172 — and Lauterbach report two possible finds in the Bismarck Archipelago: by Warburg at Mioko, in what are now the Duke of York Islands — see here; and by Dahl at Ralum, in East New Britain. I suspect more modern experts place the origin further north.) It was cultivated throughout Asia early on.

Ginger was known to the Greeks and Romans. For instance, Dioscorides:

ζιγγίβερι ἴδιον ἐστι φυτόν, γεννώμενον ἐν τῇ Τρωγλοδυτικῇ 〈καὶ〉 Ἀραβίᾳ πλεῖστον, οὗ χρῶνται τῇ χλόῃ εἰς πολλά, καθάπερ ἡμεῖς τῷ πηγάνῳ, ἕψοντες εἰς προποτισμοὺς καὶ εἰς ἑψήματα μίσγονστες. ἔστι δὲ ῥιζία μικρά, ὥσπερ κυπέρου, ὑπόλευκα , πεπερίζοντα τῇ γεύσει εὐώδη· ἐκλέγου δὲ τὰ ἀτερηδόνιστα. (II. 160)

Ginger is a peculiar plant, growing for the most part in Trogodytica and Arabia; the green part of it is used for many purposes, just as we use rue, boiling in drinks and mixing into boiled dishes. It is small rootlets, like the root of galingale, whitish, peppery tasting, and fragrant. Choose the ones that are not worm-eaten.

Note that Wellmann supplies a missing conjunction, “Troglodytica and Arabia,” but Beck translates the text as given, “Troglodytic Arabia.” On ancient confusion between Trogodytae / Troglodytae and troglodytes, see an old Language Hat discussion and the paper in JSTOR to which it links.

And Pliny, in a passage quoted more extensively in the long pepper post:

28. Non est hujus arboris radix, ut aliqui existimavere, quod vocant zingiberi, alii vero zimpiberi, quanquam sapore simili. Id enim in Arabia atque Trogodytica in villis nascitur, parvæ herbæ, radice candida. …

29. … Utrumque silvestre gentibus suis est et tamen pondere emitur ut aurum vel argentum. … (Book XII, Chap. 14 / 7)

28. The root of this tree is not, as many persons have imagined, the same as the substance known as zimpiberi, or, as some call it, zingiberi, or ginger, although it is very like it in taste. For ginger, in fact, grows in Arabia and in Troglodytica, in various cultivated spots, being a small plant with a white root. …

29. … Both pepper and ginger grow wild in their respective countries, and yet here we buy them by weight--just as if they were so much gold or silver. … (tr. Bostock & Riley)

Isidore of Seville knew that it also came from further east:

Traditur etiam alia species cyperi, quae in India nascitur et appellatur lingua eorum zinziber. (XVII.ix.8)

There is also said to be another kind of galingale, which grows in India and is called in their language ginger.

Marco Polo evidently found ginger at Kollam:

Good ginger grows here, and it is known by the same name of Coilumin after the country. (tr. Yule)

(See also Yule's note concerning the main theme of this discussion, the three varieties of ginger. I am not certain which manuscript this sentence comes from, since Yule edited together a number of them. It is not any of the ones I can find online, such as Ramusio, Il Milione, or the Geographic Text.) And Malabar:

In questa regione v'è grandissima copia di pevere, zenzero e cubebe e noci d'India. (Ramusio, Lib. 3, Cap. 28; cf. Il Milione, Cap. 179)

There is in this kingdom a great quantity of pepper, and ginger, [and cinnamon, and turbit,] and of nuts of India. (tr. Yule)

and in China:

E quivi nasce zenzero in gran quantità, il qual si porta per tutta la provincia del Cataio, con grande utilità de' mercanti; … (Lib. 2, Cap. 35)

I may tell you that in this province [Acbalec Manzi], there grows such a great quantity of ginger, that it is carried all over the region of Cathay, and it affords a maintenance to all the people of the province, who get great gain thereby. (tr. Yule)

(On the identification of Acbalec Manzi, see Paul Pelliot's Notes on Marco Polo, a portion of which is scanned here: he concludes that it must be 漢中 (Hanzhong), as Yule suspected.)

Monardes says that Francisco de Mendoza brought ginger to the new world:

Don Franciſco de Mendoça hijo del Virey don Antonio de Mendoça, ſembro en Nueua Eſpaña Clauo, Pimenta, Gengibre, y otras Eſpecias, delas que traen dela India Oriental: per dioſe aquel negocio por ſu muerte, ſolo quedo el Gengibre, porque naſcio muy bien en aquellas partes, y aſsi lo traen verde de Nueua Eſpaña y otras partes de nueſtras Indias, y ſeco del modo de lo dela India. (p. 99)

Don Francis de Mendosa, Sonne vnto the vice Roy Don Anthony de Mendoſa, did ſow in the new Spayne Cloaues, Peper, Ginger, and other ſpices, of thoſe which are brought from the Oriental Indias, and that which by him was begun, was loſt, by reaſon of his death, onely the Ginger did remayne, for it grew very well in thoſe partes, and ſo they bring it greene from the new Spayne, and other partes of our Indias, and ſome they bring drie, after the maner of that of the Eaſt India. (tr. Frampton)

And by the end of the century Acosta could report (in the chapter quoted in full in the chili post):

El jengibre se trajo de la India a la Española, y ha multiplicado de suerte que ya no saben qué hacerse de tanto jengibre, porque en la flota del año de ochenta y siete se trajeron veinte y dos mil cincuenta y tres quintales de ello a Sevilla. (Vol. I, Chap. XX)

The ginger was carried from the Indies to Hiſpaniola, and it hath multiplied ſo, as at this day they know not what to do with the great aboundaunce they have. In the fleete the yeare 1587. they brought 22053. quintalls of ginger to Seville: (tr. Grimeston)

Most of the European words for 'ginger' derive from Latin zingiberi and so from Greek ζιγγίβερις. Medieval Latin forms included gingiber,  zinziber, and zinzaber. So, Italian gengiovo and zenzero (zenzevero, zenzovero), from which Maltese ġinġer. Spanish jengibre, Catalan gingebre, Portuguese gengibre, Galacian xenxibre; The Spanish and Catalan also occur with an initial a-, perhaps because of some Arabic influence (cf. azúcar 'sugar').

Old French gingibre > gingimbre > Modern French gingembre (Littré), Provencal gingebre (e.g., here) > gengibre / gingimbre. We owe fairly precise dating of an early Old French occurrence to Thomas Becket's austerity. Shortly after Becket's murder, Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence wrote a biography, between 1172 and 1174. Of his diet, he says:

Le meilliur vin useit qu’il trover poeit,
Mes pur le fruit ventrail eschaufer le beveit,
Kar le ventrail aveit, et le cors, forment freit.
Gingibre et mult girofle pur eschaufer mangiet;
Nepurquant tut adés l’ewe ou le vin mesleit. (from the Harleian manuscript version, in Project Margot's corpus, here; oddly enough, Bekker's 1844 edition of this MS hasn't been scanned; his 1838 edition of the Wolfenbüttel MS has been, here; and Hippeau's 1859 of the Paris MS, here. See here for a quick summary. As expected, these differ somewhat in spelling.)

He used to drink the best wine he could get, but this was so as to warm his cold stomach (for his stomach and body were always exceedingly cold; he used to eat ginger and clove by handfuls). None the less, he always drank his wine watered. (tr. Shirley)

(I have not found any sign of this specific detail in Guernes' Latin sources in Migne.)

Old English gingifer (< gingiber) occurs in Bald's Leechbook (e.g., ii, 56). And Lacnunga (iii, 72):

…  ı cýmen ⁊ coſ ⁊ pıpe ⁊ inia ⁊ hƿı cuu …

… that is to say, cummin and costmary and pepper and ginger and gum mastich ('white cud'); …

This gives Middle English gingivere (with influence from Old French gingivre). So, in Laȝamon's Brut (v. 2, p. 320, Calig., ll. 9-10):

& gingiuere & licoriz:
he hom lefliche ȝef.

and ginger and licorice he gave them lovingly.

And the Ancrene Riwle (p. 416):

Of mon þet ȝe misleueð ne nime ȝe nouðer lesse ne more — nout so much þet beo a rote gingiure.

Of a man whom ye distrust, receive ye neither less nor more — not so much as a race of ginger.

(Notice that the other occurrence of ginger in this work concerns a holy man who ate hot spices for his cold stomach; see below.)

Gaelic dinnsear, Irish sinséar, Welsh sinsir, Manx jinshar are from Middle English.

Some of the forms for the continental West Germanic languages are Frisian gimber (and gingber-woartel 'ginger-root'); Middle Dutch gincbere > Modern Dutch gember; Old High German gingibere > Middle High German ingewer > Standard German Ingwer; Middle Low German engever > Low German engeber, Mennonite Low German Enjwa. But both Low and High German have forms with the initial g the other way: OHG inguͥber, MHG gingebere, modern dialectal High German ginfer, MLG gingeber, Low German gemware. For a discussion of this phenomenon, Ross points to an early work by Wilhelm Horn. The Scandinavian are from Low German: Swedish ingefära, whence Finnish inkivääri; Norwegian ingefær = Danish ingefær, whence Icelandic engifer.

Slovenian ingver, Estonian ingver and Latvian ingvers and are all from German. Russian инби́рь, Belarusian імбір, Ukranian імбир, and Polish imbir are from a dialectal High German imber; Lithuanian imbieras is from Polish. Hungarian gyömbér (earlier gyumbier, Giomwer, gengber) is from Latin zingiber; Slovak ďumbier and Serbian / Croatian / Bosnian đumbir / ђумбир and Romanian ghimbir are from it. Czech zázvor is from Italian.

Finnegans Wake works a number of those European cognates into puns (182:5-10):

(he would touch at its from time to other, the red eye of his fear in saddishness, to ensign the colours by the beerlitz in his mathness and his educandees to outhue to themselves in the cries of girlglee: gember! inkware! chonchambre! cinsero! zinnzabar! tincture and gin!)

Modern Greek has invented πιπερόριζα 'pepper-root'. The Greek ζιγγίβερι comes from some Middle Indic source, such as Pali singivera. To this corresponds the Sanskrit शृङ्गवेर śṛṅgavera. The traditional etymology for the Old Indic word is from शृङ् śṛṅga 'horn' (cf. English horn itself), on the grounds that the ginger rhizome resembles one, and this can still be found in dictionaries as the source of a European 'ginger' word without qualification. *vēr is a common Dravidian root for 'root', such as Tamil வேர்; it occurs in some Dravidian peanut words. And a number of Dravidian ginger words also have a similar phonetic shape, such as Tamil இஞ்சி iñci and Malayalam ഇഞ്ചി iñci. So it is likely the source is Dravidian.

Caldwell argued in favor of such a Dravidian source, citing a printed exchange between the two authors of Hobson-Jobson, Yule and Burnell. Yule asks, of the Arbor Zingitana (see below), “Can it be ginger? A Sanskrit etymology is assigned to the word zingiber, …” And Burnell replies, giving mostly the argument that ends up in Hobson-Jobson, and concluding:

If we look at the form of the Sanskrit word, it is impossible to doubt that it is a foreign word altered by the Brahmans, who, by their pedantry, disguise all they meddle with.

Which is a Victorian's way of saying that the exact form of the loanword is altered by folk etymology to resemble śṛṅga. For a modern summary, proposing specifically a Proto-Dravidian *cinki-vēr (loss of initial *c- is a normal change), see here.

Burnell also makes parenthetic reference to Colebrooke's edtion of Amarakosha. This entry reads (II, Chap. IX, sl. 37; another edition, with Sanskrit commentary, is here):

आर्द्रकं शृङ्गवेरं (स्यात्)

ārdrakaṃ śṛṅgaveraṃ (syāt)

undried-ginger ginger (may be)

आर्द्रक ārdraka is ginger is its fresh, undried, state. The long pepper post described त्रिकटु trikaṭu 'three pungents', a equal mixture of पिप्पली pippalī 'long pepper', मरिच marica 'black pepper' and शुण्ठी śuṇṭhī 'dried ginger'. Both forms of ginger are included in the long list in Chap. XLVI of the Sutra-sthana in the Suśruta Samhita (non-Unicode / no copy PDFs here), right after the two peppers:

नागरं कफवातघ्न विपाके मधुरं कटु ॥
वृष्योष्णं रोचनं हृद्यं सस्नेहं लघु दीपनम ॥२२६॥
कफानिलहरं स्वर्यं विबन्धानाहशूलनुत् ॥
कटूष्णं रोचनं हृद्यं वृष्यं चैवार्द्रकं स्मृतम् ॥२२७॥

nāgaraṃ kaphavātaghnaṃ vipāke madhuraṃ kaṭu
vṛṣyoṣṇaṃ rocanaṃ hṛdyaṃ sasnehaṃ laghu dīpanam
kaphānilaharaṃ svaryaṃ vibandhānāhaśūlanut
kaṭūṣṇaṃ rocanaṃ hṛdyaṃ vṛṣyaṃ caivārdrakaṃ smṛtam

Dry ginger pacifies phlegm and wind; in vipāka, it is sweet but pungent;
it is a warm aphrodisiac, stimulates the appetite, is savory, affectionate, easily digested, and stimulating.
Fresh ginger cures disorders from phlegm and wind, is beneficial to voice, removes constipation;
it is appetizing, savory, and aphrodisiac just like dry ginger.

(शुण्ठी śuṇṭhī, नागर nāgara and कटूष्ण kaṭūṣṇa all mean 'dried ginger'.)

Cognates with singivera do not survive in the Modern Indic languages as the ordinary word for 'ginger', except for Sinhalese ඉඟුරු iñguru. Instead, words derived from Sanskrit आर्द्रक ārdraka / शुण्ठी śuṇṭhī are used, so distinguishing green and dried ginger. For instance, Hindi अदरक adrak / सोंठ soṅṭh, Urdu ادرک adrak / سونٿهہ soṅṭh, Bengali আদা ādā / শুঁঠ śun̐ṭha, Marathi आले āle / सुंठ suṇṭh, Punjabi ਅਦਰਕ adrak / ਸੂੰਢ sūnḍh, Gujarati આદું ādu / સૂંઠ sūṇṭh, Oriya ଅଦା adā / ଶୁଣ୍ଠି śuṇṭhi, Pushto ادرک adrak / سونډ sūnḍ. Some Dravidian languages make the same distinction, borrowing the word for 'dried ginger': Tamil எல்லம் ellam / சுண்டி cuṇṭi, Telugu అల్లము allamu / శొంటి śoṇṭi, Kannada ಅಲ್ಲ alla / ಶುಂಠಿ śuṇṭhi.

Dravidian *cinki may be a loanword. Arguing in the JRAS (1905, p. 167ff) against the Dravidian source proposed by Hobson-Jobson, and taken up by the OED, F. W. Thomas points out some other Asian words for 'ginger' with the same overall phonetic shape. Burrow (here and here, some decades later, as he wasn't born until 1909) is careful to separate out the two arguments: that the Sanskrit (and so by descent most European words) is a loan from Dravidian, which is now generally accepted; and that the Dravidian may be a loan from some common South Asian source. In this case, the other possible cognates include: Classical Chinese ki̯ang (薑, 葁, 姜; Mandarin jiang1; Cantonese goeng1), Vietnamese gừng, Thai ขิง khĭng, Lao ຂີງ khīng, Burmese ချင်း gjin:, Khmer ខ្ញី khñi.

The Middle Indic form also passed into Middle Iranian, such as Pahlavi sangiwēl (Ross transliterates singaβēr), Sogdian snkrpyl. From there to Aramaic zangəbīl ܙܢܓܒܝܠ / זַנְגְּבִיל, and so to Modern Hebrew זַנְגְּבִיל zangvîl. And from Aramaic to Arabic زَنْجَبِیلْ zanǧabīl. Turkish زنجبيل / zencefil came from Arabic.  Persian شنکلیل šankalīl developed from Pahlavi, but زنجبيل zanjabīl was also borrowed from Arabic. And Modern Syriac ܙܢܓܦܝܠ zanjâpîl was from Turkish. From Turkish, Kurdish zenjefíl, and further away, Albanian xhenxhefil, Bulgarian джинджифил, Georgian ჯანჯაფილი janjapili. Classical Armenian սնգրուէղ sngrvēł came from Aramaic, but Modern Armenian has կոճապղպեղ kočapġpeġ 'ankle-pepper', as well as զանջաֆիլ zanǰafil from Turkish and իմբիր imbir from Russian. The Ethiopic languages required some minor adjustments to the Arabic loan to fit their phonology: Amharic ዝንጅብል zənǧəbəl, ዝንጅበር zənǧəbär; Tingrinya ጅንጅብል ǧənǧəbəl; Gurage: Wolane ዝንጅብል zənǧəbəl, Selti ጃንጅብል ǧanǧəbəl, Aymellel ጅንጅብል ǧənǧəbəl.

The Babylonian Talmud contains several references to ginger. Shabbat 65a (daf; translation): in a discussion of rules for women, specifically what she can keep in her mouth on the Sabbath, provided she put it in before its start and doesn't put it back if it falls out, the Gemara clarifies the Mishnah וכל דבר שנותנת לתוך פיה wəkāl dāḇār šenôṯeneṯ ləṯôḵə fiyhā 'and all things permitted in her mouth' as זנגבילא אי נמי דרצונא zanḡəbîlâ ʼî nēmî dirṣônâ 'ginger and cinnamon', that is, breath freshener. Pesahim 42b (daf; looser translation): exceptions to the general rule that what's good for the eyes is bad for the heart and vice-versa include מזנגבילא רטיבא ופילפלי mazanḡəbîlâ raṭīb wəpîlplî 'moist ginger and pepper'. And Berakhot 36b (daf; translation):

אַמְרֵי לֵיהּ רַבָּנָן לִמְרֵימָר כַּס זַנְגְּבִילָא בְּיוֹמָא דְּכִפּוּרֵי פָּטוּר וְהָא אָמַר רָבָא הַאי הֵמַלְתָּא דְּאַתְיָא מִבֵּי הִנְדּוּאֵי שַׁרְיָא וּמְבָרְכִין עֲלֵיהּ בפה״א לֹא קַשְׁיָא הָא בִּרְטִיבְתָּא הָא בִּיבִשְׁתָּא

ʼamərê lêh rabānān li-mərêmār kas zangəbîlâ bəyômâ dəkipûrê pāṭûr wəhâ ʼāmar rābâ haʼy hēmaltâ dəʼatyâ mibê hindûʼê šaryâ ûmbārkîn ʻălêh b.p.h. [bore pri ha‑adamah] lōʼ qašyâ hâ birṭîbətâ hâ bîbištâ

The rabbis said this to Meremar: a cup of ginger₁ on Yom Kippur — exemption. And doesn't Raba say this: ginger₂, which comes from India, — permitted; and we say a blessing over it, “Who has created the fruit of the earth”; there is no contradiction: one is moist, the other dry.

CAL glosses hmltʼ as just 'ginger', but it is clear from context that as elsewhere a basic distinction is being made on dried vs. not (with the additional complication of processing by heathens of potential food), so the Soncino translator goes with 'preserved ginger'.

From Judeo-French glosses to these passages, Darmesteter reconstructed jenjevre as the Old French form in Rashi's time.

Ginger occurs in the Quran as the flavor of Salsabil, a fountain in paradise (Al-Insan 17):

وَيُسْقَوْنَ فِيهَا كَأْسًا كَانَ مِزَاجُهَا زَنْجَبِيلا
عَيْنًا فِيهَا تُسَمَّى سَلْسَبِيلا

wa-yusqawna fīhā kaʾsā kāna mizāǧuhā zanǧabīlā
ʿaynā fīhā tusammā salsabīlā

There are they watered with a cup whereof the mixture is of Zanjabil,
(The water of) a spring therein, named Salsabil. (tr. Pickthall)

(About which Burton cannot keep himself from footnoting, “which to the Infidel mind unpleasantly suggests ‘ginger pop’.” Ginger is also apparently mentioned by the Jahiliyyah poet al-A'sha, but I have not found his work online or a copy / scan of Geyer's Zwei Gedichte.) Jeffery's The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur'an (s.v.) derives the Arabic from Syriac and thence back into Persian; the Syriac he derives from Pahlavi.

A folk etymology aiming to avoid non-Arabic roots (e.g., here; or Maulana Muhammad Ali's 1917 translation, p. 1144, n. 2628) derives زنجبيل zanǧabīl from زنأ zanʾ a 'to mount' (> زنى zanā  'commit adultery'), so 'ascend a mountain', and جبل ǧabal 'mountain'. The idea being that ginger invigorates so that one can climb mountains.

Confusion arises between زنجبيل zanǧabīl and Zanzibar < زَنْجَبَار zanǧabār 'coast of the Blacks (Zingi)'. So Hobson-Jobson points to a “shajr al-Zānij” (شجر الزانج) from India (arbor Zengitana — Gildemeister, p. 218) and Reinaud's identification of Abulfeda's “plant of Zinj” (“arbre du Zendj” — I cannot find the Arabic text) with ginger. And to the legend “Zinc et ideo Zinziber” on the map in Marino Sanudo's Liber secretorum fidelium crusis (c. 1320). This map is now known to have been drawn by Pietro Vesconte; see here; the images there are too small to read anything, but see the zoomable scan here from the Bongars' 1611 printed edition or this scan of a manuscript version. Still, it seems that this could just be a coincidence and referring only to Zanzibar and not ginger at all.

Another attempt at making ginger a toponym is based on some place named Gingi, for which there seem to be two candidates: Gingee, inland from Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu; and a place in China, though I haven't seen any specific location given. One source for the India theory seems to be Lamarck's Encyclopédie méthodique, from which it was picked up by Théis, Chaumeton and Thomson. Even the 4th Edition Encyclopædia Britannica s.v. Botany (not all the volumes are there, so I cannot tell who wrote this quite extensive article; perhaps James Edward Smith), “As it is very plentiful on the mountains of Gingi, ſome ſuppoſe that from this circumſtance the name Gingiber or Zingiber was derived.” The China theory was advanced by Philips and noted by Ainslie. It was picked up by an 1852 revision of Webster's Dictionary and included in Dr. Irving's catechism of general knowledge, by a Cambridge M.A.:

Q. What is ginger?
A. It is the root of a plant so called from Gingi, in China, and cultivated in great quantities in the West Indies, especially in Jamaica. It has a pungent, aromatic odour, and a hot, biting taste. (p. 16-17)

The Gingi theory is proposed by some of the European dictionaries cited above and it is still possible to see it in modern food reference works (for instance, here).

Ross quotes a number of accounts by explorers in support of the Malabar Coast as a source of ginger. For instance, Ibn-Battuta:

والفلفل والزنجبيل بها كثير جدا. (iv, 80)

wa-al-filfil wa-az-zanǧabīl bi-hā kaṯīr ǧadā.

pepper and ginger are very abundant there [Mangalore].

And Niccolò da Conti:

Collicuthiam deinceps petiit, urbem maritimam, octo millibus passuum ambitu, nobile totius Indiae emporium, pipere, lacca, gingibere, cinnamomo crassiore, kebulis, zedoaria fertilis. (From De Varietate Fortunae, Kunstmann, p. 48)

He next proceeded to Calicut, a maritime city, eight miles in circumference, a noble emporium for all India, abounding in pepper, lac, ginger, a larger kind of cinnamon, myrobalans, and zedoary. (tr. Jones)

And Athanasius Nikitin's A Journey Beyond the Three Seas:

А Келекотъ же есть пристанище Индѣйскаго моря всего, а проити его не дай Богъ никакову кестяку, а кто его не увидить, тотъ поздорову не проидеть моремъ; а родится въ немъ перець, да зеньзебиль, да цвѣтъ, да мошкатъ, да каланфуръ, да корица, да гвозникы, да пряное коренье, да адрякъ, да всякого коренья родится въ немъ много, да все въ немъ дешево, да кулъ да калавашь письяръ хубь сія. (From here. The version linked to by Wikipedia, here, mostly differs within the bounds of the varia noted, except that it has fewer Ь's and Ъ's; I don't know whether they were absent in some early edition or left out of the transcription at some point. Yet another version is here, with similar differences. Search also finds a study of the work from the middle of the 19th century.)

Calecot (Calicut) is a port for the whole Indian sea, which God forbid any craft to cross, and whoever saw it will not go over it healthy. The country produces pepper, ginger, colour plants, muscat, cloves, cinnamon, aromatic roots, adrach [fresh ginger — see above] and every description of spices, and everything is cheap, and the servants and maids are very good. (tr. Wielhorsky)

Another other similar accounts:

• Andrea Corsali: Ramusio, p. 178b.
• Afonso de Albuquerque: Cartas, i, 130.
• Gasparo Balbi: Viaggio, f. 65b.
• Garcia da Orta: Colloquy #26.
• Ludovico di Barthema: Itinerario, Cap. X, XIII.
• Tomé Pires: Suma Oriental, i, 83.
• Leonardo da Ca' Masser: Relazione, p. 26. (Cf. Hobson-Jobson, s.v. Cannanore.)
• Pedro Álvares: Navigatione da Lisbona in Calicut, p. 126a.
• Hieronimo da Santo Stefano: Viaggio, p. 345a.
• Vasco da Gama: Navigatione, p. 120b; Roteiro, p. 88. (Note that Ross takes Çillam to be Quilon, but most, such as Hobson-Jobson, see Ceylon.)
• Jan Huyghen van Linschoten: Cap. 64 (somewhat quirky UI; GB only has snippets and English translation).

And similarly for Kollam. So, Odoric of Pordenone:

A capite nemoris istius versus meridiem civitas quaedam habetur nomine Polumbum in qua nascitur melius zinziber quod nascatur in mundo. (Yule's Cathay and the Way Thither, §16)

Poi venni a Colonbio, ch' è la migliore terra d'India per mercatanti. Quivi è il gengiovo in grande copia e del buono del mondo. (ibid.)

At the extremity of that forest towards the south, there is a certain city which is called Polumbum [Quilon], in which is grown better ginger than anywhere else in the world. (tr. Yule, from another volume in an edition only with preview.)

And da Conti, again:

Inque eo itinere mensem cum absumpsisset, totidem diebus Coloen, civitatem nobilem, venit, cujus ambitus duodecim millia passuum amplectitur. Gingiber qui colobi dicitur, piper, verzinum, cannellae, quae crassae appellantur, hac in provincia, quam vocant Melibariam, leguntur. (Kunstmann, p. 48)

In that journey, he occupied one month; and departing thence, he, in the same space of time, arrived at a noble city called Coloen, the circumference of which is twelve miles. This province is called Melibaria, and they collect in it ginger, called by the natives colobi [colombi], pepper, brazil wood, and cinnamon, which is known there by the name of crassa. (tr. Jones)

And Benjamin of Tudela (immediately following the section quoted in the long pepper post):

וְשָׁם יִמָּצֵא הַקָּנֶה וְהַזַּנְגְבִל וּמִינֵי בְשָׂמִים הַרְבֵּה (p. 91.1)

wəšām yimāṣê haqāneh wəhazangəbil ûmînê bəśāmîm harbēh

Cinnamon, Ginger and many other kinds of spices also grow in this country. [Chulam] (tr. Asher)

And some for Mecca:

• Garcia da Orta: in the same ginger colloquy as above.
• Vasco da Gama: Roteiro, in the same paragraph as above, where the spices are carried  to Mecca.
• Felix Fabri: Hassler, p. 542.
• Ibn al-Mujāwir: Sprenger, p. 133. Note that Ross's source, Sprenger, translates الزنجبيل الطرى az-zanǧabīl aṭ-ṭarīy  as eingemachter Zingiber 'preserved ginger'. The ordinary sense of طَرِىّْ ṭarīy  is 'fresh; tender'. The Quran twice (16:14, 35:12) uses لَحْمًا طَرِيًّا laḥmā ṭarīyā 'fresh meat'. Sampson (Judges 15:15) found a לְחִֽי־חֲמֹור טְרִיָּה ləḥî-ḥămôr ṭəriyyāh 'new jawbone of an ass'. Perhaps if the sense is extended to 'moist', as above in the Talmud, then the distinction is between dried and not-dried, the latter including fresh, preserved, and pickled.

The indication being that it was a clearing-house and little was actually grown there.

The great Renaissance herbals do not add much, since ginger was well known in ancient times. Gerard, for instance, repeats what Dioscorides knew, adding a discussion of the correct appearance of the plant and a note that it does not survive in the cold. His section on names only has:

Ginger is called in Latine Zinziber and Gingiber: in Greeke, Σιγγίβερις and Γιγγίβερι: In French, Gigembre (EEBO for the 1633 edition; the 1597 only has the first Latin name).

Another factor may be that the brief period of ascendency over pepper that ginger enjoyed in the late Middle Ages was concluding, things returning to the state in ancient times, as they are still in today. For abbreviated references to the major sources up to the end of the 17th century, see Sloane's catalog, which agrees with Acosta:

In Jamaica & Insulis Caribeis ubique excolitur & luxuriat.

It is cultivated and abounds everywhere in Jamaica and the Caribbean islands.

Pegolotti's belledi comes from Arabic بَلَدْ balad, meaning a 'country; city, town; village; place, community', that is, a delimited area; the adjective form is بَلَدِى baladī 'indigenous; folk-'. Applied to ginger, it could mean 'common', that is, of lesser value, or 'native (to some place)'. Since beledi ginger seems to have been considered superior, the latter is more likely, and the place in question is India or more specifically the area around Calicut. In fact, it would appear that it came to be considered the name of place there, since Gerard de Malynes's bullionist The Canker of Englands Common Wealth lists prices for “Ginger of Beledin in Calicut,” “Ginger of Mechino,” and “Ginger in conſerue.” (EEBO; modern reprint).

In Spanish, baladí now primarily means 'insignificant, trivial'. (See also the longer entry in the 1726 RAE dictionary, to which deep links don't seem possible.) Hobson-Jobson considers this analogous to country. Ross considers the varied senses of Spanish baladí and gives a series of historical quotations, not having to do with ginger.

Da Conti relates some different kinds of ginger:

His in regionibus gingiber oritur, quod belledi, gebeli et neli vulgo appelatur. (p. 37)

In these districts grows ginger, called in the language of the country beledi, gebeli, and neli. (tr. Jones)

Gebeli is, as Hobson-Jobson explains (the DSAL version does not manage the footnote; see the Google Books scan), is 'mountain' ginger, from Arabic جَبَلِي ǧabalī. Neli in the Latin is a mistake for deli; it is Dely in the Italian text. This name is explained by Barbosa:

Nel regno di Cananor vi naſce del pepe, ma non gran quantità, & è molto buono, vi naſce del gengeuo, ma non troppo buono, il qual chiamano Dely, perché naſce appreſſo il monte Dely. (Ramusio, p. 311)

In the Kingdom of Cannanore there grows pepper, but no great quantity of it, and it is very good; there grows there some ginger, but not very good, which they call Delly, because it grows near Mount Delly. (tr. Ross)

The Arab world apparently had a different three part scheme for classifying ginger. Al-Muwaffak's كتاب الأبنية عن حقائق الأدوية Kitāb al-abniyah ʻan ḥaqāʼiq al-adwiyah 'Book of [the Foundations of the Realities of] Remedies', the first Persian materia medica, s.v. زَنْجَبِیلْ zanjabīl 'ginger', reads:

زنجبیل سه جنسست صینی و زنکی و مَلِیناوی ∴ و بهتر صینی بُوَذ انکه زنکی ∴ ملیناوی کِرد باشَذ و او را زرُنبای نیز کویند (p. 137)

zanjabīl sih jinssat ṣīnī wa zangī wa melīnawī : wa bihtar ṣīnī bowaẕ ān-kih zangī : melīnawī gerd bāšaẕ wa o rā zuronbai nīz gūyand

Ginger is of three kinds: Chinese and Zanzibar and Melinawi; and the best is Chinese, then Zanzibar; Melinawi is round and they also call it Zuronbai. (cf. Achundow)

It is not clear what Melinawi refers to; Ross glosses Zuronbai as 'resembling Zingiber zerumbet'. Below, commenter Alexander suggests that Melinawi is from ملین molayyen 'lenitive/laxative/emollient' and points out that زرنبا zuruṃbā (also زرنباد zuruṃbād) could refer to 'zedoary'. Hobson-Jobson has a single entry for both zedoary and zerumbet and the confusion between them. (Steingass also defines جدوار jadwār / زدوار zadwār / ژروار zharwār as 'zedoary'.) An obsolete English word for zedoary is setwall. The other passage of the Ancrene Riwle (p. 370) mentioned above refers to, “of gingiuere ne of gedewal, ne of clou de gilofre” 'of ginger nor setwall nor cloves'.

An excerpt from Bīrūnī's Materia Medica (كتاب الصيدنة في الطب Kitāb al-Ṣaidana fi al-Ṭibb) included in Zeki Validi Togan's compilation Bīrūnī's Picture of the World reads (p. 122):

زنجبيل الرطب منه بالفارسية شنكوير … و بالطخارية شكنرفين … يجلب من ارض بربر … والمعروف عند الصيادلة انه نوعان هندى وزنجى ويقال له الصينى ايضاً – ابو حنيفة : ينبت فى ارياف ارض عمان … واجوده الزنجى والصينى.

zanǧabīl ar-raṭbu min-hu bil-fārisīyahi šnkwyr … wa bil-ṭuḫārīyahi šknrfyn yuǧlab mina arḍi barbari … wal-maʿrūf ʿinda aṣ-ṣayādilahi ainnahu nawʿāni hindīy wa-zanǧīy wa-yuqālu la-hu aṣ-ṣīnīy ʾayḍʼa – abū ḥanīfah yanbutu fī aryāfi arḍi ʿumāna … wa-ʾaǧwadu-hu az-zanǧīy waṣ-ṣīnīy.

ginger fresh, for the Persians šnkwyr and for the Tocharians šknrfyn (šnkrfyr?; I don't know whether this is a misprint in the inexpensive edition and don't have ready access to a newer one) … it is brought from barbarian territory … and it is well known among druggists that there are two kinds, Indian and African, and there is also said to be a Chinese one - Abū Ḥanīfah: it grows in rural territory of Omān … and the best of it is the African and the Chinese.

None of the three categories given in Alfonso de Palencia's 1490 Universal vocabulario en latín y en romance (evidently modeled after emerging Latin-French dictionaries ― see here and here) are clear:

Zinziber. genera habet tria, Menagloſſa, Tangetes, ⁊ leptoſilax.

Zinziber. es de tres maneras, Menagloſſa, Tangetes, Et leptoſilax.

(Note that there are two Zinziber entries and this first one is out of alphabetical order.) Up until this post, a Google Books snippet of Ross is the only search hit for leptosilax.

Ross's monograph ends with three specialized indices: of words cited by language, of places named with latitude and longitude, and of authorities quoted. Many, but not all, of the ginger words have already been given above. More can be found at M.M.P.N.D., Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages and Wiktionary. To all these, one more will be added here: Yoruba atalẹ̀. A number of African 'ginger' words (see here) are loans from Arabic, like Swahili tangawizi; or from English, like Zulu ujinji, Xhosa ijinjala, Igbo jinja. I believe this is from ata 'pepper' + ilẹ̀ 'earth'. (On the open vowel diacritic, see the peanut₂ post.)

The next entry in that old dictionary raises an unrelated question. It is ilẹ-aiye 'world', as though 'earth' + 'earth', which certainly isn't inconceivable. Now ile, with a different vowel, is 'house'. And I have usually seen the three worlds of Yoruba cosmology explained as ilé-ọ̀run 'sky-house', so 'heaven'; ilẹ̀ 'earth'; and ilé-aiyé 'earth-house', so the habitable world. See, for instance, this paper. Furthermore, the term has been taken over by Ilê Aiyê, the first bloco afro, and Îlé Aiyé (The House of Life), a David Byrne film. (It seems e would be ê and ẹ é.) But sometimes it appears as ilẹ-aiye, such as here. To further confuse matters, the more modern Hippocrene dictionary has a lemma ilé-ayé 'world' and a sublemma ilẹ̀ ayé 'earth'. Perhaps someone who actually knows Yoruba can clear up whether there are two phrases, with separate etymologies.

Yakov Malkiel, who has written a book on the history and practice of etymology, in an earlier paper on its typology, calls out Ross's Ginger book as one of two instances of the extreme end of single word etymological monographs (the other being Flasdieck's Zinn und Zink: Studien zur abendländischen Wortgeschichte). An abbreviated version of the ginger etymology appears in Ross's book Etymology: With Especial Reference to English (part of Eric Partridge's Language Library series): a page and a half of text and a diagram. (The book is still in copyright, but I think it unlikely it will be reprinted after fifty years.)

Watermelon

We probably had the last fresh whole watermelon of the summer a few weeks ago. The crate of large globular produce at the supermarket is now full of pumpkins. But the Summer 2008 issue of Edible Boston, a franchised locavore magazine, just showed up there. Either that, or we just noticed it. It contains an article on watermelon by Elizabeth Gawthrop Riely, who edits the newsletter of the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe-Harvard, home to an important collection of vegetarian cookbooks and where CHB meets. She has also written for Gastronomica (e.g., here).

The article makes the following observation directly relevant to this blog:

The name for a plant can often point the way to its starting point, its root, but the words for watermelon in many languages do not relate to each other. In French (pastèque), Italian (cocomero), Spanish (sandia), and Portuguese (melancia). There is no etymological tie between these Romance words. Going further afield and back, the words for watermelon in ancient languages—Greek (karpouxzi), Hebrew (avatiah), Arabic (batfikh), Persian (hinduwana), and Tamil (palam)—have no cognates. This all shows the watermelon’s prehistoric dissemination.

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I am not sure how much can be inferred from a lack of cognates. When several daughter languages have related forms, that can indicate that a reconstructed parent had one, too. When a word is borrowed, it suggests the possibility that the object was new. But existing words can also be repurposed, as with African peanut words. And cognates can diverge as different branches encounter different material.

The diversity above is primarily in the greater Mediterranean. In contrast, most Germanic languages have words exactly equivalent to the transparent English watermelon: Dutch watermeloen, German Wassermelone, Swedish vattenmelon, Danish vandmeloner, Icelandic vatnsmelóna. This idea also extends to some neighbors, such as Czech vodní meloun.

Finnish and Estonian likewise have vesimeloni and vesimelon, but also arbuusi and arbuus from their other neighbors: Russian арбуз, Lithuanian: arbūzas, Polish: arbuz. This is from Turkish karpuz, as are Greek καρπούζι (I'm not sure where the x comes from above) and Romany harbuz. This in turn is from Persian خربوزه xarbuza, literally 'donkey cucumber'. The modern Persian word هندوانه hinduwāna indicates that watermelon comes from India. But the Hindi तरबूज tarabūja (also तरबूज़ tarabūza), Sanskrit तरम्बुज tarambuja is borrowed from Persian تربوز tarbuz. And Sanskrit खर्बूज kharabūja is from that same خربوزه xarbuza.

Watermelon (Citrullus lanatus — for a full name citation, see this note) appears to originate in southern Africa. Livingstone found them growing abundantly in the Kalahari:

But the most surprising plant of the Desert is the “Kengwe or Kēme” (Cucumis caffer), the watermelon. In years when more than the usual quantity of rain falls, vast tracts of the country are literally covered with these melons; this was the case annually when the fall of rain was greater than it is now, and the Bakwains sent trading parties every year to the lake. It happens commonly once every ten or eleven years, and for the last three times its occurrence has coincided with an extraordinarily wet season. … These melons are not, however, all of them eatable; some are sweet, and others so bitter that the whole are named by the Boers the “bitter watermelon.” The natives select them by striking one melon after another with a hatchet, and applying the tongue to the gashes. They thus readily distinguish between the bitter and sweet. The bitter are deleterious, but the sweet are quite wholesome. (p. 54)

The bitter form is Citrullus colocynthis, or a natural hybrid of it and watermelon.

The watermelon was known to the Ancient Egyptians. It is illustrated in paintings. (I cannot find a good image online: there is a drawing in An Ancient Egyptian Herbal, but the page is not available in preview; and in “Die Pflanzen des alten Ägyptens,” here in the Internet Archive, Fig. 30-32 in Table III—image 167 of 1190 in the PDF, which can only be reached by going to a nearby numbered page and moving forward or backward—but even the color scan does not pick up the thin lines very solidly; and there are what are assumed to be melons among the foods illustrated in Lepsius' Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien, II, plates 67-68.) Seeds have been found preserved in tombs. This presents a bit of a mystery, since at the time of the early cultivation in Egypt, the start of the 2nd millennium BCE, as far as archeologists can tell, no farming was yet practiced in south-west Africa, where the wild relatives of watermelon and colocynth are found, and so the most likely candidate for the origin of its domestication.

The word bddw-k3, which occurs in several medical papyri, is believed to refer to watermelon. For instance, a simple remedy in the Berlin Medical Papyrus 3038 (#111, transcription, facsimile, translation):

kt bddw-k3 jrp zwr.jn

ditto [a remedy to expel a disease caused by a demon]: watermelon; wine; drink.

The same word occurs a couple more times there in procedures related to fertility (#193-194, index, transcription, facsimile, translation). In Coptic, the word becomes ⲃⲉⲧⲩⲕⲉ (at least according to Budge; it isn't in Crum).

The Israelites' complaint about the foods they missed from Egypt in Numbers 11:5 (encountered in an earlier post for garlic) includes אֲבַטִּיחִ ’ăḇaṭṭiḥ 'watermelon'. This is presumably cognate, as is Arabic بَطِّيخ baṭṭīḫ (I assume the f in the article is a typo). From the Arabic come Spanish budieca, Portuguese pateca and French pateque, the modern French pastèque.

The traditional history is that watermelon was unknown to the Greeks and Romans until the beginning of the Common Era, since there is no readily identifiable Ancient Greek word for it (for example, de Candolle, translation; and so more modern food histories). This is somewhat at variance with its prevalence in Egypt. A reasonable case, though not conclusive, can be made for pushing it back several centuries, as follows. (For more details, see the paper by Alfred C. Andrews of the University of Miami in JSTOR). The word πέπων as an adjective meant 'ripe'. Combined with σίκυος 'cucumber', it named some kind of fruit that was only eaten when ripe. This was then shorted to πέπων as a noun. For instance, [pseudo-]Hippocrates describes σίκυος πέπων (De affect., 57) and contrasts σίκυοι ὠμοὶ 'raw cucumber' with πέπονες (De diaeta, 2.55). The Septuagint, in translating the passage in Numbers cited above, uses καὶ τοὺς σικύας καὶ τοὺς πέπονας 'cucumbers and melons'. μηλοπέπων 'melon-apple', or perhaps 'sweet-melon', was then used for regular melons. So that πέπων would likely have been 'watermelon'. The Romans viewed all the Cucurbitaceae as some kind of cucumis 'cucumber'. So, of pepo and melopepo, Pliny wrote:

cum magnitudine excessere, pepones vocantur. (Nat. Hist., 19, 5, 23, § 65)

When they [cucumbers] exceed a certain size, they are called “pepo.”

ecce cum maxime nova forma eorum in campania provenit mali cotonei effigie. forte primo natum ita audio unum, mox semine ex illo genus factum, melopeponas vocant. (ibid., § 67)

behold a wholly new form of them [cucumbers] has arisen in Campania with the form of a quince. I hear that the first one was born that way by accident, and then the type was made from the seed of that one; they call it “melopepo.”

Likewise the Vulgate for Numbers has cucumeres et pepones. So, while Lewis and Short, s.v. pepo, have, “a species of large melon, a pumpkin,” the Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. pepon, has, “a water-melon or other gourd.” Melopepo was shorted to just melo, from which many European words, including English melon, are derived. (This same development was related from a slightly different perspective in the earlier squash post.)

Italian developed a couple of new words for watermelon: Tuscan cocomero, derived in some way from cucumis; and Northern anguria, apparently from the Byzantine Greek ἀγγούριον 'cucumber'. This may be related to Arabic عَجُورْ ʿaǧūr, according to Forskål Cucumis chate, but according to Lane, “a species of melon.” Lane derives the Arabic from the Greek and furthermore glosses both ἀγγούριον and Modern Greek ἀγγοῦρι 'water-melon', not 'cucumber'; anguria can also evidently mean a kind of cucumber. Also from the Greek are Slavic words like Polish ogórek and Czech okurka 'cucumber'; from the Slavic comes the German Gurke; and from some Germanic language the English gherkin.

The Romance languages were not immune to the Northern water-melon: for example, Italian melone ad acqua or French melon d'eau. Thus Louis Reybaud, writing of Napoleon's men in Egypt:

Il fallut se passer de pain et de viande. Pour y suppléer on avait du riz, des lentilles, et surtout un melon d'eau commun sur les rives du Nil, et connu dans nos provinces méridionales sous le nom de pastèque. Ce fruit, plus rafraîchissant que substantiel, consola nos troupes dans leur marche pénible; il devint pour les soldats l'objet d'un culte singulier; dans leur reconnaissance ils le nommaient sainte pastèque. (Hist. scien. Ég., vol III, p. 183)

Bread and meat ran out. To supplement them, they had rice, lentils, and especially a water-melon common on the banks of the Nile, and known in our southern provinces under the name pastèque. This fruit, more refreshing than substantial, consoled our troops on their painful march; it became for the soldiers the object of a singular cult; in their gratitude they named it holy watermelon.

On sainte pastèque, one of the generals adds, “à l'example des anciens Égyptiens,” 'following the example of the Ancient Egyptians' (Mém. de Nap., p. 71).

The Spanish and Galician sandía come from Iberian Arabic *sandíyya, Classical Arabic سِنْدِية sindiyyah, meaning that the fruit comes from Sindh. The Catalan síndria perhaps shows the additional influence of cídria 'citron'.

The Portuguese melancia was balancia in the 16th century, of unknown origin, and began to show up as melancia in the 17th, presumably under the influence of melão 'melon'.

The physical descriptions in the botanical descriptions through the age of the great herbals to modern natural history already shows watermelon's variety of shapes, sizes and pulp and seed colors:

• Albertus Magnus: pepo viridis plani corticis 'a green melon with a flat rind'.
• Fuchs: fructũ rotundũ, herbacei coloris, & in eo ſemina lata, & colore ſpadicea, hoc est, in rufo atra 'round fruit, grass-colored, inside flat chestnut-brown seeds, that is, black in red'.
• Garcia de Orta (See also Coloquios 36): prægrande & rotundum, oblongius tamen aliquantulum, formaque quodammodo ouali 'very large and round, though somewhat more oblong, and in a way oval shaped'.
• Mattioli (illustration and comparison with true melons).
• Camerarius: (shape) subrotundos 'roundish';
   Cortice læui, herbaceo colore, maculoſo tamen 'smooth rind, grass-colored, but spotted';
   (seed) rufo, nigróve putamine 'with a red or black husk'.
• Dalechamp (Ir a 637): (shape) rotundum 'round';
   (color) herbaceo, maculoſo 'grass-colored, spotted';
   (seed) nigrum, in aliis rubrũ 'black, in others red'.
• C. Bauhin, Phytopinax: Variat colore corticis qui alijs virens, alijs maculoſus, ſubcandidis maculis. Caro alijs rubens & dulcior, alijs candida: Semina colore nigro, aut rubro, aut fuluo; rariùs ſine ſemine reperitur. 'It varies in rind color, with some green, others spotted, with somewhat white spots. The flesh is in some red and sweeter, others white. The seeds are black in color, or red, or yellow; rarely it is found without seeds.'
• C. Bauhin, Pinax (similarly).
• Gerarde: “the fruite is ſomewhat rounde, ſtreaked or ribbed with certaine deepe furrowes alongſt the ſame, of a greene colour aboue, and vnderneath on that ſide that lieth vpon the grounde ſomewhat white: the outwarde ſkin whereof is very ſmooth; the meate within is indifferent harde, more like to that of the Pompion then of the Cucumber or muſke Melon: the pulpe wherein the ſeede lieth, is ſpungie and of a ſlimie ſubſtance: the ſeede is long, flat, and greater then thoſe of the Cucumbers: the ſhell or outward barke is blackiſh, ſometimes of an  ouerworne reddiſh colour.”
• Marcgrave: fructus rotundus ſeu globoſus vel etiam ellypticus cortice viridi, magnitudine capitis humani, aut paulo major vel minor; carnem habet albam & in medio rubram (nimirum ubi ſemina jacent) ſeu ſanguineam ſucculentiſſimam, boni ſaporis 'the fruit is round or globular or even elliptical, with green rind, as large as a man's head, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller; it has white flesh and red in the middle (around where the seeds are scattered) or a very succulent blood-red, of good taste';
   (seed) in quibuſdam coracini, in aliis ruffi coloris 'in some raven-colored, in others reddish'.
• J. Bauhin: (size) capitis humani magnitudiné equans 'equal in size to a human head';
   (seed) colore buxeo obscuriore 'dark boxwood color'.
• Josselyn: “the fleſh of it is of a fleſh colour.”
• Chabrey (Ir a 140): (flesh) alba 'white'.
• Ray (summarizes others).
• Sloane: Variat substantiâ sive pulpâ rubrâ vel albâ; huic semina sunt nigra illi rubra. 'Varies in the contents with either red or white pulp; these seeds are black, those red.'
• Bryant: “varies very much in the ſize, ſhape, and colour of both its fruit and the ſeeds; the latter are black in ſome, red in others, and the fleſh yellow or red.”
• Lourerio: (shape) rotundum, vel oblongum sesquipedale 'round or a foot-and-half oblong';
   (color) ruberrimum, aliquando pallidum 'reddish, sometimes pale';
   (seed) nigris, vel rufis 'black or red'.
• Linnaeus.
• Thunberg (fuller description): lanato 'woolly'.

Some very strict vegetarians in India (both Jain and Brahmin) must avoid foods that resemble meat in appearance, such as beets or tomatoes. And so, those watermelons, “of a flesh color,” are forbidden. (For instance, p. xvi of Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Cooking; or this review of a different book from the same year, and so perhaps copying it; or the comments to this blog post.)

Another set of Indian watermelon words is Sanskrit कालिन्दकं kālindaka, Hindi कलिंदा kalindā, Marathi काळिंगण kāḷiṅgaṇa, and so on.

The Tamil பலம் palam properly means a green fruit (or edible root) in general. I have no doubt that it sometimes means 'watermelon', but a more common name appears to be கொம்மட்டி kommaṭṭi, with many Dravidian cognates. (Both words together are given by this Malaysian exporter.) Dictionaries also list வத்தாக்கு vattākku, derived from Portuguese pateca, and so cognate with the French, Hebrew and Arabic. பலம் palam itself is borrowed from Sanskrit फल phala 'fruit', but also 'result; consequence', the associated verb meaning 'bear fruit' or 'burst open', ultimately from the same root as English split.

According the Laufer, the first mention of watermelon, 西瓜 xi1gua1 'Western melon', by the Chinese is in the 10th century diary of 胡嶠 Hu2 Jiao4 in the History of the Five Dynasties (五代史 Wu3 Dai4 Shi3):

遂入平川，多草木，始食西瓜，云契丹破回紇得此種，以牛糞覆棚而種，大如中國冬瓜而味甘。(chap. 73)

sui4 ru4 Ping2chuan1, duo1 cao3 mu4, shi3 shi2 xi1gua1, yun2 Qi4dan1 po4 Hui2he2 de0 ci3 zhong3, yi3 niu2 fen4 fu4 peng2 er2 zhong4, da4 ru2 Zhong1guo2 dong1gua1 er2 wei4 gan1.

As soon as I arrived at Pingchuan, I found many plants and trees, and first ate watermelon, the Khitan say that after defeating the Uigur they obtained this plant. They cover it with ox dung and and mats to grow it. It is as big as the Chinese winter melon and tastes sweet.

Watermelons were reported in New England in 1629 by Master Graves, Engineer:

In the mean time wee abound with such things which next under God doe make us subsist: as fish, foule, deere, and sundrie sorts of fruits, as musk-millions, water-millions, Indian pompions, Indian pease, beanes, and many other odde fruits that I cannot name. (The usually cited source, Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll. 1:124. 1806, is only a snippet, but the letter is thankfully reproduced elsewhere.)

The odd spelling water-million, not surprising for the 17th century, is listed in Bartlett's Americanisms and continues to pop up in eye-dialect, much of which is cringe inducing today.

Back in Europe, the Ukrainian кавун, from Arabic قاوُون qāwūn 'muskmelon' by way of Turkish kavun, also yields Polish kawon.

The Bulgarian любеница and Slovenian, Serbian and Croatian lubenica appear to be related to lùbina 'skull', from the root *leubh concerned with peeling. This discussion covers four Serbian / Croatian / Bosnian words for watermelon, adding bostan, from Turkish bostan 'vegetable garden; melon field; [water-]melon', from Persian بستان bustān 'garden for flowers or sweet-smelling fruits' (as opposed to باغ bāgh for a regular fruit garden) < بو bo + ستان stān 'fragrance place'.

And rounding out this area of diverse watermelon words are a couple simple ones: Romanian pepene verde 'green melon' and Hungarian görögdinnye 'Greek melon'. (See also M.M.P.N.D.)

The Gilded Age

Over the holiday weekend, Tim Spalding of LibraryThing added a feature to Common Knowledge (the site's book-oriented wiki) to record a work's epigraphs. In the discussion leading up to this in Talk (the site's social network), Tim mentioned Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age and its satirizing polyglot epigraphs.

From the authors' Preface:

No apology is needed for following the learned custom of placing attractive scraps of literature at the heads of our chapters. It has been truly observed by Wagner that such headings, with their vague suggestions of the matter which is to follow them, pleasantly inflame the reader's interest without wholly satisfying his curiosity, and we will hope that it may be found to be so in the present case.

Our quotations are set in a vast number of tongues; this is done for the reason that very few foreign nations among whom the book will circulate can read in any language but their own; whereas we do not write for a particular class or sect or nation, but to take in the whole world.

I thought it would be fun to actually transcribe these mottoes, which appear at the head of each chapter, into LT. And, since so many 19th century books have been digitized, it is easy to find many of the sources and check them. A couple of the mottoes have enough to do with the admittedly loosely defined charter of this blog for me to post the results here.

Read More

The chapter mottoes for The Gilded Age (1873) are the work of James Hammond Trumbull, friend and neighbor of Samuel Clemens. Trumbull featured in an earlier post here as an authority on the etymology of the word squash.

A footnote in Paine's biography of Mark Twain, says:

There was another co-worker on The Gilded Age before the book was finally completed. This was J. Hammond Trumbull, who prepared the variegated, marvelous cryptographic chapter headings. Trumbull was the most learned man that ever lived in Hartford. He was familiar with all literary and scientific data, and according to Clemens could swear in twenty-seven languages. It was thought to be a choice idea to get Trumbull to supply a lingual medley of quotations to precede the chapters in the new book, the purpose being to excite interest and possibly to amuse the reader—a purpose which to some extent appears to have miscarried.

And so swearing in 27 languages has become a standard part of Trumbull's biography. I have not been able to locate anywhere where Clemens actually says this, though. He did write an obituary for Century Magazine (November, 1897, p. 154).

Critical reaction was understandably varied, with some seeing it as another aspect of the satire and others being confused. For example, a review by F. B. Perkins in Old and New (Vol. IX, March 1874, p. 387: entire volume in the Internet Archive; preview of this and other contemporary reviews in Google Books) said:

Nor must the grotesque parody on the motto business, at the chapter-heads, be overlooked. We strongly suspect that the writers may have purchased an assorted lot of spare mottoes from Mr. Trumbull, Prof. Whitney, or some of the other Connecticut linguists. There used to be, in “Horne's Introduction,” or some such book, a set of specimens of the type used in the various translations of the Bible, which we thought at first had been transcribed; but we missed the Burmese passage. But Old French, Anglo-Saxon, Ethiopic, Erse, Syriac, ancient Mexican, Basque, Russian, Armenian, Chinese, Sanscrit, and in particular Chinook and Kanaka (which Mr. Clemens could furnish), Natick Indian, and other kindred language (which Mr. Trumbull could furnish), and even English, occur to us. Still, if Messrs. Clemens and Warner, or either of them, do habitually study in these and all the other languages of their mottoes, we beg to apologize, and wish them joy.

In the First American Edition, the mottoes appeared with no explanation at all. In the 1899 Author's National Edition of Twain's works, a note was added and Trumbull's translations were put in an appendix to each of two volumes, though Trumbull had died in the interim. These show that the mottoes are both real and relevant and present some of Trumbull's own satire of scholarly notes (e.g., XXXVII & XLI).

Modern editions tend to print the earlier text, with the translations appendix. This means that the amplifications and corrections to the mottoes proper from the later edition are not present. Even worse, since these are so hard to proofread, some further new errors have slipped in.

In the transcription below, I have mostly followed the later edition, except where it introduced errors or formatting inconsistencies. Links to both versions are included. I have corrected (and noted) simple printer's errors with the unusual languages and scripts. More substantial mysteries I have left alone (and noted). Where sources can be located straightforwardly and no commentary is called for, I have simply linked to them inline. Where no translation source is cited, and I have not found the text, and the language is popular enough, such as French or Latin, I assume it is Trumbull's own and do not call attention to it further. I have sometimes abbreviated The Gilded Age as GA.

Formatting is a bit of a challenge, since some chapters have more than one motto, each of which may or may not have either translation or commentary. So, I've compromised on interleaving the translations (rather than giving all the chapter's mottoes, then all their translations, then any commentary) and adding a little mark in the margin to distinguish mottoes and Trumbull's translations.

According to Bryant Morey French's Mark Twain and The Gilded Age: The Book That Named an Era, the original holograph of Trumbull's notes is in the Mark Twain Library (SM-TR-1). It might be interesting to get a scan or photocopy of this. French's article “James Hammond Trumbull's Alternative Chapter: Headings for The Gilded Age” (Philological Quarterly, April 1971, pp. 271-280; the journal has been scanned and so can be accessed from a decent reference library, but I can't deep link to it) gives some of the choices Trumbull offered the authors, based on the same material. These alternatives are worked into footnotes to the endnotes of the 1972 Bobbs-Merrill edition, edited by French, together with brief bibliographical and biographical data for some of the works and authors. The editor of the Penguin Classics edition only alludes to these notes, presumably due to copyright concerns.

Title. (p. iii / vii, 315):

協力山成玉
同心坭變金

Chinese: Hie li shán ching yŭ: tung sin ní pien kin.
Literally, By combined strength, a mountain becomes gems: by united hearts, mud turns to gold.
[A maxim often painted on the door-posts of a Chinese firm—which may be freely translated—Two heads, working together, out of commonplace materials, bring The Gilded Age.]

In Pinyin, xie2 li4 shan1 cheng2 yu4, tong2xin1 ni2 bian4 jin1. In addition to mud, the same proverb is written with 土 tu3 'earth'. There is no indication of an immediate source and hunting around I am unable to locate a likely one.

I. (p. 17 / 1, 315):

Nibiwa win o-dibendan aki.

Chippeway: “He owns much land.”—Baraga.

As will be seen below, this second edition of Baraga (the only one in GB) probably wasn't the one used; the first edition is in the Internet Archive (phrase appears on p. 375).

  Eng. A gallant tract
Of land it is!
  Meercraft. 'Twill yield a pound an acre:
We must let cheap ever at first. But, sir,
This looks too large for you, I see.
        Ben Jonson. The Devil is an Ass.

II. (p. 31 / 14, 315):

መፍትው፡ሕዝበ፡ክርስቲያን፡እለ፡አልቦሙ፡ውሉደ፡
ይሕፅንዎሙ፡ለእጓለ፡ማውታ፡ወራዙት፡ወደናግል፡
ወይረስይዎሙ፡ከመ፡ውሉዶሙ፡ወፈድፋደ[፡ያፍቅርዎሙ]።

Ethiopic: “It behoveth Christian people who have not children, to take up the children of the departed, whether youths or virgins, and to make them as their own children,” etc.
        The Didascalia (translated by T. Platt), 121.

The Internet Archive has a scan of the work from microform; the meta-data for the series is off by one, so while it appears that this is it, actually this is (p. 121 is 146 in the PDF). The text:

maftəw ḥəzba krəstiyān ʾəla ʾaləbomu wəluda yəḥṣ́ənəwwomu laʾəgwāla māwtā warāzut wadanāgəl wayrasyəwwomu kama wəludomu wafadfāda yāfqərəwwomu.

was abbreviated to just what is on that page, or to avoid taking up another line. Platt's translation continues (on the next page) “and love them yet more.” One word is omitted, ያፍቅርዎሙ yāfqərəwwomu 'they (masc.) love them (masc.) (subj.)', leaving the quotation to end with ወፈድፋደ wafadfāda 'and abundantly', which doesn't really work.

III. (p. 35 / 19, 315):

Babillebabou! (disoit-il) voici pis qu'antan. Fuyons! C'est, par la mort bœuf! Leviathan, descript par le noble prophete Moses en la vie du sainct home Job. Il nous avallera tous, comme pilules. … Voy le cy. O que tu es horrible et abhominable! … Ho ho! Diable, Satanas, Leviathan! Je ne te peux veoir, tant tu es ideux et detestable.
        Rabelais Pantagruel, b. iv, c. 33.

Old French: [Pantagruel and Panurge, on their voyage to the Oracle of Bacbuc, are frightened by seeing afar off, “a huge monstrous physeter.” “Poor Panurge began to cry and howl worse than ever:] Babillebabou, said he, [shrugging up his shoulders, quivering with fear, there will be the devil upon dun.] This will be a worse business than that the other day. Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me, if it is not Leviathan, described by the noble prophet Moses, in the life of patient Job. It will swallow us all like a dose of pills. … Look, look, it is upon us. Oh! how horrible and abominable thou art! … Oh, oh! Devil, Sathanas, Leviathan! I cannot bear to look upon thee, thou art so abominably ugly.”—Motteux's Translation.

The earlier GA edition has Mosis for Moses.

IV. (p. 41 / 25):

—Seventhly, Before his Voyage, He should make his peace with God, satisfie his Creditors if he be in debt; Pray earnestly to God to prosper him in his Voyage, and to keep him from danger, and, if he be sui juris, he should make his last will, and wisely order all his affairs, since many that go far abroad, return not home. (This good and Christian Counsel is given by Martinus Zeilerus in his Apodemical Canons before his Itinerary of Spain and Portugal.)
        Leigh's Diatribe of Travel, p. 7.

The original text (EEBO; anthologized) included one more to-do item between peace with God and satisfy creditors, “Receive the Lord's Supper.” (Martin Zeiler's Hispaniae et Lusitaniae itinerarium is online; the Canones Apodemici are on p. 20.)

V. (p. 53 / 39, 316):

دهِئَڙىَ کهٖي اُتهَارٖي پَنْهَن جٖي کهَرِ وِهَارٖي پَاڙهِينْدَا هُئَسِ

Sindhi: “Having removed the little daughter, and placed her in their own house, they instructed her.”—Life of Abd-ul-Latif, 46 (cited in Trumpp's Sindhi grammar, p. 356).

In Trumpp's transliteration scheme, dhiaṛia khē uthārē panhan ǰē khari wihārē pāṛhīndā huasa. The Sindhi subscript alef vowel does not seem to render very well on Windows.

ll veut faire sécher de la neige au four et la vendre pour du sel blanc.

French Proverb: He would dry snow in the oven, to sell it for table salt.—Quitard, 193.

VI. (p. 62 / 50, 316):

十年前事幾翻新

Chinese: [Shap neen tseen sze, ke fan sun.] The affairs of ten years past, how often have they been new.

A more modern Cantonese transliteration (Jyutping) would be sap6 nin4 cin4 si6 gei2 faan1 san1. The phrase appears to come from this book.

Mesu eu azheïâshet
  Washkebemâtizitâking,
Nâwuj beshegandâguzé
  Mauwâbegönig edush wen.
        Ojibwa Nugumoshäng, p. 78.

Chippeway. “So blooms the human face divine,
When youth its pride of beauty shows:
Fairer than Spring the colors shine,
And sweeter than the virgin rose.”
        Ojibwa Hymns. (Am. Tract Society), p. 78.

The later GA edition adds the dieresis on begönig. I have not been able to locate a copy of the hymnal, whose title seems to actually be Ojibwa Nugumoshäng, with an m, not a wi.

VII. (p. 75 / 64):

Via, Pecunia! when she's run and gone
And fled, and dead, then will I fetch her again
With aqua vitӕ, out of an old hogshead!
While there are lees of wine, or dregs of beer,
I'll never want her! Coin her out of cobwebs,
Dust, but I'll have her! raise wool upon egg-shells,
Sir, and make grass grow out of marrow-bones,
To make her come!
        Ben Jonson.

VIII. (p. 83 / 74):

—Whan þe borde is thynne, as of seruyse,
  Nought replenesshed with grete diuersite
 Of mete & drinke, good chere may then suffise
  With honest talkyng—
        The Book of Curtesye.

  Mammon. Come on, sir. Now, you set your foot on shore
In Novo Orbe; here's the rich Peru:
And there, within, sir, are the golden mines,
Great Solomon's Ophir!—
        Ben Jonson. The Alchemist.

IX. (p. 93 / 85, 316):

Quando ti veddi per la prima volta,
Parse che mi s'aprisse il paradiso,
E venissano gli angioli a un per volta
Tutti ad apporsi sopra al tuo bel viso,
Tutti ad apporsi sopra il tuo bel volto;
M'incatenasti, e non mi so'anco sciolto—
        J. Caselli. Chants popul. de l'Italie, 21.

Italian: When I saw thee for the first time, it seemed to me that paradise was opened, and that the angels were coming, one by one, all to rest on thy lovely face, all to rest on thy beautiful head; Thou bindest me in chains, and I cannot loose myself.
        J. Caselli, Chants popul de l'Italie, 21.

The earlier printing has a defective a, so some later editions (for instance, the Library of America one) have veniss no.

Yʋmohmi hoka, himak a̱̱ yakni ilʋppʋt immi ha chi̱̱ ho̱̱—

Choctaw: “Now therefore divide this land for an inheritance.”— Joshua, xiii. 7.

—Tajma kittôrnaminut innèiziungnærame, isikkæne sinikbingmun illièj, annerningærdlunilo siurdliminut piok.
        Mos. Agl. Siurdl. 49.32.

Eskimo (Greenland), from Fabricius's translation of Genesis:—“And when he had made an end of commanding his sons, he gathered up his feet into the bed, and yielded up the ghost, and was gathered unto his people.”
        First Book of Moses, xlix. 32.

It does not seem to be online, but I scanned the relevant page (198) from Testamentitokamit, mosesim aglegèj siurdleet.

X. (p. 100 / 93, 317):

—Okarbigàlo: “Kia pannigátit? Assarsara! uamnut nevsoïngoarna”—
        Mo. Agleg. Siurdl. 24.23.

Eskimo:—“And said, ‘Whose daughter art thou? tell me, I pray thee.’”— Gen. xxiv. 23.

Again, I scanned the page (84) of Fabricius's Genesis.

N∞tah nuttaunes, natwontash,
  Kukkeihtash, wonk yeuyeu
Wannanum kummissinninnumog
  Kah K∞sh week pannuppu.

Massachusetts Indian (Eliot's version of Psalm xlv. 10): “Harken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear; forget also thine own people, and thy father's house.”

The earlier edition properly uses Eliot's vowel ∞; later editions tend to just write oo. This is Eliot's metrical version of the Psalm. The metrical Psalms were published separately (see entries in this bibliography) and as well as bound with the 1663 Bible (EEBO). The main Bible contains a prose translation, in both the 1663 (EEBO) and 1685 (EEBO) editions:

N∞tah (nuttaunes) kah natwontash kah kukkeitash: wannanum wonk nehenwonche kummissinninnumog, kah k∞sh week.

The extra words added to fit the metre are yeuyeu 'now' and pannuppu 'thoroughly'.

Trumbull later owned an Eliot Bible, which he bought at the Brinley sale for $500, “very appropriately,” the New York Times wrote, as he was, “the only man in the wide world who can read the language in which it is printed.” He made a detailed study of Eliot's translations, publishing a paper on mistakes others had made in similar efforts. And of the Algonquian languages generally: in addition to the paper cited in the earlier post and the posthumous Natick Dictionary, he wrote one on native words in English and another detailing 40 versions of the Lord's Prayer, of particular interest to Pater Noster collectors. Of further interest for this blog were studies of native food plant words: he co-authored (with Asa Gray) a note on the Jerusalem Artichoke and a review of de Candolle (Part I, II, III; mentioned in this biography). His chronicle, “Origin and early progress of Indian missions in New England,” is snippet view. (But available in the Hathi Trust. For even more, see the entries in that same bibliography.)

—La Giannetta rispose: Madama, voi dalla povertà di mio padre togliendomi, come figliuola cresciuta m'avete, e per questo ogni vostro piacer far dovrei—
        Boccacio, Decam. Giorno 2, Nov. 8.

Italian:—“Jeannette answered: 'Madame, you have taken me from my father and brought me up as your own child, and for this I ought to do all in my power to please you.”

The GA text prints agni for ogni.

XI. (p. 108 / 104, 317):

くらへどもあじしらず

Japan: Though he eats, he knows not the taste of what he eats.

The handwritten text uses a hentaigana form of し shi, based on 志; fortunately, it's one of the common ones and even included in the Wikipedia's short sample. It took me a bit to realize that it is written right-to-left — after remembering that 'taste' is aji (あじ = 味) from reading an interesting article on the history of MSG and the Ajinomoto Company in Gastronomica. So it reads, kurahedomo aji shirazu. I did not find this online in this form, but in comments below and at LanguageHat, John Emerson and IllVes recognize this as the Japanese version of a passage from commentary by Zengzi (曾子) on The Great Learning (大學; VII, 2):

心焉に在らざれば、視れども見えず、聴けども聞こえず、食らえども其の味を知らず。

kokoro koko ni arazareba, miredomo miezu, kikedomo kikoezu, kuraedomo sono aji o mirazu.

心不在焉、視而不見、聽而不聞、食而不知其味。

xin1 bu4 zai4 yan1, shi4 er2 bu4 jian4, ting1 er2 bu4 wen2, shi2 er2 bu4 zhi1 qi2 wei4.

When the mind is not present, we look and do not see; we hear and do not understand; we eat and do not know the taste of what we eat. (tr. Legge)

XII. (p. 114 / 112, 317):

        Todtenbuch, 141. 17, 4.

Egyptian (from the Book of the Dead, or Funereal Ritual, edited by Lepsius from the Turin papyrus; translated by Birch). “The Preparation in the West. The Roads of the West.”

Neither Birch's translation nor Lepsius's Todtenbuch appears to have been scanned yet, which is a bit surprising considering how many separate online copies of Budge's there are. Nor are there other online facsimiles of the papyrus (item 1791 in the Museo Egizio di Torino); the Italian government commissioned a small number of special reproductions for diplomatic purposes, but did not make the digital photos available. The library has lost their copy of Lepsius. Fortunately, Lepsius's plates are reproduced in Davis's Egyptian Book of the Dead, which I have a copy of and from which I have scanned the relevant plate. The Egyptian text is online in the TLA, but has been somewhat normalized by lemma so that you cannot always tell how something is spelled. There: 141 [17,3]: jqr m jmn.tt; 141 [4,3]: w3.wt jmn.tt.

XIII. (p. 122 / 122):

What ever to say he toke in his entente,
his langage was so fayer & pertynante,
yt semeth vnto manys herying
not only the worde, but veryly the thyng.
        Caxton's Book of Curtesye, l. 340-343 (ed., E. E. Text Society).

The exact spelling is that in the Preface to the EETS edition, not the critical text, which like Caxton's printing (EEBO; reprint) had slightly different spelling, such fayr and mannys. This also explains why the line numbers are off: the reference there is to 343, meaning the last line, not the first.

XIV. (p. 132 / 134, 317):

Pulchra duos inter sita stat Philadelphia rivos;
  Inter quos duo sunt millia longa viæ.
Delawar his major, Sculkil minor ille vocatur;
  Indis et Suevis notus uterque diu.
Hîc plateas mensor spatiis delineat æquis,
  Et domui recto est ordine juncta domus.
        T. Makin.

From Thomas Makin's Description of Pennsylvania (Descriptio Pennsylvaniæ) 1729. Translated [?] by Robert Proud:
“Fair Philadelphia next is rising seen,
Between two rivers plac'd, two miles between,
The Delaware and Sculkil, new to fame,
Both ancient streams, yet of a modern name.
The city, form'd upon a beauteous plan,
Has many houses built, tho' late began;
Rectangular the streets, direct and fair;
And rectilinear all the ranges are.”

Two lines are left out of the Latin, though all eight are included in the translation (which does not quite line up line-for-line):

Ædibus ornatur multis urbs limite longo,
  Quaæ parva emicuit tempore magna brevi.

Vergin era fra lor di già matura
  Verginità, d'alti pensieri e regi,
D'alta beltà; ma sua beltà non cura,
  O tanta sol, quant' onestà sen fregi.
        Tasso.

Italian (translated by Wiffen—from Tasso):
“Of generous thoughts and principles sublime,
Amongst them in the city lived a maid,
The flower of virgins, in her ripest prime,
Supremely beautiful! but that she made
Never her care, or beauty only weighed
In worth with virtue.”
        Jerusalem Delivered, c. ii., st. 14.

XV. (p. 139 / 143, 318):

—Rationalem quidem puto medicinam esse debere: instrui vero ab evidentibus causis; obscuris omnibus non à cogitatione artificis, sed ab ipsa arte rejectis. Incidere autem vivorum corpora, et crudele, et supervacuum est: mortuorum corpora discentibus necessarium.
        Celsus.

Latin: [Celsus] I think the healing art ought to be based on reason to be sure, and too that it should be founded on unmistakable evidences, all uncertainties being rejected, not from the serious attention of a physician, but from the very profession itself.

The same English translation occurs in this magazine, but since it's a snippet, it's hard to tell what the original source is.

XVI. (p. 149 / 155, 318):

        Todtenbuch, 117. 1, 3.

Egyptian (from the Book of the Dead), in Birch translation: “I have come.” “Make Road expresses what I am” (i.e., is my name).

Again, I have scanned the relevant plate from Davis. Also online in the TLA: 117 [1] jy.n.j; [3] jrt w3t twt sw[t] jnk.

XVII. (p. 159 / 166):

—“We have view'd it,
And measur'd it within all, by the scale:
The richest tract of land, love, in the kingdom!
There will be made seventeen or eighteen millions,
Or more, as't may be handled!
        Ben Jonson. The Devil is an Ass.

XVIII. (p. 168 / 176, 318):

ⵏⵔⵜⴳⵎⴹⵙⴾⵍⵏⵜⵏⵔⴰ
ⵓⵔⵉⵈⵎⵍⵙⵓⵔⵏⵜⵜⴾⴰ
        Bedda ag Idda.

Tamachekh (Touareg): From an improvisation by a native poet, at Algiers; printed by Hanoteau, Essai de Grammaise de Langue Tamackek, p. 207.
—If she should come to our country (the plains), there is not a man who would not run to see her.

Hanoteau also gives a transliteration:

enner teg'medh s ikallen n tiniri
our ik'k'im ales our en tet ikki.

The Tifinagh character set in Unicode is just the bare minimum: there is no support for the square ⵔ, or the directional variants of ⵎ and ⴳ when writing right-to-left, or the diagonal variant of ⵏ used when it is next to ⵍ or another ⵏ. The title of the book is printed Langeu.

—“E ve us lo covinentz qals er,
Que voill que m prendatz a moiler.
—Qu'en aissi l'a Dieus establida,
Per que not pot esser partida.” Roman de Jaufre.
        Raynouard. Lexique Roman, i. 139.

Romance:
—“Enough! she cries, henceforth thou art
The friend and master of my heart.
No other covenant I require
Than this: ‘I take thee for my wife.’
That done, enjoy thy heart's desire,
Of me and mine the lord for life.”
        A. Bruce Whyte's paraphrase.

Eight lines are omitted from the Occitan, though nothing is trimmed from the corresponding translation. The earlier GA edition has Eve for E ve, convintz for covinentz, and prendats for prendatz.

XIX. (p. 177 / 187, 318):

Wie entwickeln ſich doch ſchnelle,
Aus der flüchtigſten Empfindung,
Leidenſchaften ohne Grenzen
Und die zärtlichſte Verbindung!
    Täglich wächſt zu dieſer Dame
Meines Herzens tiefſte Neigung,
Und dass ich in ſie verliebt ſei,
Wird mir faſt zür Ueberzeugung.
        Heine

German: from the “Book of Songs” (Angelique, 4) of Heine.
“O how rapidly develop
From mere fugitive sensations
Passions that are fierce and boundless,
Tenderest associations!
Tow'rds this lady grows the bias
Of my heart on each occasion,
And that I'm enamoured of her
Has become my firm persuasion.”

The English translation appears to be Bowring's.

XX. (p. 186 / 198, 318):

—Buaḃall bionngloraċ go mbuaiḋ ninnscne & nurlaḃra ceille, & coṁairle, go ttaidḃriḋ seirce ina ḋreiċ attar lá gaċ aen at as cíoḋ—

Old Irish: from the Annals of the Four Masters (vol. vi., p. 2298). O'Donovan translates:
—“A sweet-sounding trumpet; endowed with the gift of eloquence and address, of sense and counsel, and with the look of amiability in his countenance, which captivated every one who beheld him.”

That volume of the Annals does not seem to have been scanned yet; the Internet Archive only has Vol. 1. However, both text (in Roman type) and translation have been transcribed into CELT. There is one vowel difference: ttaidbhridh for ttaidbhredh; the character written as e (another convention is to use ę) is the “tall e”. O'Donovan's font had it, but Trumbull's may not have; none of the Unicode fonts I can find do. A scan of the original manuscript is in ISOS; the cited passage is f. 273 r, starting on the third line at the right (the troublesome word is at the end of the next line).

XXI. (p. 194 / 207, 319):

Unusquisque sua noverit ire via.—
        Propert. Eleg. ii. 25.

[Let each one know how to follow his own path.]

    O lift your natures up:
Embrace our aims: work out your freedom. Girls,
Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed;
Drink deep until the habits of the slave,
The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite
And slander, die.
        The Princess.

XXII. (p. 202 / 216, 319):

Wohl giebt es im Leben kein süsseres Glück,
Als der Liebe Geständniss im Liebchen's Blick;
Wohl giebt es im Leben nicht höhere Lust,
Als Freuden der Liebe an liebender Brust.
Dem hat nie das Leben freundlich begegnet,
Den nicht die Weihe der Liebe gesegnet.
  Doch der Liebe Glück, so himmlisch, so schön
  Kann nie ohne Glauben an Tugend bestehn.
        Körner.

“Is there on earth such a transport as this,
When the look of the loved one avows her bliss?
Can life an equal joy impart
To the bliss that lives in a lover's heart?
O! he, be assured, hath never proved
Life's holiest joys who hath never loved!
Yet the joys of love, so heavenly fair,
Can exist but when honor and virtue are there.”
        Translated by Richardson.

O ke aloha ka mea i oi aku ka maikai mamua o ka umeki poi a me ka ipukaia.

Hawaiian: Love is that which excels in attractiveness (is much better than) the dish of poi and the fish-bowl (the favorite dishes of the Islanders).

I expected to find that all the Hawaiian mottoes (see also XLVIII and LXIII) came from a single source, as most other languages that occur more than once do. But I did not find one, only sources for the individual pieces, which I therefore suspect were not the ones used by Trumbull. This proverb occurs here.

XXIII. (p. 213 / 229):

“O see ye not yon narrow road
So thick beset wi' thorns and briers?
That is the Path of Righteousness,
Though after it but few inquires.

“And see ye not yon braid, braid road,
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the Path of Wickedness,
Though some call it the road to Heaven.”
        Thomas the Rhymer.

XXIV. (p. 217 / 233, 319):

Cante-teca. Iapi-Waxte otonwe kin he cajeyatapi nawahon; otonwe wijice hinca keyapi se wacanmi.
Toketu-kaxta. Han, hecetu; takuwicawaye wijicapi ota hen tipi.
        Mahp. Ekta Oicim. ya.

Sioux-Dakota (from Riggs's translation of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress).
“Christian. This town of Fair-Speech—I have heard of it; and as I remember, they say it's a wealthy place.
By-Ends. Yes, I assure you that it is; and I have very many rich kindred there.”

I cannot find Riggs's Mahpiya Ekta Oicimani ya online, but I have scanned the relevant page (157).

XXV. (p. 228 / 245, 319):

𒀀𒂡 𒆗𒆗𒋾

Assyrian:—“A place very difficult.”
        Smith's Assurbanipal, p. 269 (l. 90).

(A Neo-Assyrian Unicode font can be downloaded here.) Smith transliterates this text, from Prism A, col. viii, a-sar dan-dan-ti. Others, including Streck, read the second word as kal-kal-ti (same sign, different phonetic; snippet; unfortunately, the Internet Archive only has Vol. I), 'hunger', so that the sense of the phrase is 'wasteland'. (See this translation and its endnote; and CAD s.v. galgaltu A.)

XXVI. (p. 235 / 253, 319):

பணம் மெத்த அரிதாய் இருக்கி்றது

Tamul: Money is very scarce.

The phrase, paṇam metta aritāy irukkiṟatu, appears to come from a phrase-book intended to teach English to Tamil speakers. As printed in GA, பணம் எமத்த அரிதாய் இருக்தி்றது, there are a couple of printer's errors where similar looking letters are substituted. Using the initial isolated form of the vowel instead of the combining form (which goes on the left) makes எமத்த ematta. I don't think இருக்தி்றது iruktiṟatu, with a த t instead of க k, is a form of இரு iru 'to be'; it may not even be phonologically sound. In addition to இருக்கி்றது irukkiṟatu, another version of the phrase-book has இருக்கி்று irukkiṟa (or I'm being faked out by the edge of the scan), and yet another one that looks to be a somewhat different dialect, ருக்கின்றது rukkiṉṟatu.

XXVII. (p. 244 / 264, 319):

Egyptian: “Things prepare I. I prepare a road.”
        Book of the Dead, xliv. 117. 1, 2.

The same plate and TLA section as XVI: [1] ḫy zmn.n.j; [2] wpi.n.j w3t.

ὡς οὖν τὰ πραχθέντ᾽ ἔβλεπεν, τυφλὸς γεγώς,
οὐ μὴν ὑπέπτηξ᾽ οὐδέν, ἀλλ᾽ εὐκαρδίως
βάτον τιν᾽ ἄλλην ἤλατ' εἰς ἀκανθίνην,
κάκ τοῦδ᾽ ἐγένετ᾽ ἐξαῦθις ἐκ τυφλοῦ βλέπων.
        Bishop Butler. In Arundines Cami.

Greek (post-classical):
“And when he saw his eyes were out,
With all his might and main,
He jumped into another bush,
And scratched them in again.”

As printed in GA, a couple of the Greek acute accents are turned into grave and a breathing mark is missing. Bishop Butler, S.B. in the source, is Samuel Butler, the grandfather of the author of Erewhon.

XXVIII. (p. 250 / 272, 320):

Hvo der vil kjöbe Pölse af Hunden maa give ham Flesk igjen.

Danish proverb: “He who would buy sausage of a dog, must give him bacon in exchange.”

The Danish proverb is probably from this polyglot collection.

—Mit seinem eignen Verstande wurde Thrasyllus schwerlich durchgekommen seyn. Aber in solchen Fällen finden seinesgleichen für ihr Geld immer einen Spitzbuben, der ihnen seinen Kopf leiht; und dann ist es so viel als ob sie selbst einen hätten.
        Wieland. Die Abderiten.

German: “Thrasyllus, with his unaided intellect, would not have succeeded; but such worthies can always find rogues who for money will lend brains, which is just as well as to have brains of their own.”

The translation of Wieland may be based on Christmas's.

XXIX. (p. 264 / 286, 320):

—Mihma hatak ash osh ilhkolit yakni ya̱ hlopullit tʋmaha holihta ʋlhpisa ho̱ kʋshkoa untuklo ho̱ hollissochit holisso afohkit tahli cha.
        Chosh. 18.9.

Choctaw translation of Joshua xviii. 9: “And the men went and passed through the land, and described it [by cities, into seven parts] in a book.”

XXX. (p. 274 / 297, 320):

—Gran pensier volgo; e, se tu lui secondi,
Seguiranno gli effetti alle speranze:
Tessi la tela, ch' io ti mostro ordita,
Di cauto vecchio esecutrice ardita.
        Tasso.

Italian: in Wiffen's translation: “I nurse a mighty project: the design
But needs thy gentle guidance to commend
My hopes to sure success; the thread I twine;
Weave thou the web, the lively colors blend;
What cautious Age begins, let Dauntless Beauty end.”

Bella domna vostre socors
M'agra mestier, s'a vos plagues.
        B. de Ventadour.

Provençal: “Fair lady, your help is needful to me, if you please.”

All the editions of Bernard de Ventadour that I can find, such as this collection of troubadour poetry, have bella, not belle.

XXXI. (p. 278 / 302, 320):

Deh! ben fôra all' incontro ufficio umano,
E ben n'avresti tu gioja e diletto,
Se la pietosa tua medica mano
Avvicinassi al valoroso petto.
        Tasso.

Italian: from the Jerusalem Delivered, c. vi. st. 76:
“It would be some humanity to stand
His dutiful physician! what delight
Would it not be to lay thy healing hand
Upon the young man's breast!”
        Wiffen.

The GA text prints bed for ben. There is a lot of variability in 19th century spelling of 16th century poetry, and some effort is required to find an edition that matches the four selections as given, but I am pretty sure that this is an error. I cannot locate any version of Wiffen's translation that has “young man” and not “brave man” for valoroso, but that may be intentional.

She, gracious lady, yet no paines did spare
To doe him ease, or doe him remedy:
Many restoratives of vertues rare
And costly cordialles she did apply,
To mitigate his stubborne malady.
        Spenser's Faerie Queene.

XXXII. (p. 288 / 1):

Lo, swiche sleightes and subtiltees
In women ben; for ay as besy as bees
Ben they us sely men for to deceive,
And from a sothe wol they ever weive.
        Chaucer.

This obviously really is Chaucer, from The Squire's Prologue, but I am not sure whose edition. In particular, based on the spelling in the various manuscripts, those that have subtiltees instead of subtilitees seem to have wommen for women. I am not, however, prepared to say that no such edition exists.

XXXIII. (p. 295 / 9, 331):

—Itancan Ihduhomni eciyapi, Itancan Tohanokihi-eca eciyapi, Itancan Iapi-waxte eciyapi, he hunkakewicaye cin etanhan otonwe kin caxtonpi; nakun Akicita Wicaxta-ceji-skuya, Akicita Anogite, Akicita Taku-kaxta—

Sioux (Dakota) translation of the Pilgrim's Progress. By-Ends names his distinguished friends, in the City of Fair-Speech:
—“My Lord Turn-about, my Lord Time-server, my Lord Fair-speech, from whose ancestors the town first took its name; also Mr. Smooth-man, Mr. Facing-both-ways, Mr. Anything,” etc.

The passage from Riggs's translation of the Pilgrim's Progress is from the same page as XXIV.

þe richeste wifmen alle: þat were in londe,
and þere hehere monnen dohtere. …
þere wes moni pal hende: on faire þā uolke.
þar was mochel honde: of manicunnes londe,
for ech wende to beon: betere þan oþer.
        Layamon.

Semi-Saxon:
“The richest women all—that were in the land,
And the higher men's daughters—
There was many a rich garment—on the fair folk,
There was mickle envy—from [all parts of the country],
For each weened to be—better than others.”

The first excerpt of Laȝamon's Brut begins here in the 19th century edition (v. 24507) and the second on the next page here (v. 24531). (In a more modern edition, Vol. II, p. 640/641.) The GA text prefers MS Cotton Otho C.xiii, perhaps because the language is less archaic, except where the Otho Reviser has cut lines, where they are restored from Cotton Caligula A.ix, giving a hybrid result.

XXXIV. (p. 314 / 31, 331):

Eet Jomfru Haar drager stærkere end ti Par Öxen.

Danish proverb: One hair of a maiden's head pulls stronger than ten yoke of oxen.

Another Danish proverb in the same collection.

XXXV. (p. 320 / 38, 331):

“Mi-x-in tzakcaamah, x-in tzakcolobeh chirech nu zaki caam, nu zald colo. … nu chincu, nu galgab, nu zalmet” …
        Rabinal-Achi.

Quiché (Guatemalan), from a native drama, published by Brasseur de Bourbourg:
“I have snared and caught him, I have taken and bound him, with my brilliant snares, with my white noose, with my bracelets of chiseled gold, with my rings, and with my enchantments.”

The GA text prints tzakcolobch; it is possible that this is defective type in the earlier editions, for which I only have scans, but it is definitely a c in modern ones.

Chascus hom a sas palmas deves se meteys viradas.

Old French proverb: Every one has the palms of his hands turned toward himself.

From Quitard's collection of French proverbs (p. 339; cf. V).

XXXVI. (p. 329 / 47, 332):

புத்தகங்கள்

Tamul: “Books.”

The Tamil word puttakaṅkaḷ occurs a number of times in the phrase-book suggested above for XXVI; for instance, on this page (in the “nominative case”).

“Bataïnadon nin-masinaiganan, kakina gaie onijishinon.”—
“Missawa onijishinig kakina o masinaiganan, kawin gwetch o wabandansinan.”
        Baraga.

Chippeway: “My books are many and they are all good.”
“Although his books are good, he does not much look into them.”

Only the second Baraga example appears in the version in Google Books (with an added circumflex accent, which is used irregularly to indicate nasalization). Both are in the edition in the Internet Archive (pp. 394, 393). The GA text adds a third n, in the verb ending, which is emphasized in the paradigm:

Missawa onijishininig kakina o masinaiganan, kawin gwetch o wabandansinan.
Although his books are good, (useful,) he does not much read them, (look into them.)

XXXVII. (p. 335 / 54, 332):

𒉌 𒅔 𒀉 𒂵 𒊏 𒀀 𒄩 𒈨𒌍

Assyrian (from Smith's Assurbanipal): “Ni-in-id [dag]-ga ra a-ha-mis,” “We will (help) each other.”
[Note. The fourth group varies in different copies of the cuneiform record. Mr. Smith puts dag, marking it as a variant, and translates by “help.” Others may prefer to read gul, “to cheat.” As philological criticism would have been out of place in The Gilded Age, and as the passage is a familiar one, it seemed best to omit the questionable group—leaving it to the reader to fill the blank as in his better judgment he might determine.]

The GA appendix prints -ni- for -in-. Trumbull's deadpan note plays around with Smith's text (p. 25, col. ii, l. 11) and the variant it actually records. The prism A text has ni-in-id-ga-ra and another (p. 42, K 2675, l. 39) substitutes dag (𒁖) for id. Both are writing nimtagara 'let us come to a mutual agreement' phonetically; see CAD, s.v. magāru 5a. (The Prism B version of this passage on the First Egyptian War and the one on the Arabian War in XXV are also presented in Beginner's Assyrian, an inexpensive reprint of An Assyrian Manual.)

Usa ogn' arte la donna, onde sia cólto
Nella sua rete alcun novello amante;
Nè con tutti, nè sempre un stesso volto
Serba, ma cangia a tempo atti e sembiante.
        Tasso.

Italian, from the Jerusalem Delivered, c. iv., st. 78:
“All arts the enchantress practised to beguile
  Some new admirer in her well-spread snare;
Nor used with all, nor always, the same wile,
  But shaped to every taste her grace and air.”

XXXVIII. (p. 340 / 60):

Now this surprising news scaus'd her fall in a trance,
Like as she were dead, no limbs she could advance,
Then her dear brother came, her from the ground he took
And she spake up and said, O my poor heart is broke.
        The Barnardcastle Tragedy.

All the versions I can find of this online (for instance, here) differ in the first half of the second line, “Life as if she was dead.”

XXXIX. (p. 349 / 70, 332):

  —Belhs amics, tornatz,
Per merce, vas me de cors.
        Alphonse II.

Provençal: Dear friend, return, for pity's sake, to me, at once.

From the same collection of troubadour poetry as suggested for XXX.

Ala khambiatü da zure deseiña?
  Hitz eman zenereitan,
  Ez behin, bai berritan,
    Enia zinela.
  —Ohikua nüzü;
  Enüzü khambiatü,
  Bihotzian beinin hartü,
    Eta zü maithatü.
        Maitia, nun zira?

Basque (Souletin dialect); from a popular song, published by Vallaberry: “You gave me your word—not once only, twice—that you would be mine. I am the same as in other times; I have not changed, for I took it to my heart, and I loved you.”—Chants populaires du pays Basque, pp. 6, 7.

XL. (p. 355 / 77):

Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing, when loud Rumor speaks?
I, from the orient to the drooping west,
Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold
The acts commenced on this ball of earth:
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride;
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
        King Henry IV.

XLI. (p. 362 / 85, 332):

وَزَادَهُ كَلَفاً فِى الحُبِّ أَنْ مَنَعَتْ
وَحَبَّ شَيْئاً الَى الانْسَانِ مَا مُنِعَا
        Táj el-'Aroos

Arabic:
“And her denying increased his devotion in love:
For lovely, as a thing, to man, is that which is denied him.”
From an Arabic poet quoted in the Táj el-'Aroos (of the Seyyid Murtada), which, as everybody knows, is a commentary on the Kámoos—the Arabic “Webster's Unabridged.”

The Arabic poem occurs in the تاج العروس من جواهر القاموس Taj al-Arus Min Jawahir al-Qamus, s.v. حبب ḥbb 'to love'. The text in the online version here and in the Internet Archive (vol. 2, p. 217, right at the top)

وزَادَهُ كَلَفاً فِي الحُبِّ أَنْ مَنَعَتْ
وَحَبَّ شَيْئاً إلى الإِنْسَانِ ما مُنِعَا

wa-zāda-hu kalafa fī al-ḥubbi an manaʿat
wa-ḥabba šaiʼa ila al-insāni mā muniʿā

differs only slightly in the exact placement of a few vowels and hamzas. I do not know whether Trumbull found this by browsing through the dictionary or (as seems more likely) quoted in some bilingual work (which I cannot locate).

Egundano yçan daya ni baydienetacoric?
Ny amoriac enu mayte, nic hura ecin gayecxi.
        Bern. d'Echeparre.

Basque. From the Poésies Basques of Bernard d'Echeparre (Bordeaux, 1545), edited by G. Brunet, 1847:
“Was there ever any one so unfortunate as I am?
She whom I adore does not love me at all, and yet I cannot renounce her.”

XLII. (p. 372 / 96, 333):

Subtle.  Would I were hang'd then! I'll conform myself.
Dol.  Will you, sir? Do so then, and quickly: swear.
Sub.  What should I swear?
Dol.  To leave your faction, sir,
    And labour kindly in the common work.
        Ben Jonson. The Alchemist.

Eku edue mfine, mfine ata eku: miduehe mfine, mfine itaha.

Efik (or Old Calabar) proverb: “The rat enters the trap, the trap catches him; if he did not go into the trap, the trap would not do so.” From R. F. Burton's Wit and Wisdom of West Africa, p. 367.

The later GA edition lost a mfine and inserted a spurious comma, the most serious error it introduced. The same proverb can be seen in modern orthography here.

XLIII. (p. 390 / 117, 333):

“Ikkaké gidiamuttu Wamallitakoanti likissitu anissia ukunnaria ni rubu kurru naussa abbanu aboahüddunnua namonnua.”

Arrawak version of Acts xix. 23: “And the same time there arose no small stir (Gr. τάραχος οὐκ ὀλίγος) about that way.”

XLIV. (p. 396 / 124, 333):

Capienda rebus in malis præceps via est.
        Seneca.

Latin (Seneca): “In an evil career a reckless downward course is inevitably taken.”

Based on the various manuscripts, the more common modern reading for Seneca's Agamemnon, v. 154 is Rapienda. Since capio and rapio are mostly synonyms as well as rhymes, this does not much change the sense. But it is the Capienda version that has made it into collections of proverbs and into Montaigne (translation).

Et enim ipsi se impellunt, ubi semel à ratione discessum est: ipsaque sibi imbecillitas indulget, in altumque provehitur imprudenter: nec reperit locum consistendi.
        Cicero.

Latin (Cicero): “For men are subject to their own impulses as soon as they have once parted company with reason; and their very weakness gives way to itself, incautiously sails into deep water and finds no place of anchorage.”

The earlier GA edition has ipse and provebitur. The later edition corrects this to the above. Now, Cicero actually wrote (Tusc. Disp., iv, 18 [41]):

Etenim ipsæ se impellunt, ubi semel a ratione discessum est, ipsaque sibi imbecillitas indulget in altumque provehitur imprudens nec reperit locum consistendi.

The subject in the original is feminine because it refers to ægritudo autem ceteræque perturbationes 'sorrow and other perturbations'. Based on the translation, it may have been intentional to make it masculine. Though, as it happens, the same two changes, that and imprudenter for imprudens, were made in that English translation of Montaigne of a few years before (French original). That would be an even more likely source for both the mottoes in this chapter, except that the English translations of the Latin appear to be original.

XLV. (p. 404 / 133, 333):

—Nakila cu ch'y cu yao chike, chi ka togobah cu y vach, x-e u chax-cut?—Utz, chi ka ya puvak chyve, x-e cha-cu ri amag.
        Popol Vuh.

Quiché (Guatemalan), from the Popol Vuh, or Sacred Book, edited by Brasseur de Bourbourg, p. 222:
—“‘What will you give us, then, if we will take pity on you?’ they said. ‘Ah, well we will give you silver,’ responded the associate [petitioners].”

XLVI. (p. 416 / 147, 333):

Forte è l'aceto di vin dolce.

Italian proverb: “Strong is the vinegar of sweet wine.”

An Italian proverb from the same polyglot collection.

Ne bið swylc cwénlíc þeáw
idese to efnanne,
þeáh ðe hió ǽnlícu sý,
þætte freoðu-webbe
feores onsæce,
æfter lig-torne,
leófne mannan.
        Beowulf.

Anglo-Saxon:
“Such is no feminine usage
for a woman to practise,
although she be beautiful,—
that a peace-weaver
machinate to deprive of life,
after burning anger,
a man beloved.”
        — Thorpe's Translation, 3885-91.

The printed GA version is missing a couple of the long vowel marks from Thorpe's transcription. The last line of the translation seems to have been modernized from Thorpe's “a dear man.”

XLVII. (p. 426 / 158, 334):

—Mana qo c'u x-opon-vi ri v'oyeualal, ri v'achihilal! ahcarroc cah, ahcarroc uleu! la quitzih varal in camel, in zachel varal chuxmut cah, chuxmut uleu!
        Rabinal-Achi.

Quiché (from a native drama): “My bravery and my power have availed me nothing! Alas, let heaven and earth hear me! Is it true that I must die, that I must die here, between earth and sky?”

XLVIII. (p. 434 / 167, 334):

—In our werking, nothing us availle;
For lost is all our labour and travaille,
And all the cost a twenty devil way
Is lost also, which we upon it lay.
        Chaucer.

He moonihoawa ka aie.
        Hawaiian Proverb.

“A poison-toothed serpent (moonihoawa) is debt.”

This Hawaiian proverb occurs here.

XLIX. (p. 443 / 177, 334):

Солнце заблистало, но не надолго: блеснуло и скрылось.

Russian: “The sun began to shine, but not for a long time; it shone for a moment and disappeared.”

The phrase occurs in an English-Russian grammar here (the GA text does not include the accents), with the English translation coming from the earlier exercise here, to which that is the key. (The idea evidently is to supply the correct form of the given verb.) Interestingly, searching for that phrase online will turn up a Russian translation of The Gilded Age, Позолоченный век.

“Mofère ipa eiye nā.” “Aki ije ofere li obbè.”

Yoruba proverb: “I almost killed the bird.” “Nobody can make a stew of almost” (or “Almost never made a stew”).— Crowther's Yoruba Proverbs, in Grammar, p. 229.

Crowther's Grammar is not online (or in a nearby library), but the same proverb (less diacritics) is in Burton (429), who presumably got it from there.

L. (p. 453 / 188, 334):

  Þá eymdir stríða á sorgfullt sinn,
og svipur mótgángs um vánga ríða,
  og bakivendir þér veröldin,
og vellyst brosir að þínum qvíða;
  þeink allt er knöttótt, og hverfast lætr,
  sá hló í dag er á morgun grætr;
    Alt jafnar sig!
        Sigurd Peterson.

Icelandic, from a modern poem:
“When anguish wars in thy heavy breast,
and adverse scourges lash thy cheeks,
and the world turns her back on thee,
and pleasure mocketh at thy pain:
Think all is round and easily turns;
he weeps to-morrow who laughs to-day;
    Time makes all good.”

This appears to be from an English translation of Rask's Icelandic grammar. There, the pronoun þér is actually spelled þèr (original). Rask prefers a different accent because the change is before the base vowel; see discussion here (translation). In addition to just leaving an accent off the e, as mentioned there, the sound might be spelled je. But the GA text has the modern spelling, and there is never a question of different accents being interpreted differently. Also, the Swedish has hnöttótt 'globular'; apparently there was a misprint in Dasent's translation. I suppose that ought to be corrected, too.

LI. (p. 465 / 200, 334):

Mpethie ou sagor lou nga thia gawantou kone yoboul goube.
        Wolof Proverb.

Wolof (Senegambian) proverb: “If you go to the sparrows' ball, take with you some ears of corn for them.” R. F. Burton, from Dard's Grammaire Wolofe.

Both Burton and Dard have sagor, not sagar. Based on the dictionaries I can find, sagar means 'rag; bit of cloth' and sagor 'sparrow'.

“Mitsoda eb volna a' te szolgád, hogy illyen nagy dolgot tselekednék?”
        Királyok II. K. 8. 13.

Hungarian, from 2 Kings, viii. 13:
—“Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?”

For Királyok II 8.13, the GA text is missing the long vowel in tselekednék. In modern grammar and spelling, but still basically Gáspár Károli's translation, (e.g., here), this is “Kicsoda a te szolgád, ez az eb, hogy ilyen nagy dolgokat cselekednék?”

LII. (p. 473 / 210, 334):

Aucune chose au monde et plus noble et plus belle
Que la sainte ferveur d'un véritable zèle.
        Le Tartuffe, a. I, sc. 6.

French of Molière:
“Nothing in the world is more noble and more beautiful
Than the holy fervor of true zeal.”—Molière.

The later GA edition consistently has Tartufe.

With faire discourse the evening so they pas;
For that olde man of pleasing wordes had store,
And well could file his tongue, as smooth as glas—
        Faerie Queene.

—Il prit un air bénin et tendre,
D'un Laudate Deum leur prêta le bon jour,
Puis convia le monde au fraternel amour!
        Roman du Renard (Prologue).

French: [The Fox] “assumed a benign and tender expression,
He bade them good day with a Laudate Deum,
And invited the whole world to share his brotherly love.”

The GA text prints fraternal.

LIII. (p. 476 / 213, 335):

—He seekes, of all his drifte the aymed end:
Thereto his subtile engins he does bend,
His practick witt and his fayre fylèd tongue,
With thousand other sleightes; for well he kend
His credit now in doubtful ballaunce hong:
For hardly could bee hurt, who was already stong.
        Faerie Queene.

I am not sure what edition of Spenser this is from, since only a couple of the spellings (tongue for tonge; doubtful for doubtfull) have been modernized.

Selon divers besoins, il est une science
D'étendre les liens de notre conscience,
Et de rectifier le mal de l'action
Avec la pureté de notre intention.
        Le Tartuffe. a. 4, sc. 5.

French of Molière: Tartuffe, the hypocrite, is speaking:
“According to differing emergencies, there is a science
Of stretching the limitations of our conscience,
And of compensating the evil of our acts
By the purity of our motives.”

Molière wrote selon, even when he it was spelled, “Selon diuers beſoins, il eſt vne Science.” The substitution of selons seems rather prevalent: there are lots of hits in Google, Google Books, and even JSTOR; it even occurs right next to selon. A good number are transcriptions of French in English, but some seem to be native French compositions, suggesting a common typo (or something I don't understand). It also creeps into later reprints: for instance, Macaulay 1850 vs. 1901; and with the same Molière quote, Arnold 1862 vs. 1873. All editions of GA that I have seen have it.

LIV. (p. 484 / 222, 335):

भेदस्तमसो ऽष्टविधो मोहस्य च दशविधो महामोहः
तामिस्रो ऽष्टादशधा तथा भवत्यन्धतामिस्रः
        Sánkhya Káriká, xlviii.

Sanskrit: “The distinctions of obscurity are eightfold, as are also those of illusion; extreme illusion is tenfold; gloom is eighteenfold, and so is utter darkness.”
[This description of a New York jury is from Memorial Verses on the Sankya philosophy, translated by Colebrooke.]

The later GA edition corrects the chapter number to xlviii. An online transcription is here and it transliterates:.

bhedastamaso.aṣṭavidho mohasya ca daśavidho mahāmohaḥ
tāmisro.aṣṭādaśadhā tathā bhavatyandhatāmisraḥ

Ny byd ynat nep yr dysc; yr adysco dyn byth ny byd ynat ony byd doethineb yny callon; yr doethet uyth uo dyn ny byd ynat ony byd dysc gyt ar doethineb.
        Cyvreithian Cymru.

Old Welsh: “Nobody is a judge through learning; although a person may always learn he will not be a judge unless there be wisdom in his heart; however wise a person may be, he will not be a judge unless there be learning with the wisdom.”—Ancient Laws of Wales, ii. 207.

Google Book offers a preview of the Welsh Laws p. 206, in which it may or may not include the English p. 207. The Full View, out of copyright, edition only has volume one. The earlier GA edition prints doethinab for the second occurrence.

LV. (p. 494 / 233, 335):

“Dyden i Midten,” sagde Fanden, han sad imellem to Procutorer.

Danish proverb: “Virtue in the middle,” said the Devil, when he sat down between two lawyers.

Another Danish proverb in the same collection, with a slightly altered translation.

Eur breûtaer brâz eo! Ha klevet hoc'h eûz-hu hé vreût?

Breton: “This is a great pleader! Have you heard him plead?”—Legonidec's Descrip. de Braham.

Of course, Le Gonidec never wrote a description of the novel's fictional “Mr. Braham, the great criminal lawyer.” But those phrases are taken from his French-Breton dictionary. (Search will not find them; the OCR is not tuned for fine italic type.) Breûtaer, literally 'pleader', is generally 'lawyer'.

LVI. (p. 503 / 244, 335):

—Voyre mais (demandoit Trinquamelle) mon amy, comment procedez vous en action criminelle, la partie coupable prinse flagrante crimine?—Comme vous aultres Messieurs (respondit Bridoye)—

Old French: “‘Yea, but,’ asked Trinquamelle, ‘how do you proceed, my friend, in criminal causes, the culpable and guilty party being taken and seized upon flagrante crimine?’ ‘Even as your other worships use to do,’ answered (Judge) Bridlegoose.”—Rabelais, Pantagruel, b. ii., ch. 137.

Again Motteux's translation of Rabelais.

“Hag eunn drâ-bennâg hoc'h eûz-hu da lavaroud évid hé wennidigez?”

Breton: “Have you anything to say for her justification?”—Legonidec.

LVII. (p. 513 / 256, 335):

“Wegotogwen ga-ijiwebadogwen; gonima ta-matchi-inakamigad.”

Chippeway: “I don't know what may have happened; perhaps we shall hear bad news!” — Baraga.

From the same edition of Baraga in the Internet Archive, p. 398.

LVIII. (p. 521 / 265, 336):

皁白不分

Chinese (Canton dialect, Tsow pak păt fun): “Black and white not distinguished,” i. e., Right and wrong not perceived.

In Jyutping, zou6 baak6 bat1 fan1. From the same Cantonese book as VI. (French's note from Trumbull's list seems to confirm this by referring to Morrison.) Note that while that was written left-to-right, this is right-to-left. Also found with a more common word for 'black', 黑 hak1.

Papel y tinta y poco justicia.

Spanish proverb (of a court of law): Paper and ink and little justice.

Although there are sources confirming that there is such a Spanish proverb, I have not found one that could possibly have been used.

LIX. (p. 530 / 276, 336):

Ebok imana ebok ofut idibi.

Efik (Old Calabar) proverb: “One monkey does not like to see another get his belly full.” — Burton's W. African Proverbs.

Ὁ καρκίνος ὧδ᾽ ἔφα
Χαλᾷ τὸν ὄφιν λαβών·
Εὐθὺν χρὴ τὸν ἑταῖρον ἔμμεν,
Καὶ μὴ σκολιὰ φρονεῖν.

Grecian. From the Greek Anthology: “When the Crab caught with his claw the Snake, he reproved him for his indirect course.” [An old version of what the Pot said to the Kettle.]

The skolion is printed in GA with one acute accent turned to grave and one grave left out, relative to the text in Bergk. The version in Jacobs has an extra δὲ in the first line. A translation given in Bland's Collections comes from an essay from the Edinburgh Review on “Greek Banquets” (in the Internet Archive, p. 372; the essay starts on p. 350) and the tradition in which this poem occurs.

Mishitt∞naeog n∞waog
  ayeuuhkone neen,
Nashpe nuskesukqunnonut
  ho, ho, nunnaumunun.

Massachusetts Indian, from Eliot's translation of Psalm xxxv. 21: “Yea, they opened their mouth wide against me, and said, Aha, aha, our eye hath seen it!”

Once again, in addition to Eliot's metrical translation (EEBO), there is a prose one, which in the 1663 edition (EEBO) reads:

Nux mishitt∞naéog ayeuukone neen, n∞waog, Ho, ho, naumunan nashpe nuskesukqunonat.

and the same in the 1685 edition (EEBO), except for “Aha, aha” instead of “Ho, ho.”

LX. (p. 543 / 291, 336):

 

Javanese: “Alas!”

I am not entirely confident of my abilities with the Javanese script (I used the font from here) or the particular variant used here. But it appears that this says aḍoh tĕlahĕ. This is somewhat confirmed by some books that give the first word as aḍuh. A dictionary gives a variant adhuh lae, leaving only the tĕ unaccounted for. Of course, I have no idea what work this was copied from.

“Ow holan whath ythew prowte
  kynthoma ogas marowe”—

Cornish:
“My heart yet is proud
Though I am nearly dead.”—The Creation.

LXI. (p. 552 / 301, 336):

Han ager ikke ilde som veed at vende.

Danish proverb: “He is a good driver who knows how to turn.”

Another Danish proverb in the same collection, with “not bad” adjusted to “good” in the translation.

Wanna unyanpi kta. Niye de kta he?
        Iapi Oaye, vol. i, no. 7.

Sioux (Dakota): “Let us go now. Will you go?” [The Iapi Oaye is a Dakota newspaper published monthly in the Dakota language.]

I have not yet seen a copy of Iapi Oaye.

LXII. (p. 560 / 310, 336):

Gedi kanadiben tsannawa.

Kanuri (Borneo): “At the bottom of patience there is heaven.”—R. F. Burton's West African Proverbs.

—La xalog, la xamaih mi-x-ul nu qiza u quïal gih, u quïal agab?
        Rabinal-Achi.

Quiché: “Is it in vain, is it without profit, that I am come here to lose so many days, so many nights?”

Five words are left off the end of the question from Rabinal-Achi, “chiri chuxmut cah, chuxmut uleu.” And a corresponding part of the translation omitted, “between heaven and earth (entre le ciel et la terre).” I believe chiri means 'here' (ici), which was not left out of the translation. (The vocabulary in the same book is a bit chaotic, but there is one on the FAMSI site.) The same stock phrase occurs elsewhere (including XLVII) with varal, which also seems to mean 'here' (perhaps with some distinction that dictionaries don't make clear).

LXIII. (p. 567 / 317, 336):

Alaila pomaikai kaua, ola na iwi iloko o ko kaua mau la elemakule.
        Laieikawai, 9.

Hawaiian: “Then we two shall be happy, our offspring shall live in the days of our old age.”

This quotation occurs in the same Hawaiian dictionary as the previous one, but since the translation is slightly different, I'm still guessing this is not Trumbull's source. The entire Hawaiian Romance of Laieikawai can be found in a later Ethnology Bureau Annual Report.

ܘܢܗܘܐ ܡܒܝܐܢܐ ܠܢܦܫܟܝ܅ ܘܡܬܪܣܝܢܐ ܠܡܕܝܢܬܟܝ܅
ܪܥܘܬ܃ܕ܃ܝܗ

Syriac (from the Old Testament; the blessing on Naomi transferred to Ruth): “And he shall be unto thee a restorer of thy life [consolotor animæ, as Walton translates from the Syriac version,] and a nourisher of thine old age.” Ruth iv. 15.

Since Walton is mentioned explicitly, I assume the Peshitta text comes form his Polyglot Bible, a favorite of polyglot scripture collectors. (Though it is sacrilege to bibliophiles, there are internet sites that sell single leaves of the Walton Polyglot, making at least a piece of it affordable.) I don't know whether Trumbull owned a Walton Polyglot. This line is on vol. I, p. 193 (EEBO). The Syriac Bible can be found online in CAL: both text and grammatical analysis. The name of book in the GA attribution is printed ܪܕܥܘܬ, probably a transposition of ܕܪܥܘܬ., that is, with an Aramaic genitive particle, which is how it appears in a sentence marking the end of Ruth on that same page.

Tail-piece. (p. 574 / 325, 337):

טוב אחרית דבר מראשיתו

Hebrew: “The end of a thing is better than the beginning.” Eccles. vii. 8.

ṭôḇ ’aḥărîṯ dāḇār mērē’šîṯô.

Sowing Cumin and Basil

The American edition of Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit, co-authored by Steve at LanguageHat, still isn't available, as far as I know. But being impatient, I went ahead and got the UK edition when I found a copy here in the States, even though it lacks LH's preface.

A relevant topic within the scope of this blog takes a little bit of a stretch.

Read More

Theophrastus has this to say about cumin:

Πάντα δὲ πολύκαρπα καὶ πολυβλαστῆ, πολυκαρπότατον δὲ τὸ κύμινον. ἴδιον δὲ καὶ ὂ λέγουσι κατὰ τούτο· φασὶ γὰρ δεῖν καταρᾶσθαί τε καὶ βλασφημεῖν σπείροντας, εἰ μέλλει καλὸν ἔσεσθαι καὶ πολύ. (HP, vii 3 3)

All have numerous fruits and numerous shoots, but cummin has the most fruits of all. And there is another peculiarity told of this plant: they say that one must curse and abuse it, while sowing, if the crop is to be fair and abundant. (tr. Hort)

Pliny says much the same thing about basil:

nihil ocimo fecundius. cum maledictis ac probris serendum praecipiunt, ut laetius proveniat; sato pavitur terra. [et cuminum qui serunt,] precantur ne exeat. (NH, xix 36 = 7)

There is no seed more prolific than that of ocimum [basil]; it is generally recommended to sow it with the utterance of curses and imprecations, the result being that it grows all the better for it; the earth, too, is rammed down when it is sown, and [when cumin is sown] prayers offered that the seed may never come up. (tr. after Bostock and Riley; some codices associate the last sentence with cumin, others do not)

Cumin is native from the Eastern Mediterranean to India and was cultivated in ancient times. The scientific name, Cuminum cyminum, is as close to a tautonym as the rules for plants allow. The Semitic name occurs in Akkadian as kamûnu (written 𒌑𒁷𒌁𒊬 ^u₂gamun^sar), the כַּמֹּן kammon of Isaiah 28:27.

Another source of various names for cumin shows up as, for instance, जीर jīra. Both the Wikipedia and this fun book of Persian proverbs mention ریره به کرمان می‌برد zire be kermān mibarad 'carry cumin to Kerman', that is, coals to Newcastle.

Basil, Ocimum basilicum, though now considered the essential herb of Southern Italian cuisine, actually is native to India. It is the βασιλικόν 'royal' plant.

Plutarch also mentions the belief about sowing cumin:

Ἀλλ᾽ ἐὰν τοῦτ᾽, ἔφη, ζητῇς, ὁ Εὐθύδημος αὐτίκα δεήσει σε καὶ περὶ τοῦ σελίνου καὶ περὶ τοῦ κυμίνου διδόναι λόγον, ὥν τὸ μὲν ἐν τῷ βλαστάνειν καταπατοῦντες καὶ συντρίβοντες οἴονται βέλτιον αὐξάνεσθαι, τὸ δὲ καταρώμενοι σπείροισι καὶ λοιδοροῦντες. (Quaestiones Convivales, vii 2 3)

But if you have a mind to such questions, Euthydemus will presently desire you to give an account of smallage and cummin; one of the which, if trodden down as it springs, will grow the better, and the other men curse and blaspheme whilst they sow it. (tr. T. C.)

But Palladius applies it to rue:

Hoc mense ruta seritur ... Prosequuntur etiam maledictis et maxime in terra soluti lateris ponunt, quod prodesse certissimum est. (De Re Rustica, iv 9)

Is this month rue is sown ... They also attack it with curses and especially they put it in earth with loose brick, which is certain to be beneficial.

These superstitions could not escape the notice of the great students of mythology. So, Grimm cites Pliny in a section on curses (Deutsche Mythologie, xxxviii; translation). On the spectrum of “may God damn he who ...” to “damn you“ to the interjection Damn! to the intensive “the whole damn ...,” Grimm tends more toward the apotropaic and Uglier than a Monkey's Armpit toward the insulting, though its section on “Ancient Languages” does explain the earlier world, followed by a taste of Latin, Greek and Early English. In any case, it is not always possible to draw a neat line between senses of curse, and both reveal something about the culture that uses them. For instance, Grimm has this Old Norse curse from the Poetic Edda:

nio röstom er þû skyldir neðar vera,
ok vaxi þer â baðmi barr! (Helgaviða Hjörvarðssonar, 16)

Nine miles deeper | down mayst thou sink,
And a tree grow tall on thy bosom. (tr. Bellows)

And a Middle High German poem by the Minnesinger Master Rumelant containing a meta-curse:

Sô Gelboê der berc von allen touwen verteilet ist, der vluoch dir haften müeze! (Minnesinger Handschriften, vol. 3, p. 53)

As Mount Gilboa is condemned of all dew, may that curse stick to you!

The allusion is to David's curse against Mount Gilboa in 2 Samuel 1:21, הָרֵי בַגִּלְבֹּעַ אַל־טַל וְאַל־מָטָר עֲלֵיכֶם hare baggilboa‘ al-ṭal wal-maṭar ‘aleḵem 'Ye mountains of Gilboa, [let there be] no dew, neither [let there be] rain, upon you'. A similar curse against the land is invoked by Danel in the Ugaritic tablet KTU 1.19:I:44: 𐎁𐎍𐎟𐎉𐎍𐎟𐎁𐎍𐎗𐎁𐎁 balû ṭalli balû rabibi 'no dew, no rain'. (Transliteration, translation and more discussion here; Wyatt's translation and notes here.)

Getting back to planting herbs, Frazer notices Theophrastus, Plutarch, Pliny and Palladius in a digression on the “Beneficial effect of curses and abuse” in a chapter on magical control of the rain (The Golden Bough : Part 1, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, i 281). He relates them to later and distant customs, none of which, though, involve growing vegetables.

Erasmus, in the entry in his Adages, s.v. cumini sector 'cumin-splitter' for one who is very parsimonious, cites Plutarch and sees the superstition as confirmation that this is a negative characterization:

... quod olim ſerebatur a male precantibus, auctore Plutarcho, atque ita felicius provenire creditum eſt. Quo magis quadrat in hos huiuſmodi convicium, qui ob parcimoniam male audiunt. (p. 443)

According to Plutarch, those who planted this would curse it as they sowed, and this was supposed to improve the germination. This fact makes this type of uncomplimentary saying more appropriate for notorious skinflints. (tr. Mynors)

Later editions of Giambattista della Porta's Natural magick take note of it in an inventory of tricks for growing fruits and vegetables:

Theophraſtus mentions an experiment that is very ſtrange, whereby to make Cumin grow flouriſhingly, and that is curſing and banning of the ſeeds when you ſow them; and Pliny reporteth the ſame out of Theophraſtus. And he reporteth it likewiſe of Baſile, that it will grow more plentifully and better, if it be ſowed with curſing and banning. (Book 3, Chap. XIX of the 1658 English translation: text, EEBO; only earlier shorter editions of the Latin appear to be online)

I suspect that it is also covered by some of the great herbals, though a quick check does not turn up any references. One reason for this is that they, like Dioscorides (III, 59) concentrate more on the magic effects of the herbs themselves than on growing them.

By the same token, it is in Conrad Heresbach's Rei rusticae:

Cuminum, Coriandrum terram poſtulant bene ſubactam cui letamen admiſceatur, ſeruntur verna ſatione, ſata herbis purgeantur. Cumin κύμινον et Graecis alijſque linguis pleriſque vocatum. Maledictis ſeri creditum vt copioſius exeat, & qui ſerunt precentur vt exeat. (Lib. II, p. 102)

Cummin and Corriander require well ordered ground, they are ſowed in the Spring, and muſt be wel weeded. Cummin is called in Greeke κυμινον, in Latine Cuminum, and almoſt like in all other languages: it is ſowed beſt (as they thinke) with curfyng and execration, that it may proſper the better. (tr. Googe in EEBO)

The French idiom semer le basilic, literally 'to sow basil', apparently means 'to rant and rave'. I only qualify this somewhat because I have never seen it actually used in literature (or cinema), only indirectly reported in works on herbs or plant lore, such as Angelo de Gubernatis's La mythologie des plantes or the Herbalpedia.

A look through 17th century English works finds a number of interrelated similes about sowing cumin and hempseed and/with curses, whose exact sequence of development, if it is more than coincidence, is not entirely clear to me:

• One of the Characters added to Thomas Overbury's poem “The Wife,” probably by John Webster, in the 1616 edition, is:

  A Diuelliſh Uſurer
  Is ſowed as Cummin or Hemp-ſeede, with curſes; and he thinks he thriues the better. Hee is better read in the Penall Statutes, then the Bible; and his euill Angell perſwades him, hee ſhall ſooner be ſaued by them. (EEBO; later edition)

• Thomas Adams The Good Politician Directed (before 1653):

  What ſhall become of the oppreſſor? No creature in heauen or earth ſhall teſtifie his innocency. But the ſighes, cryes, and grones of vndone parents, of beggard widdowes and Orphanes ſhall witneſſe the contrary. All his money, like Hempe-ſeede, is ſowed with curſes: and euery obligation is written on earth with inke and blood, and in hell with blood and fire. (Works, p. 838, EEBO)

• Nathaniel Hardy, Justice triumphing, or, The spoylers spoyled (1648):

  He ſoweth curſes like hempſeed to make an halter for himſelfe, and all ſuch ſooner or later ſhall have cauſe to ſay — propriis configimur armis, our armes are our harmes, and our own conceptions the death of their parents. (EEBO)

• Henry Bold, Wit a sporting in a pleasant grove of new fancies (1657):

  The Uſurer.
  He puts forth Money, as the Hangman ſowes,
  His fatal Hemp-ſeed, that with curſes growes,
  So growes his damn'd wealth in the Devils name,
  That doth in hel the Harveſt home proclaim,
  For which deep reaſon my poor Muſe preferrrs
  This ſute, that Poets nere prove Vſurers. (EEBO)

What kind of curses are appropriate? A suggestion is given by Edgar MacCulloch's Guernsey Folk Lore (1903; no preview in Google Books, but complete in the Internet Archive):

In planting a bed of smaller herbs, to render them thoroughly efficacious they should be planted under a volley of minor oaths, such as “goderabetin” or “godzamin.” It is not expedient that the oaths should be too blood curdling. (p. 425)

I can only find those particular words, which show every sign of being euphemisms for something like “god damn it,” in two other books associated with Guernsey (the second one of which seems, in the snippet available, to be relating just this superstition). The source MacCulloch cites for this is George Métivier, apparently his unfinished (and unpublished?) Souvenirs Historiques de Guernesey et des autres îles de la Manche, but possibly Dictionnaire franco-normand, which has not been scanned yet that I can find. (See preface to Poësies guernesiaises et françaises, which is in Google Books).

It is not surprising that this same idea is applied by other cultures, and in other languages, to different plants. For instance, Marín's Más de 21,000 Refranes Castellanos contains similar southern Spanish proverbs about garlic:

El ajar, en días nones, y sembrarlo con maldiciones.

He oído aludir más de una vez a esta vulgar creencia, y sé que la practican algunos hortelanos andaluces. A cada diente de ajo que entierran, sueltan un periquito o un reniego, como si estuviesen muy enfadados contra los ajos, y en eso fían la suerte del ajar. (p. 144)

The garlic patch, on odd days, and sow it with curses.

I have heard this common belief alluded to more than once, and I know that some Andalusian growers practice it. Each clove of garlic that they bury, they let go a swear-word ('parakeet') or a curse, as if they were very angry against the garlic, and in that ensure the fortune of the garlic patch.

Para que salgan buenos tus ajos, con maldiciones has de sembrarlos.

Ya queda atrás en otra forma: “Los ajos mejores se siembran con maldiciones.” (p. 361)

For your garlic to come out well, you should plant them with curses.

Now left behind in another way: “The best garlic are planted with curses.”

If you know of any more, particularly outside Europe, please leave a comment.

Branded Meat Substitutes

I have mentioned before that I collect vegetarian cookbooks from different times and places and in different languages. A number of these are from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, mostly in English with a few in French. As well as physical books, this subset is augmented by books scanned into Google Books (though their subject categorization is as sloppy as the rest of their meta-data).

The rise, at the end of the 19th century, of food faddism in general, and vegetarianism in particular, involved an interest in the scientific planning and production of food. It also coincided with modern production and brand marketing. This relationship is particularly clear in the early history of cold breakfast cereal.

One result of this is that a number of these cookbooks include recipes calling for, and advertisements offering, processed vegetarian foods, particularly protein sources. Some of these are recognizable as brands in the modern sense, with patented processes and/or trademarked names. Others are just new names for a public domain process. For instance, Mrs. Kellogg's Healthful Cookery lists all the Battle Creek Sanitarium products that are called for in the recipes earlier in the book. The British Manual of Vegetarian Cookery has ads with similar lists.

The natural question is, what exactly are these products?

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G. K. Chesterton, for whom Orthodoxy was quite literally the basis of his creed, was always ready to apply his wit against middle-class non-conformists. His poem about “Higgins the Heathen” wonders why those without faith would display conventional morality. The coincidence of vegetarianism and teetotaling led him to wonder why a “Logical Vegetarian” would not drink these pure vegetable drinks. To be fair, Chesterton, an Anglican who converted to Roman Catholicism and Distributist, maintained a lifetime friendship with George Bernard Shaw, vegetarian, teetotaler, atheist turned follower of some mystical version of Bergson's Creative Evolution and Fabian Socialist. They engaged in a series of public debates with a civility rarely found today. Chesterton wrote a biography of Shaw, whose Introduction consists of this:

Most people either say that they agree with Bernard Shaw or that they do not understand him. I am the only person who understands him, and I do not agree with him.

Shaw himself reviewed the book in the Nation (reprinted in the Sep. 12, 1909 NYT), calling it, “the best work of literary art I have yet provoked,” but substantially disputing its accuracy.

But this blog is not about religion or politics, so I will stick to the vegetarian angle. In the Dec. 4, 1909 Illustrated London News, Chesterton wrote an essay titled “Honesty in Vegetarianism” arguing generally against the idea, joking “I am a vegetarian between meals,” and specifically against vegetarian dishes modeled after meat ones:

I will eat nuts with any man—or with any monkey. But they must be nuts—not nutton, or nutter, or nusco, or nutrogen, or nuttolene, or nuttose, or nutarian Cashew. (Collected Works, Vol. XXVIII, p. 437)

Obviously, these are all foods made from nuts, but what specifically?

The September, 1904 issue of Sunset magazine included the following poem by Ruth Comfort Mitchell:

To a Health-Food Girl

Hail to thee, Granola Maid!
Kumyss cheek and silken braid,
Flower blooming in the shade
  Of the Protose tree;
Pious bearing, modest mien,
Hail, my Vegetarian Queen,
Hail, my healthy Nuttolene,
  Zwieback fairy, thee!

Set my Glutose spirit free,
Lift they Meltose eyes to me,
Say thou'lt be my Bean Puree,—
  All my cares beguile;
Sway me with they grace imperial,
Say thou'lt be my Flaky Cereal,
Beam on me, while charms ethereal
  Sterilize thy smile!

See, thy Granut tear-drop start!
Swear that we will never part,—
Give to me thy Whole Wheat heart,
  Let the skeptics scoff;
'Round thy waist my strong arm clinches,—
This is where my spirit flinches,
For thy waist is forty inches—
  Let us call it off! (p. 489)

Some of these health-foods were imports, rather than new inventions. Kumyss (that is, kumis) is fermented milk, traditionally mare's milk among the Turkic peoples of the steppes. In Mongolian, it is ᠠᠢᠷᠠᠭ airaγ, apparently from Arabic عرق ʿaraq 'sweat', that is, arak. Tolstoy relied on the “koumiss cure” at various times; for instance, he writes in his Confession:

бросил всё и поехал в степь к башкирам - дышать воздухом, пить кумыс и жить животною жизнью. (here)

I threw in everything and left for the steppes of the Bashkirs to breathe fresh air, drink koumiss and live a primitive life. (tr. Kentish)

Kellogg briefly offered the Sanitarium's own version of kumis, known as kumyzoon. Zwieback can usually be found in the cracker aisle of the supermarket. But what of the rest, with newly made-up names?

To make some sense of all of these, I have put together a small glossary of these vegetarian products and the best determination I have been able to make for what they were made of, how and by whom. A blog post is not the best medium for this, but it is a decent way to get started. I fear that just dumping it as a work in progress into Wikipedia would only invite a mess or deletion.

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albene: [< albus 'white'?] A vegetable fat. Edinburgh Medical Journal. Coconut butter? A Comprehensive Guide-book to Natural, Hygienic & Humane Diet.

alnut: Some kind of nut meat. Compendium of Food-microscopy. See nutmeat.

avenola: [< avena granola] Sanitarium breakfast food made from oats and wheat. Science in the Kitchen. See granola.

artox: Whole wheat flour. “so treated that the sharp, irritating particles of the bran, so prevalent in the ordinary meal, are rendered harmless and capable of digestion by the weakest stomach.” Cf. Graham flour, where different parts of wheat are ground separately. Reform Cookery Book.

atole: [< atole] Seasoned dried corn. Vegetarian Society of America.

beurréose: Coconut butter. Hubert. See nucoline.

brazose: Nut meat from brazil nuts. Produced by Pitman Health Food Company. Reform Cookery Book. A Manual of Vegetarian Cookery.

bromose: Nut meat with malted nuts. Produced by Kellogg's Sanitas Nut Food Company. Compendium of Food-microscopy. “A combination of predigested nuts and cereals.” Reform Cookery Book. Sanitas ad. See nutmeat.

carnos: Beef extract substitute. Malt extract of barley. A Comprehensive Guide-book to Natural, Hygienic & Humane Diet. Reform Cookery Book.

cocoaline: Coconut butter. Hubert. See nucoline.

cocoïne: Coconut butter. Hubert. See nucoline.

cocolardo: Coconut butter. Coconut Research Institute of Ceylon. See nucoline.

cocoline: Coconut butter. Coconut Research Institute of Ceylon. See nucoline.

cocose: Coconut butter. Hubert. See nucoline.

cocotree: Coconut butter. Hubert. See nucoline.

diamond butter oil: Cottonseed oil. Vegetarian Society of America.

ervalenta: [< Ervum lens] Lentil flour. Pharmaceutical Journal.

fibrose: Some kind of nut meat. Mapleton's. Reform Cookery Book. See nutmeat.

Fromm's extract: Crushed nuts with cellulose and excess oil removed. A System of Diet and Dietetics. Vegetarian Society of America.

fruitosia: Nut butter, nut meal and dried fruit. Guide for Nut Cookery.

frutose: Nut butter and fresh fruit (bananas). Guide for Nut Cookery.

glutose: Some kind of syrup?

gofio: Sanitarium breakfast food made from parched grains. Science in the Kitchen. See granola.

granola: Kellogg's version of granula. Not the same as modern granola.

granose: Graham flour flakes. Kellogg's Corn Flakes before corn.

granula: Granules of Graham flour. Wikipedia.

granut: =? granuto. The Living Temple. “A Vegetarian Menu.”

granuto: Some kind of Sanitas wheat cereal, “predigested,” so probably porridge-like. Healthful Cookery. Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.

ko-nut: Coconut butter. See nucoline.

lac vegetal: Almond milk. Kellogg profile.

lactine: Coconut butter. Coconut Research Institute of Ceylon. See nucoline.

ko-nut: Coconut butter. Vegetarian Society of America. See nucoline.

kornules: Breakfast cereal. Ixion. Reform Cookery Book. The New Age.

kunerol: Coconut butter. Reinhardt. See nucoline.

laureol: Coconut butter. Coconut Research Institute of Ceylon. See nucoline.

legumon: [< legume nutton] Finely ground peanuts. Reform Cookery Book. See nutmeat.

malted nuts: Milk substitute of ground almonds and peanuts in emulsion with malt syrup. Produced by Kellogg's Sanitas Nut Food Company. Kellogg profile. A System of Diet and Dietetics.

maltol: Some kind of Sanitarium product with maltose. The Living Temple. Sanitarium price list.

marmite: Brewers yeast paste. Wikipedia.

meatose: Some kind of nut meat. Reform Cookery Book. Good Food. See nutmeat.

meltose: Sanitarium's maltose syrup. “malt honey.” The New Dietetics. Home Book of Modern Medicine.

nucoa: Oleomargarine. Coconut oil, peanut oil and milk. Congressional Hearing. Vintage billboards. eBay.

nucoline: [< nux 'nut'] Coconut butter. Jamaica Dept. of Agriculture. Before hydrogenated vegetable oils, one of the few vegetable oils solid like butter at room temperature. According to The Oil Conquest of the World's chapter on margarine, when coconut oil was first sold as cocoanut-butter, there was the possibility of confusion with cocoa-butter, that is, cacao-butter, a by-product of chocolate manufacture, so Francis H. Loder, son of Francis W. Loder, of Noder and Nucoline, began insisting that it be spelled coco-nut and never cocoa-nut. (Of course, this, the modern spelling, was always an alternative, but somewhat less prevalent at that time.)

nusco: Some kind of nut product?

nutcoa: Coconut butter. Vegetarian Society of America. See nucoline.

nut cero: Nut meat. Produced by St. Helena Sanitarium Food Company. The Home Dietitian. See nutmeat.

nutcysa: Nut meat. Produced by Nashville Sanitarium Food Company. Internal Medicine. See nutmeat.

nutarian: [By analogy with vegetarian and fruitarian] So nutarian lard or nutarian cake. R. Winter's Nut Butters: Nutarian Almond Margarine, Nutarian Walnut Margarine, Nutarian Cashew Margarine, Nutarian Table Margarine, Nutarian Cocoanut Margarine. Reform Cookery Book.

nutfoda: Nut meat. Produced by Nashville Sanitarium Food Company. Internal Medicine. See nutmeat.

nutgrano: Grain and nut butter. Guide for Nut Cookery. See nutmeat.

nutmarto: Potted paste. Produced by Pitman Health Food Company. Reform Cookery Book. A Manual of Vegetarian Cookery.

nutmeal: Some kind of savory nut meat. Compendium of Food-microscopy. See nutmeat.

nutmeat: Various kinds of canned nut loaf: ground nuts, nuts proper or peanuts; plus flour, usually wheat. Compendium of Food-microscopy. Modern recipe.

nutmeato: Nut butter and corn starch. Guide for Nut Cookery. See nutmeat.

nutmeatose: Some kind of nut meat. Reform Cookery Book. Guide for Nut Cookery. See nutmeat.

nutmese: Peanuts ground and steamed. The Laurel Health Cookery. See nutmeat.

nutora: Steamed nut butter. Guide for Nut Cookery. See nutmeat.

nutose: See nuttose.

nutrela: Soy granules, TVP. Modern version.

nutrex: Coconut butter. Coconut Research Institute of Ceylon. See nucoline.

nutrogen: Nuts and milk food? Reform Cookery Book. But Food and Feeding in Health and Disease says like wintox.

nutrose: Nut meat from peanuts. Compendium of Food-microscopy. Food and the Principles of Dietetics. See nutmeat.

nuttene: Nut fat. Chapman's Health Food Stores. Reform Cookery Book. Coconut butter?

nutter: [< nut butter] Usually coconut butter. See nucoline.

nuttolene: Nut meat pâté. Produced by Kellogg's Sanitas Nut Food Company. Peanuts and seasoning. Commerce Dept. ruling. Kellogg profile. Substitutes for Flesh Foods. Modern versions are just peanut loaf. See nutmeat.

nutton: [< nut mutton] Finely ground blended nuts: almond, cashew, pine kernel, and walnut; no peanuts. Reform Cookery Book. See nutmeat.

nuttose: Veal-like nut meat. Produced by Kellogg's Sanitas Nut Food Company. Peanut paste thickened with a bit of flour. Commerce Dept. ruling. Kellogg profile. Ad for diabetics. See nutmeat.

nutvego: Some kind of savory nut meat. Reform Cookery Book. See nutmeat.

nutvejo: Some kind of savory nut meat. Compendium of Food-microscopy. Reform Cookery Book. Ad; another. See nutmeat.

nuxo: Nut gravy. Reform Cookery Book.

odin: Beef extract substitute. Malt extract of barley. A Comprehensive Guide-book to Natural, Hygienic & Humane Diet.

palmin: Coconut butter. Reinhardt. See nucoline.

penole: [< pinole] Seasoned dried corn. Vegetarian Society of America.

placomeat: [< place o' meat?] Sandwich biscuits. Produced by Pitman Health Food Company. Reform Cookery Book. A Manual of Vegetarian Cookery.

plasmon: Powdered casein and baking soda. “Vegetarian Restaurant in London.” Failures of Vegetarianism.

protose: Beef-like nut meat. Produced by Kellogg's Sanitas Nut Food Company. Peanuts with wheat gluten. Commerce Dept. ruling. Kellogg profile. Modern recipe using other starches. See nutmeat.

provost nuts: Cereal of wheat, barley and malt. Reform Cookery Book.

prunus: “The rapid flesh-former.” Reform Cookery Book.

revalenta arabica: [< ervalenta] Lentil flour. A System of Diet and Dietetics. Pharmaceutical Journal. Burton's Pilgrimage.

savita: Vegetable bouillon for gravy, made from brewers yeast. The New Dietetic. See marmite.

sovex: Paste of soy sauce and brewers yeast. Modern version.

taline: Coconut butter. Hubert. See nucoline.

trumese: Wheat gluten and peanuts steamed. The Laurel Health Cookery. See nutmeat.

végétaline: 1. karité = Shea butter. Landor. 2. Coconut butter. Hubert. See nucoline.

vegex: Vegetable bouillon, made from brewers yeast. The New Dietetic. See marmite.

vegsal: Vegetable soup. Produced by Pitman Health Food Company. Ad.

vegsu: See vejsu.

vejola: Some kind of savory nut meat. Reform Cookery Book. Advice for serving The Vegetarian Guest. See nutmeat.

vejos: Vegetable extract. Vegetarian Society of America.

vejsu: [< vegetable suet] From coconut oil. Jamaica Dept. of Agriculture. I suppose the processing must be slightly different from nucoline; perhaps partial hydrogenation to raise the melting point.

vigar: Some kind of concentrated vegetable stock? Vigar Brawn, tomato and clear, served cold; Vigar Gravy Essence. Produced by Pitman Health Food Company. Reform Cookery Book. A Manual of Vegetarian Cookery.

vijex: Some Adventist product. Noted in a list of them in American Speech.

wheatena: Sanitarium breakfast food made from wheat. Science in the Kitchen. See granola.

wintox: Vegetarian beef tea subtitute, made from malted grain. Reform Cookery Book. Food and Feeding in Health and Disease.