Maize 2

More European words following the same ideas as previously include:

• Catalan blat de moro 'Moor's wheat'.
• Hungarian törökbúza 'Turkish wheat'.
• Basque arto, which originally meant 'millet'.
• Bulgarian царевица tsarevitsa < Цариград Tsarigrad 'Imperial City', that is, Constantinople / Instanbul.
• Welsh indrawn is just Ind- + grawn 'India grain'.

A number of Slavic languages have something like Russian кукуру́за kukurúza. Vasmer says, «Трудное слово», 'it's a difficult word'. He does cite Kretchmer's idea that it is from the sound one makes when feeding cornmeal to turkeys. In addition to such a cucuruz, Romanian porumb originally meant 'pigeon', on account of the shape, and a regional păpușoi is from păpușă 'doll'.

Around the Mediterranean, the imputed source may need to change.

• Turkish mısır 'Egyptian', short for mısır buğdayı 'Egyptian wheat' or mısır darısı 'Egyptian millet'.
• Likewise, Armenian: եգիպտացորեն egiptacʿoren 'Egyptian wheat'.
• Conversely, in Egyptian Arabic, ذُرَةٌ dhura is either 'sorghum' or 'maize', per Lane (scan), the former is disambiguated as ذُرَة صَيْفِىّ dhura sayfia 'summer sorghum' or ذُرَة قَيْظِىّ dhura qayzia 'spring sorghum' and the latter ذُرَة شَامِىّ dhura shamia 'Syrian sorghum' or ذُرَة كِيزَان dhura kizan 'vessel(?) sorghum'.
• Maltese qamħirrun = qamħ ir-rum 'wheat of the Romans'.

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Modern Hebrew תירס tiras was named (in imitation of the European "Turkish grain" words) for Tiras, one of the sons of Japheth in Genesis 10:2, because of an association with Turkey. In his Dictionary, s.v., Klein has a rant against this, partly because in the Targum (and the Protestant Samuel Bochart's Phaleg, which similarly aimed to equate modern names with the tribes of Noah), תירס Tiras is תרקא tarreka Thracia, and according to some in the Talmud, פָּרַס pāras 'Persia'; so something else is needed if you want Turkey.

In Persian, the normal word is ذرت zorrat, borrowed from that Arabic ذُرَّة dhura, and like it formerly meaning 'sorghum'. An older term (according to, for instance, here) was گندم مکه 'Mecca wheat'. This idea is also found to the North and East around the Caspian. The main Azeri word is qarğıdalı, evidently from qarğı 'reed'. But (according to this), there are other regional forms, such as məkkə-buğda 'Mecca wheat' in Nakhchivan and Lankaran, yekə buğda 'big wheat' in Balakan and Zagatala, and hacı-buğda 'Haji wheat' in (Azerbaijani speaking parts of ?) Dagestan. So too, Turkmen mekgejöwen, Uzbek makkajoʻxori, Tajik Ҷуворимакка 'Mecca sorghum', sometimes shortened, as it is in Kazak жүгері jügerı / Kyrgyz жүгөрү jügörü; this second part coming from Pers. جواری jovâri 'sorghum' (Horn), also the Dari word for 'maize', and cognate with Sanskrit यव yava, “barley”. (jowari is enough of an English word to make it into the OED.)

In the actual Indian subcontinent, Indian corn is also often makka. So makki ki roti, a maize flatbread, served with sarson ka saag, mustard greens: ਮੱਕੀ ਦੀ ਰੋਟੀ + ਸਰੋਂ ਦਾ ਸਾਗ is (or is marketed as) quintessential Punjabi street food. Around here, the makki ka atta used seems to be coarser than masa harina, so the bread is stiffer than tortillas. More examples: Hindi मक्का / Urdu مکا‎ makkā or मकई makaī, Marathi मका makā, Oriya ମକା môka, Gujarati મકાઈ makāī, Tamil மக்காச்சோளம் makkāccōḷam, Telugu మొక్కజొన్న mokkajonna, Kannada ಮೆಕ್ಕೆ ಜೋಳ mekke jōḷa. Malayalam is മക്കച്ചോളം makkacōḷaṁ or just ചോളം cōḷaṁ, that part being common Dravidian for 'sorghum'. (cholum is also enough of an English word to make it into the OED.)

The conventional explanation, again, is that makka is 'Mecca', that being, following the common pattern, the supposed origin. If not entirely fanciful, it would presumably be the Spanish who brought it from the New World to the Arabs.

But there is also a controversy of long standing looking to prove Pre-Columbian origins for maize in Asia and the Subcontinent in particular. Some of this focuses on physical evidence. For example, from the late '80s:

• American Crop Plants in Asia prior to European Contact
• Maize Ears Sculptured in 12th and 13th Century A.D. India as Indicators of Pre-Columbian Diffusion
• 'Maize' in Somnathpur, an Indian mediaeval temple
• Maize Ears Not Sculpted in 13th Century Somnathpur Temple in India

This debate continues on Usenet, blogs and other personal sites, and now social media. As far as I can tell, the evidence for and against has not much changed in decades, even while the details have been worked out in the development of maize from teosinte in Central America and the spread of the various early maize races throughout the Americas. It is now possible, though, to access higher resolution photos and even a video tour of the statues with what might be corn cobs.

Concentrating on the words, an early origin would imply that there ought to be Sanskrit words for maize. Watt gives a few and takes three 'corn' entries from Monier-Williams, which he then decides were probably millet or sorghum. (It is unfortunately easy to find recent online papers quoting these very ones as evidence of an early maize arrival.) Turner has markaka, a word attested only in lexicographical works, as the source of 'maize' words from Ḍumāki mʌkæi to Marāṭhī makā. His gloss for the headword is 'Ardea argala', as in Monier-Williams, preceded by:

मर्क् mark (prob. invented to serve as the source of the words below), to go, move.

But Ardea argala is an adjutant bird. Still McGregor has two entries for Hindi मक्का makkā, with the 'maize' sense “conn[ected with] markaka-.” This is copied into Wiktionary, whose second Reference does (p. 106) note Central Asian mäkkä-jokhari (see above) and so the possible Mecca derivation. On the other hand, Václav Blažek, in article analyzing 15 Indo-European 'barley' words, sums his theory up (2.4.5) as a *mr̥k- 'seeds of barley', as 'kind of corn which must be irrigated' from *merk- 'to dip', which also explains a water bird. But the path of Mecca jowari would need explaining.

Or there is markaṭaka 'a species of grass', from Āpastamba's Śrautasūtra, which Turner compares to markaka-. It also occurs in food lists in the Mārkaṇḍeya and Padma Puranas. It seems to be ragi.

The Gauhati copper-plate grant of Indrapala has boundaries involving a makkhi-yāna. Dr. Hoernle (met here before on account of the Bower Manuscript) points out that this might be 'the road lined with maize (-fields)' or another form of makhānā (which is coincidentally popped like popcorn).

All of this is obviously colored by nationalism and religion, particularly in our present climate. Makki-di-roti probably isn't ancient Punjabi cuisine. (“Makki di roti is colonial violence” might be trolling / Poe's law.) But it is, at worst, a happy accident of colonialism, like banh mi or nem.

Another set of words includes Bengali ভুট্টা / Hindi भुट्टा / Urdu بهٿا bhuṭṭā, which McGregor, Platts, and Turner trace to bhr̥ṣṭá¹ 'fried / roasted'. But another possibility is that it is related to Indian words for Tibet / Bhutan (and so like Bhut Jolokia).

As to the earlier suspicion that by bútás Burton meant bhuṭṭā and the reasonableness of doing that in an African context. First, in one of his Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay he wrote, “the ‘búta’ of Hindostan, young maize roasted or boiled.” Likewise, back in Africa, his 1859 report to the Royal Geographical Society on “The Lake Regions of Central Equatorial Africa” has several pages of agriculture and the paragraph on Zea mays contains, “green maize or young ‘corn-cob,’ the buta of Western India.” The two volume Lake Regions Of Central Africa, published the next year, does not have either the botanical name or the India reference. Elsewhere, someone's report, “Sketches of Abyssinia,” taken from Indian Public Opinion, says:

Besides these they have the bhutta, or the Indian corn, which they call mashela bahry [ምሸላ ባሕሪ], or corn from the sea—their usual method of distinguishing any foreign importation.

So it works, given the right audience and maybe a little more qualification than the Pongo-land passage had.

In East Africa, Swahili muhindi (Burton mentioned it in that RGS report and here in Zanzibar) indicates that maize comes from India.

In his journal on the Second Zambesi expedition, on Aug 31, 1858, Dr. Livingstone recorded his analysis of a common pattern for maize names:

I consented and went to wood on the island of Nyakasenna. Found the native cotton called Tonje Cadja growing on it. It clings to the seed and, from its hard crisp feel in the hands, seems more like wool than cotton. The fibre is strong, curly and short. Tonje manga is the introduced variety and, as that same word is applied to maize, we learn in this etymology that maize is not an indigenous but an imported grain. Mapira is the name of the large millet or sorghum and Mapira manga of Maize (Foreign mapira).

For reasons that will become evident in a second, take note that the tonje manga that Livingstone found and Kirk reported was likely from India. And that manga specifically means something foreign arriving by sea and is named for the Manga Arabs from Muscat, the name coming from Arabic مَنْقَعُ 'pool of water' or, by extension, 'sea'.

Yoruba, Igbo, and Edo cognates ọka are from a common root for 'millet', but now additionally mean 'maize'. Westermann identified a larger set of -kà- 'Rohrgras,Sorghum' for his 'West Sudanic' languages. His overall Sudansprachen 'Sudanic languages' form, I believe, the basis, more or less, of proto-Niger-Congo. “The Diffusion of Maize in Nigeria. A Historical and Linguistic Investigation” listed out these and other terms to determine, in particular, the role of the Portuguese in its spread there.

ọka is used to make ẹkọ, which Burton (in Yorubaland) compared to sowens. Lumpers, for whom grits and polenta are really the same thing, will probably want to include ugali, if not angú …, hasty-pudding and stirabout (Burton in Brazil, explaining how it is made from fubá). Splitters who don't go all the way to distinguishing all the national varieties, but do need to call out the slightly fermented version, in search of an Englishing might go with corn-pap. This African sense does make it in the OED's pap noun2 1.b. Even though this is immediately informed by Africaans, Harriot had written of, “boyling the floure with water into a pappe.” Pap seems to be on the top of the flour packaging on Amazon with other names below.

While describing Savi in The Kingdom of Whydah (present day Benin), Burton includes a footnote on the preparation of akansan, which is usually spelled akasan. Here is a photo from Michael W. Twitty, the Kosher/Soul culinary historian's, Twitter; note how a respondant from Nigeria recognizes is as more or less the same as eko.

I am not sure it is the most effective way to convey the decision tree, but this chart of “Sub-Saharan African Maize-Based Food-Processing Practices” is pretty amazing.

An old LanguageHat post pointed to a paper on Bantu porridge words, which pointed to another paper on manioc noting a mid-17th century Dutch reference to maize flour in fufu. Wikipedia has a helpful note, thrown into a typically random paragraph in the fufu article warning against Eastern and Southern Africans confusing it with their own ugali. And, as noted above, milie, Dutch mille, can be 'millet' or 'maize'. Still, in Dapper's Naukeurige beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche gewesten van Egypten, …, we find first, “Mille, Mais by d'Indianen geheten,” which seems unambiguous, and then, “Dan hunne gewoonlijke ſpijze is meeſt fondy of foufy, van meel van mille.” Even more strangely, the previous paragraph had noted, “Zy hebben groten overvloet van Banannas en Mandioque, of Farinhe-wortelen, welke twee gewaffen gen broot verſtrekken.” As though at that time they made bread from cassava flour but fufu from maize meal.

There is also debate about pre-Columbian dispersion of maize to Africa. Much of this that is easy to find online is the work of Mervyn David Waldegrave Jeffreys, an Oxford-educated colonial administrator who got a 1934 PhD in Anthropology from UCL while (on leave from?) working in Nigeria and who collected for the Wellcome Museum. He was prolific enough that someone published a bibliography with supplement. Jeffrey's argument was refined over the years, but the essential part seems to be that Arabs brought maize to Africa before Europeans reached the New World. Linguistic evidence of that is of this sort:

• Guinea wheat is not a standin for unknown foreign origin, or confusion with sorghum, but a sign of maize there before Europeans had been to America.
• Portuguese milho zaburro is not a functional description (something like grain for fodder), and so liable to confusion between sorghum and maize, but always exactly the latter, so early references to it indicate that the Portuguese found maize in Africa (before they might have brought it there).
• Manga = Mecca “I now put forward the theory that Manga is the Bantuised form of either Mecca or Mocha, both old established Arab trading emporiums, established long before the days of Mohamet.”

The zaburro confusion, if that is what it is, was already in Ramusio's translation of Barros's Asia, Primeira Decada (1552 edition, need to navigate to image number 38), where the translator adds mahiz in one margin and an illustration in the other. Now elsewhere Ramusio adds canna del mahiz in the margin of a translation of the Iambulus fragment of Bibliotheca Historica (C1 BCE). Burton makes a cameo appearance as translator of Francisco de Lacerda in Kazembe, giving, in a footnote quoted by Jeffreys, maize as milho burro 'lesser millet' and sorghum as milho grosso 'greater millet'.

As for the prerequisite that Arabs might have reached America, one potential source is early Chinese accounts of Arab sailors in 木蘭皮 Mùlán Pí, which is usually taken as Morocco and Spain under the Almoravids المرابطون Al-Murābiṭūn. But about which the botanist Hui-lin Li wrote a paper, supposing, in particular, that descriptions of a large grain there referred to maize.

Jeffrey's non-linguistic evidence includes things like that there is a ntoro that cannot eat maize on Tuesdays, which is taken to imply that it must have been known very long ago for such a taboo to have developed.

The Africanist Frank Willett (that is a link to an obituary; Wikipedia tellingly does not have an entry at all; Britannica has a one-sentence bio because he wrote their African Art article, but that's it) wrote:

Jeffreys draws on all manner of evidence, with more industry than discretion, failing to bear in mind certain important considerations and using linguistic evidence in a way no philologist could approve.

(Backstory is a squabble in Man: W J W J.)

Another paper author at the 1962 Third Conference on African History and Archaeology, where Willett presented the maize paper that contains that quote, was A. C. A. Wright, again a colonial career civil servant, who had written a 1949, “Maize Names as Indicators of Economic Contacts,” published in The Uganda Journal. (I have no idea why the UF Digital Collections have that journal, but fortunately they do. There is even a follow-up in that journal, by a Comboni Missionary, Fr. Carlo Muratori, giving Italian dialectical 'maize' forms.) He manages to cover a lot of the same territory without, that I can see, going beyond the bounds of generally accepted facts.

Once again, there is no escaping that this is politically delicate. Mealie-meal was the staple of the mines and cities of colonial Southern Africa. Jeffreys briefly appears in the work of Henrika Kuklick, the historian of anthropology. First in the paper “Contested Monuments” (in Colonial Situations) on the tortured archeology of Great Zimbabwe and Rhodesia's state policy to deny that it was the work of Bantu people centuries ago, putting Jeffrey's claims of foreign origin not only for material culture but even for vocabulary in that context. And then again in The Savage Within on the survival of diffusionism at “the only university that tolerated unreconstructed diffusionists, the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.” With footnote, “Jeffreys taught social anthropology, and seems to have been the only convinced diffusionist who was able to secure an academic appointment to do so.” Even from the diffusionist side, Ivan Van Sertima, the Guyanese author whose They Came Before Columbus aimed to show that Africans reached Central America before Columbus, pointed out that Jeffreys moved to South Africa later in life by choice, and concluded that he may have just assumed that someone brought maize to Africa, rather than that they went and got it.

This review of Van Sertima takes a swipe at Jeffreys as a way of linking to our last African work, Leo Wiener's Africa and the Discovery of America, last encountered here in connection with peanuts. Recall that his shtick is to mine word lists, find patterns, and construct significant historical revisions based on them. About eight pages of the Tobacco chapter are devoted to maize. However, as I read it, there is no challenge to the American origin of maize the plant / grain; even the basic outline of the history of its spread is accepted. Rather, it is the history of the word maize itself that gets revising. It is not a native word from a Caribbean language. Instead, the source is the word mazorca, conventionally explained as Iberian Arabic maṣúrqa formed from ماسُورة māsūrah plus a Latinate -icus suffix, and used to describe pipes used as bobbins, and which the Spaniards used to describe corn-cobs, by analogy with somewhat similar ears of sorghum they knew from Africa and the Portuguese maçaroca. Evidence of this Wiener also sees in various African words for these grains. The Bambara maka is taken to be an Arabicized form, which went from Africa to India, accounting for makka there. Note that Jeffreys (see above) had conversely taken the same to indicate that Arabs had brought maize to Africa before Columbus, naming it after Mecca.

There is also debate of long standing around the arrival of maize in East Asia. De Candolle (cited here regularly) begins his discussion of it (translation) by quoting his earlier work:

Le Maïs est originaire d'Amérique et n'a été introduit dans l'ancien monde que depuis la découverte du nouveau. Je regarde ces deux assertions comme positives, malgré l'opinion contraire de quelques auteurs et le doute émis par le célèbre agronome Bonafous, auquel nous devons le traité le plus complet sur le Maïs.
Maize is of American origin, and has only been introduced into the old world since the discovery of the new. I consider these two assertions as positive, in spite of the contrary opinion of some authors, and the doubts of the celebrated agriculturist Bonafous, to whom we are indebted for the most complete treatise upon maize.

And, indeed, Matthieu Bonafous's 1833 Traité du maïs does claim early arrivals throughout Asia. The specific evidence given includes:

• A 13th century “Charter of Incisa,” documenting a grain called meliga.
• Maize found in an Ancient Egyptian tomb by Rifaud in 1819.
• Entries in 16th century Chinese materia medica.

De Candolle refutes these in turn. The 1204 Incisa document, published by Molinari in 1810, records that two returning crusaders gave the town a piece of the True Cross and some semine, seu granis de colore aureo, et partim albo 'seed or grain of gold color, also partly white' from around Constantinople named meliga. Bonafous admits that this might be sorghum. But that turns out not to be necessary, since in 1877 Comte Riant, in the ironically titled, “Chartre du Maïs,” showed that the whole thing was a forgery.

De Candolle assumes that the Egyptian maize was put there by one of the modern workers. Virey goes to the trouble of supposing that it might be sorghum. Braun also went with a deception by the locals. I am actually not sure where Rifaud reported that he found maize. The citation given by Bonafours in the 1833 edition, digitized by Google is, “J.-J. Rifaud. Voyage en Egypte, en Nubie et lieux circonvoisins, depuis 1805 jusque'en 1827, avec 200 planches. Paris. 1834.” But that is the work Rifaud hoped to publish (prospectus); he wasn't able to get enough subscribers. The 1836 edition, digitized by the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid, ends instead with “Paris, 1855, planches 97 et 138.” Now, those plates, which in the end were all that was published, have been digitized by the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle: pl 97 pl 138. They only show the sarcophagus and an elevation of the tomb site. There isn't any real text. My guess is that Rifaud announced his find in some more ephemeral form, perhaps in some journal, or even the manuscript. Everyone since has just copied Bonafous's citation. In the process of looking for something more definite, I did find an anecdote of Rifaud littering into a maizefield, so that the farmer thought he was putting some written spell on the crop. Also he vandalized the sites with grafitti.

Ancient Egypt is a magnet for those promoting new historical theories. So, Ancient Egyptian Maize by Gunnar Thompson, which presents both textual evidence and many illustrations of ancient artwork (slightly redrawn from published copies), clarifying that various unidentified plants, such as the one in the lower-left of Carter's mural for the Egypt Exploration Society are maize. The lexicographical side is mostly just the usual name lists with proposed connections.A page with the proposed hierglyphic words seems to misread its source. That latter says that “common words for corn flour” (meaning any kind of grain) are nḏ and sḥj. And that specific kinds are gotten by appending swt 'wheat' and jt 'barley'. The slightly different words drawn by Thompson do look compatible with this, though it is not clear exactly where they come from.

1. corn 𓋴𓎞𓏬𓈖𓌾
2. wheat 𓋴𓎞𓏬𓈖𓋴𓅱
3. barley 𓐩𓏌𓌾𓋴𓎞𓏬

The book's scope is not limited to the Near East. For example, there is a section on Rosslyn Chapel and the mid-15th century maybe-maize carvings there. (The chapel's own site even gets in on the Sir Henry “may have travelled there long before Columbus” act.) As sometimes happens, the author is so invested in their revised history that not only are they derisive toward the traditional experts, but they even seem to develop a personal animus toward popularizers for relying on those experts and not doing their own research. The popular account in this case being Betty Fussell's The Story of Corn.

Bonafous and Rifaud were noticed by exegetical works. So, in Fairbairn's 1866 Imperial Bible-Dictionary, s.v. Corn, is an entry written by James Hamilton and illustrated by a maize plant. If it was known to the Egyptians, it would have been in Palestine, and it is not impossible that classical ζειά, the source of Linnaeus's name for maize, included it. Smith's 1868 Comprehensive Dictionary only mentions Rifaud, giving Hamilton as authority, that it might have been known to the Hebrews. But it then wonders whether Rifaud's grains might not have gotten there, “by accident or design, at some time within the last three or four centuries?” There is no sign of this discussion in Smith's 1863 three volume Dictionary or the 1871 four volume update in entries written by Henry Hayman (right around the time of the Rugby controversy); these works have Hebrew fonts and are in many ways unrelated. McClintock and Strong's 1882 Cyclopædia looks to be a shortened version of Hamilton's entry. For all these, as with the Tribes of Israel, the driving idea is that the theology might be tidier if everything was known in the Bible, or at least to the older pagans. The importance here is that these Biblical reference works have been continuously reprinted since and are now transcribed online, making them a potential modern propagator of these unorthodox theories.

In 1906, Berthold Laufer, referenced here before as an expert on the introduction of foreign foods to China, wrote a monograph, on “The Introduction of Maize into Eastern Asia.” His proposal is that within a generation of discovery, it had been brought by the Portuguese to India, and from there through Tibet to China, where by the second generation, so within fifty to seventy-five years of Columbus, is was established. Which is fast enough to account for all the available evidence. He argues against direct introduction by Europeans, in part based on the differences in how maize and potatoes (or tobacco) are perceived. Ping-Ti Ho's 1955 “The Introduction of American Food Plants into China” questions some of this, specifically that maize was produced in large quantities as early as the late 16th century, proposing both overland and maritime routes.

The maize section in Francesca Bray's 1984 Agriculture volume of Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, (e) (2) (iii), begins by quoting (the English translation of) de Candolle. It does not present any novel arguments, but summarizes what we might call the accepted history. In 2004, Johannessen (see above for India) and Sorenson published a paper on “Scientific Evidence for Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Voyages,” as part of the Sino-Platonic Papers series, edited by Language Log's Victor Mair. It summarizes most of the revised arguments. That same yesr, Anne E. Desjardins, a USDA research biochemist, put together a web site on Milho, Makka, and Yu Mai: Early Journeys of Zea Mays to Asia, with the help of the National Agricultural Library's librarian. (That link is to the Wayback Machine, as the original links are all dead. The closest thing remaining on the NAL site are some maize-centered Zoom videos from 2022. It is also possible to get a PDF snapshot of the site here.) Although the authors mostly limit themselves to English (with occasional French) sources, everything is properly footnoted. In terms of content, we might again call it all accepted history. Dr. Desjardins, like Prof. Mair, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. (Ethnographic art and textiles in particular are another area of interest here; many dealers and collectors in those at the end of the last century and beginning of this one were Peace Corps alumni/ae of that generation.) The site was promoted on a Peace Corp message board.

Ho had concluded,

… that, barring a sensational discovery in Chinese sources clearly indicating a pre-Columbian introduction, Chinese maize as a topic for speculation should be closed.

In 2005, in “Maize in Pre-Columbian China,” Uchibayashi claimed to have made that discovery, in the form of the 1505 本草品彙精要 Bencao Pinhui Jingyao 'Classified Materia Medica', where the 薏苡仁 yiyi-ren Job's tears entry has an illustration that looks more like maize. (Note 6 accidentally has 苡薏仁.)

Besides the herbals, the physical evidence for early arrival is mostly odd varieties of maize itself, particularly waxy / glutinous ones. But, it has been pointed out that it shouldn't be surprising that a culture mostly dependent on rice would favor these in its cultivation. And that they are similar to some in Brazil, and so might have initially arrived from there to India or Burma. For instance, Collins 1909 A new type of Indian corn from China. Or Stonor and Anderson 1949 “Maize Among the Hill Peoples of Assam”, addressed specifically by Mangelsdorf and Oliver 1951 “Whence Came Maize To Asia?”, which concludes that no major revision of needed. I am not sure whether botany is more resistant to creative reinterpreation than philology.

As for 本草綱目 Bencao Gangmu, completed in 1578 and published in 1596, and its 玉蜀黍 yù shǔshǔ entry (illustration text): Bonafouns used that illustration as the frontispiece for the first chapter of the later edition of his Maize work. And Weatherwax too as an illustration in his The Story of Maize Plant (though there is some confusion around in which order to read the characters). Note that the text itself somewhat weakens the argument, saying,

玉蜀黍種出西土，種者亦罕。
Yùshǔshǔ zhǒng chū xītǔ, zhǒng zhě yì hǎn
Maize, originating from Western lands, is rarely grown.

In the end, words for 'maize' in various Sinitic topolects (at various times) are not of an inherently different pattern than elsewhere or otherwise suggestive of anything other than recent introduction.

• 番麥 fan1 mai4 Hokkien hoan beh8 'foreign wheat'
• 御麥 yu4 mai4 'imperial (tribute) wheat'
• 玉麥 yu4 mai4 'jade wheat'
• 玉蜀黍 yu4 shu3 shu3 'jade sorghum'
• 玉高粱 yu4 gao1 liang2 'jade sorghum'
• 玉米 yu4 mi3 'jade rice'
• 粟米 Cantonese suk1 mai5 'millet rice'
• 包粟 Hakka bau1 siuk 'sheath millet'
• 包穀 bao1 gu3, Hunanese bau1 gu6 ‘sheath grain’
• 珍珠米 Shanghainese tsen tsy mi 'pearl millet'
• 油甜苞 Fuzhounese iù diĕng báu 'oil sweet plant'
• 粟米 su4 mi3 'millet rice'
• 包兒米 bao1 er2 mi3 'sheath rice'
• 西番麥 xi1 fan1 mai4 'Western barbarian (Tibetan) wheat'
• 戎菽 rong2 shu1 'Western barbarian (Rong) pulse'

And likewise

• Korean 옥수수 oksusu is 玉蜀黍 'jade sorghum' with a native name for jade.
• Japanese トウモロコシ tōmorokoshi = 'Tang sorghum'.
• Burmese ပြောင်းဖူး praun42 bu42 'sorghum gourd'.

Chinese Materia Medica, Vegetable Kingdom, (1911) by Dr. George Arthur Stuart, a medical missionary to China, s.v. Zea Mays, adds some ordinal terms, 八路 bālù 'eighth path' and 六粟 liù sù 'sixth grain'. This is a revision of Contributions Towards the Materia Medica and Natural History of China (1871) by Dr. Frederick Porter Smith, another medical missionary, a combination of translations of parts of Bencao Gangmu with the doctor's own observations. That latter's entry is more discursive, including the suggestion that maize was probably introduced from Japan, where it has the name 南蠻黍 nan-ban-kibi 'Southern barbarian millet'; this based on a multi-part discussion in Notes and Queries on China and Japan for 1867. Note that although Dr. Smith says Mr. Mayers comments were in No. 6, where there are indeed comments by others, his are, in fact, in No. 7, and include the same 玉蜀黍 illustration. The discussion there also takes up the possibility of maize being indigenous, but the concludes not. (As noted here before, Notes and Queries is the Victorian group blog; this variant added “missionaries and residents in the East generally” to its intended audience.)

In the infamous “Terminal Essay,” Burton acknowledged these controveries:

It has been suggested that Japanese tobacco is an indigenous growth and sundry modern travellers in China contend that the potato and the maize, both white and yellow, have there been cultivated from time immemorial.

Nor was he above himself hedging his bets on maize etymology:

The word is of doubtful origin, generally derived from the Haytian mahiz. But in northern Europe mayse (Irish maise) bread, and the Old High German maz (Hind. mans) means meat

mayse is a Prussian word for bread, cognate with Latvian màize. See 1.12 in Blažek (IE barley; cited above), which ultimately links this to a root meaning 'urinate'. I am not sure what is meant for the Irish, mais is just 'mass', which does come from Greek μᾶζα 'barley-cake', from a *meh₂ǵ root meaning 'knead'. OHG maz is indeed 'meat' in the sense of food in general.

Postscript: It is possible that someone will have noticed that, other than some gems pulled from the embers of 𝕏, most of the secondary sources in these recent posts are a decade or more old. Indeed, much of the material sat in the local file system waiting to get put into shape. The lingering pandemic has afforded an opportunity to do that. I do not think much has changed in this history, though I welcome additions. Even the program of government-mandated ignorance for American schoolchildren in certain areas, which might revert the opening premise, may not succeed. There are, naturally, new and expanded online resources, which cleared up some loose ends. Although copyright of obsolete but recent works remains a mess. Overall, I think there was a greater relevant difference between the time of the earliest post here and the last one before the hiatus than between then and these new ones. For instance, Unicode support for hieroglyphs or emoji. 🌽

Maize 1

In The City of Saints, Sir Richard Francis Burton does for Salt Lake City / Mormons / the American West what he did for Mecca / Muslims / the Arabian Peninsula. One of his many asides:

It has long been disputed whether maize was indigenous to America or to Asia; learned names are found on both sides of the question. In Central Africa the cereal is now called as in English, “Indian corn,” proving that in that continent it first was introduced from Hindostan. The Italians have named it Gran' Turco, showing whence it was imported by them. The word maiz, mays, maize, or mahiz, is a Carib word introduced by the Spaniards into Europe; in the United States, where “corn” is universally used, maize is intelligible only to the educated.

I think the last may only still be true in a reductive sense, as universal primary education (while it lasts), to say nothing of global communication, means almost everyone has learned maize.

Indian corn is a prototypical term for maize. An existing word for a common grain — and corn historically means the prevalent local grain — plus some geographical qualification that might suggest where it originates / arrived from. Made extra confusing by West versus East Indies, already confused on the way from Sanskrit सिन्धु 'river' via Old Persian 𐏃𐎡𐎯𐎢𐏁 Hindush and Herodotus's Ἰνδός. Typical too is shortening Indian corn to just corn after a while.

As well as how many twenty-first century Americans recognize “maize,” one might also wonder what “corn” is to other English speakers in a globalized world without well-defined local default grains. I would not be surprised if to some it is, “an American word for maize.” Or, lacking context, that one would react like George III to Thomas Hutchinson, as the latter recalled in his Diary for July 1st, 1774:

H.— … coarse bread made of rye and corn …
K.— What corn?
H.— Indian corn, or, as it is called in Authors, Maize.

A footnote says that Hutchinson mused on the diary's flyleaf whether the word maize was in use in Europe before the discovery of America. As others had and others would.

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Gerard's Herball has an entry for Turkie corne / Turky wheat, with names Frumentum Turcitum / Milium Indicum, Maiz / Pagatowr. The part of the 1597 edition that says,

Theſe kinds of Graine were firſt brought into Spaine, and then into other prouinces of Europe, out of Aſia which is in the Turkes Dominions, as alſo out of America and the Iſlands adioyning from the eaſt and weſt Indies, and Virginia or Norembega

is corrected in the 1636 edition to,

Theſe kinds of grain were firſt brought into Spaine, and then into other prouinces of Europe: not (aſ ſome ſuppoſe) out of Aſia minor, which is in the Turks dominions; but out of America and the Iſlanda adioining, aſ out of Florida, and Virginia or Norembega

A New World origin is generally considered definitively settled by Parmentier, who is best known for promoting potatoes as a substitute for flour in France in the 1780s, but who also proposed cornmeal for that. He there concluded,

C'eſt aſſez inſiſter ſur l'origine du Maïs; il n'eſt plus permit de douter que cette plante ne ſoit une production indigène du Continent, ainſi que des Iles de l'Amérique; & que c'eſt de ce nouvel hémiſphère qu'il a été tranſporté dan les autres parties de l'Univers.

He reinforced this in his entry in the Nouveau dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle, s.v. Mais, pointing out that there is no mention anywhere by anyone before the Spanish.

Somewhat anticipating Mencken, Edward Eggleston wrote a humorous piece, “Wild Flowers of English Speech in America,” for The Century Magazine of April, 1894. It has a couple paragraphs on maize:

• “To this day we do not say maize; our illiterate people have never heard it..”
• Henry Hudson called it “Turkish wheat.”
• French blé de Turquie 'Turkey wheat' and blé d'Inde 'wheat from India'.
• Italian gran turco 'Turkish grain' and gran saracenico 'Saracen grain'.
• German (including from Pennsylvania) Türkisch korn.
• ”corn,“ short for ”Indian corn,“ so “English corn” for other cereals.
• Clayton, the botanist, called it ”Virginia wheat.“
• New Englanders shorten the other way to just ”Indian.“
• Governor Winthrop wrote ”Indean.“
• Connecticut waitress offering a newcomer ”Fried Indian.“

I believe that Henry Hudson's encounter with maize was on his third voyage, in September 1609, aboard the VOC's Halve Maen 'Half Moon'. His journal for that trip is lost, perhaps sold at the 1821 auction of all the Company records before 1700. When he first returned to England, he consulted with van Meteren, who included just a brief summary in the 1611 edition of Belgische ofte Nederlantsche oorlogen ende gheschiedenissen, getting no closer to maize than, “Vꝛuchten, ſelve Wijndꝛuyven / witte ende roode” 'fruit; even white and red grapes' (tr. Asher; somehow 'blue' here; I can't find anything other than 'red', even in the prior Englishing that does invert the order). Hudson was detained by the British authorities, along with the English crewmen; the journal (presumably, per his contract) sailed on to Holland with the remainder Dutch crew. Some extracts were published in 1625 in de Laet's Nieuwe Wereldt, including, “haer eten is Turcxſe tarwe / daer ſy koecken van backen / ende is goet eeten;” 'Their food is Turkish wheat, which they cook by baking, and it is excellent eating' (tr. Asher) and “was overvloedich van Maiz ende Boonen vant vooꝛ-gaende jaer” 'There was plenty of maize and beans from the previous year'. These mostly align with the journal of Robert Juet, one of Hudson's officers, also published in 1625: for Sept 4th, 1609, “They haue great ſtore of Maiz or Indian Wheate, whereof they make good Bread.” and for Sept 16th, “ears of Indian Corne” (Purchas adding Maiz in the margin). In negotiating the contract, Hudson had help from Hondius, which seems to confirm that he was not fluent in Dutch. “Turkish wheat” is certainly not unknown in English, but it I think could also be that Hudson actually wrote some more common name, as Juet did, and the translator turned it into a more common Dutch one.

Finnegans Wake realized that capitalization turns gran turco 'Turkish grain' = maize into Gran Turco 'great Turk' = Sultan, like Mehmet II. The first riddle in chapter 6, with its list of hundreds of punning attributes for the Father / HCE / Finn MacCool, includes vegetables, “a Colossus among cabbages,” fruits, “Melarancitrone,” and grains: maize, barley, wheat, and bulgur.

John Clayton had a day job as a clergyman. He wrote a letter to the Royal Society, noting “Engliſh Wheat (as they call it, to diſtinguish it from Maze, commonly called Virginia Wheat).” John Winthrop definitely spelled it Indean, but I haven't found where he uses this as short for Indian corn. The Younger Winthrop also wrote a letter to the Royal Society, dealing exclusively with maize.

A Pennsylvanian German who wrote Türkisch Korn to his friends back home was Francis Daniel Pastorius. For instance, here (translation). Interestingly enough, that translation also has him writing, “Indian (or as you call it, Turkish) corn.” This part of the translation is taken from a different German edition of his letters, of which the only known copy was in an unspecified library in Zurich and is now lost. (This turns out to be specifically interesting for the history of early Pennsylvania abolitionism.) Pennsylvania Dutch (that is, German) has Welschkann, corresponding to the regional Welschkorn (Wälschkorn in Grimm), Welsh standing for 'foreign'. Welschen Korn ode Türkisch korn is how it appears in Hieronymus Bock's New Kreuterbuch herbal, the entry beginning with:

Unſer Germania würt bald Felix Arabia heiſſen/ dieweil wir ſo vil frembder gewächß von tag zů tag/ auß frembden Landen in vnſeren grund gewenen/ vnder welchẽ das gꝛoß Welsch koꝛn nicht das geringeſt/ on zweiffel erſtmals von Kauffleütten auß warmẽ feyßten landen zů vns gefürt woꝛden/
Our Germany will soon be called felix Arabia, because we accustom so many foreign plants to our soil from day to day, among which the large wälsch-korn is not the least important. (tr. Stallybrass)

A few years later, Eggleston put many of these same observations into his book, The Transit of Civilization From England to America with a chapter on language containing a couple of sections on maize. This time with proper references in the margins. And the cannibal joke has become a peeve against vernacular. It also adds Gynneye [Guinea] wheat to the English names from a 1585 report from Virginia, “… that yields both corn and sugar”). This same also occurs in a 1598 Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes, s.v. brena (I am not sure what this is): “a kinde of ginnie or turkie wheate.” Note that Guinea corn is (at least usually) 'sorghum'.

Also in 1585, Thomas Harriot's A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia begins the section on native foods with a good summary of the names:

Pagatowr, a kinde of graine ſo called by the inhabitants; the ſame in the Weſt Indies is called Mayze: English men call it Guinney wheate or Turkie wheate, according to the names of the countreys from whence the like hath beene brought.

Followed by a description of varieties and uses.

In “Pongo-land,” (Gabon; this might count as “South-Guinea” in Jean Barbot's A Description of the Coasts of North and South-Guinea, and of Ethiopia Inferior, vulgarly Angola — see his introduction), Burton found:

Maize (Zea mays) has become common, and the people enjoy “bútás,” or roasted ears. Barbot says that the soil is unfit for corn and Indian wheat; it is so for the former, certainly not for the latter.

Apparently, in Mpongwe buta is 'seek' and 'maize' is mba. I may be overlooking another nearby alternative, but, otherwise, I suspect that by bútás he means to refer to Bhutta Masala, roasted corn on the cob in India; more on this later. I assume corn is 'wheat', though strange next to “Indian wheat,” in turn following “maize.” If “that kind of cereal which is the leading crop of the district” (NED) were followed scrupulously, then I think corn here might well be 'millet'. But he is just echoing Barbot, who wrote, “nor is there any corn or Indian wheat, at leaſt that I can ſee,” but who is elsewhere more clear with “Maiz or Indian wheat, and millet, …; our European corn ….”

The first written use of maize in English appears to be Roger Barlow's 1544 A Brief Summe of Geographie, translating Martín Fernández de Enciso's Suma de Geographia. (original translation)

comen los indios pã de grano de maiz molido:& hazẽ dello buen pã que ed de mucho mãtenimiẽto. de eſta miſma harina de maiz cozida en calderas & tinajas grandes en mucha aqua hazen vino para beuer:
The indies of this contreie do ete of brede made with mais wᶜʰ maketh good brede and is of moche sustenaunce, and of the said corne thei make ther drynke

Note how the second maiz occurrence was translated corn.

A few English dialects have their own words for maize. South African mealie(s), from Afrikaans mielie, from Dutch milie, ultimately from Latin milium 'millet'. New Zealand kānga from Maori, itself just Engllish corn adapted to its phonology. In the same way as Hawaiian has kūlina. Or Tok Pisin kon or Nigerian Pidgin kᴐ̃n. Analogously, Haitian Creole has mayi.

The rapid spread of maize throughout the world was part of the Columbian Exchange. But there are gaps in the history. And, as we shall see, some amount of controversy; much more, for some reason, than chili peppers or potatoes.

There is reasonably reliable evidence of precisely where and when Europeans were introduced to maize, the word and the grain. On Nov 2nd, 1492, two crew members and two Indians went inland on Cuba with beads and sought-after spice samples to find the king and negotiate a trade agreement. The Spaniards were Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, a converso who knew Hebrew, Aramaic, and some Arabic and was to act as interpreter. They found a village, were well received, and introduced to smoking tobacco and maize. They returned on the 5th with some Indians from there and the new found plant products.

Christopher Columbus kept a journal, of which several copies were made, as soon as he returned to Spain, for the court. All of these were lost, but not before at least two writers had access. The obvious one was Christopher's son Ferdinand, who was educated at court after the first voyage, accompanied his father when thirteen on the fourth voyage, and later settled down as a bibliophile and litigant. His Historie, a life of his father, was written in Spanish, then translated into Italian before that manuscript was lost; it had to be translated back into Spanish, but not until 1749. The section in chapter 28 concerning the introduction to maize differs between the 1571 and 1614 editions only in correcting a missing accent.

Et che i ſemi erano molti di quelle radici, come di fagiuoli, & di certa ſorte di faue, & di vn'altro grano, come paniccio, da lor chiamato Mahiz, di buoniſſimo ſapore cotto, ò ariſtito ò peſto in polente. (tr. Ulloa)
lo que ſembravan eran muchas raices de aquellas, i cierta eſpecie de Habas, i otro grano, que llamaban Maiz, de mui buen ſabor, cocido, ó toſtado, ò hecho polenta (tr. ???)
They also saw much land planted to the roots mentioned above, to kidney beans, to some kind of horse beans, and to a grain resembhng panic grass that they call maize and is most tasty, boiled, roasted, or ground into flour (tr. Keen)

Peter Martyr was also educated at court. His Decades documented Spanish discoveries, and the first part of the first one covered the first voyage. There is an interesting difference between the 1511 and 1530 editions, where a sentence is added giving the Taino name.

Panem et ex frumēto quodā panico: cuius eſt apud inſubꝛes ⁊ granatēſes hiſpanos maxima copia nō magno diſcrimine confitiūt. Eſt huius mappa longioꝛ ſpitama in acutuꝫ tēdēs: lacerti fere craſſitudine. Gꝛana miro oꝛdine a natura cōfixa. Foꝛma et coꝛpe piſum legumē emalātur. Albēt acerba: vbi maturuerūt nigerrima efficiunt᷑: fract candoꝛe niuē exuperāt:
Panem & ex frumento quodā panico, cuius eſt apud Inſubres & Granatenſes Hiſpanos maxima copia, non magno diſcrimine conficiunt. Eſt huius panicula longior ſpitama in acutum tendens, lacerti fere craſſitudine. Grana miro ordine a natura cōfixa. Forma & corpore piſum legum æmulātur. Albent acerba, vbi matueurrunt nigerrima efficiuntur, fracta candore niuē exuperant. Maiziū id frumenti genus appellant.
They make alſo an other kynde of bꝛeade of a certayne pulſe, called Panicum, muche lyke vnto wheate, wherof is great plentie in the dukedome of Mylane, Spayne, and Granatum. But that of this countrey is longer by a ſpanne, ſomewhat ſharpe towarde the ende, and as bygge as a mannes arme in the bꝛawne: The graynes wherof are ſette in a maruelous oꝛder, and are in fourme ſomwhat lyke a peafe. While they be ſoure and vnripe, they are white : but when they are ripe they be very blacke. When they are bꝛoken, they be whyter then ſnowe. This kynde of grayne, they call Maizivm. (tr. Eden)
The islanders also easily make bread with a kind of millet, similar to that which exists plenteously amongst the Milanese and Andalusians. This millet is a little more than a palm in length, ending in a point, and is about the thickness of the upper part of a man's arm. The grains are about the form and size of peas. While they are growing, they are white, but become black when ripe. When ground they are whiter than snow. This kind of grain is called maiz. (tr. MacNutt)

Perhaps this was because mais was by then gaining some currency, as opposed to panizo.

Bartolomé de las Casas had access one of the (apparently inaccurate) copies. He wrote a summary, which was lost until 1790, when Navarrete, a librarian retired from maritime service, found it. He published an edition with regularized spelling in 1825. An English translation by Kettell came out in Boston in 1827. In 1892, the Raccolta Columbiana, for the 400th anniversary and in an Italy unified only thirty years before, published what amounts to a variorum edition by footnoting in bits from Ferdinand's Historie. Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian and sailor, wrote an account of the summary's publication history to 1939, including a number of complaints about the nautical understanding of the translators; a couple years later, he wrote a detailed technical description of how Columbus's reckoning of position in the journal went wrong; and he included a better translation in a 1963 Heritage Press edition of documents on Columbus, a slipcased volume that is a fairly common library sale and used bookstore find. A 1989 critical edition with facsimile, careful transcription, and concordance by Dunn and Kelley won a Quincentennial of the Discovery Prize; a paperback printing came out in 1991, and is also reasonably easy to find cheap now that the anniversary is long past. Meanwhile, photos of the original manuscript are now available on the Internet: here. I cannot figure out how to link to a specific image on this site. Folio 22 recto is number 43.

la tr̅r̅a̅ my̅ fertil y my̅ labrada de aq̃llos mañes y fexoes y havas my̅ diuerſas dlas nr̅a̅s̅ /. eſo miſmo panizo
La tierra muy fértil y muy labrada de aquellos mames y fexoes y habas muy diversas de las nuestras, eso mismo panizo (ed. Navarette)
The soil appeared fertile and under good cultivation, producing the mames aforementioned and beans very dissimilar to ours, as well as the grain called panic-grass. (tr. Kettell)
The land is very fertile and much cultivated with yams and beans and [other] beans very different from ours, as well as panic-grass (tr. Morison)
The earth is very fertile and planted with those mañes and bean varieties very different from ours, and with that same millet. (tr. Dunn and Kelley)

Las Casas also wrote a Historia de las Indias, but it wasn't published until 1875. It includes this mention:

y del grano que llaman los indios maiz, que ellos llamaban panizo, hallaban mucha cantidad.
and of the grain that the Indians call maiz, which they called panizo, they found a great quantity.

Priority for actual publication of the Spanish encounter with maize goes to a pamphlet by Nicolò Syllacio, dedicated to the Duke of Milan, translating into Latin (and embellishing) letters from his friend Guglielmo Coma that were hurried back aboard one of first ships returning from the second voyage, printed in late 1494 by another friend Johannes Antonius de Birretis. It contains the following section:

Eſt pꝛeterea fȩcundum ſementis genus: magnitudine lupini: ciceris rotunditate: farina pꝛodit effracto tenuiſſimo polline teritur vt frumentum: panis conficit ſciti ſapoꝛis. multis quibus tenuioꝛ victus: grana mādētibus.
There is here, besides, a prolific sort of grain of the size of a lupin, round like a vetch, from which when broken a very fine flour is made. It is ground like wheat. A bread of exquisite taste is made from it. Many who are stinted in food chew the grains in their natural state. (tr. Thacher)

What of Luis de Torres, the crew's interpreter? Washington Irving interpolates, first on the plan, “one or other of which languages, Columbus supposed might be known to this oriental prince,” and then on its success, “The Israelite, Luis de Torres, found his Hebrew, Chaldaic and Arabic of no avail, and the Lucayan interpreter had to be the orator.” De Torres remained on Hispaniola in the fort La Navidad, which had been wiped out by the time a new expedition returned from Spain the following year. (Another section of the Syllacio-Coma letter says this was because the native inhabitants got fed up with the Spanish behavior toward the local women. text translation) Wikipedia properly points this out, but the sources are a bit confusing: the de Jerez entry has a link to a Wayback Machine archive of a page that copies a 1892 appendix that translates a 1883 list by Duro, where de Torres is actually listed among those who returned to Spain. But by 1892, Duro had found new information and published an updated list; on that one, de Torres is among those who remained. Now, one of the goals of the settlement was apprendendo quella lingua, so perhaps that was a factor. Still, Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries, even though it scrupulously footnotes its sources in the couple pages on de Torres, seems to me to have missed the quality of his last year. In particular, the allowance granted by their Catholic Majesties was to his widow and heirs.

Maize was domesticated in Central America around 5-10 thousands years ago. By the time the Spanish arrived, it was cultivated throughout the New World: from roughly as far north as the where the Canadian border is now as far south as what is now Chile, at sea level and in the Andes, from where the summer growing season was only a few weeks long to near the equator where it grew year round. All of the corn varieties that Stutevant proposed at the end of the 19th century — a system no longer considered to have any botanical significance, but still mostly used in commerce — already existed: pop, flint, dent, soft/flour, and sweet. For many of the American cultures, maize was an integral part of the cosmology / religion.

Maize was fundamentally important to the New World civilizations that the Spanish found and conquered. Among the Aztecs, in the Florentine Codex, which regularly features in discussions here of foods of Central American origin, it is easy to find an illustration. The Online Nahuatl Dictionary has a thematic page of corn words, with all the terms giving detailed citations. Naturally, there isn't really a “word for maize,” as opposed to its more important forms: cintli (Molina) 'dried corn cob', elotl (Molina) 'fresh corn cob', and tlaolli (Molina) 'corn kernels'. Elotl is the source of Mexican Spanish word elote. I would have said “English word,” except that no dictionary seems to have admitted it yet, plus it only gets a subsection on Wikipedia. Of course, typed into Google, there are pages and pages of pictures, descriptions, recipes, and reminiscences. I do not think this is a principled objection; all the major dictionaries have both banh mi and pad thai. Rather, I think these are more likely to occur in English (non-cooking) prose, which may say something about the image of urban multiculturalism that they portray and elote does not. Oddly enough, M-W does have an entry for elotillo. Tlaolli is used in the reverse of the common naming pattern of this discussion, where castilan taoli means 'wheat'. It is also the word chosen by Martius to expand his list of words from the languages he encountered in Brazil.

Maize cultivation predates the break-up of the proto-language of the language(s) of the Classic Maya Script, languages encountered by the Spanish in Yucatan, and those spoken there today, so there are often clear correspondences. It is perhaps worth keeping in mind the history of the encounter of the writing system with the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern European cultures, as in “How Maya Hieroglyphs Got Their Name: Egypt, Mexico, and China in Western Grammatology since the Fifteenth Century.” And, specifically, that well into the last quarter of the twentieth century there were ideas about Mayan as wrong as Kircher was about Chinese and Egyptian. Only after the end of the Cold War and into this century was it basically, if imperfectly and sometimes still contentiously, readable as the written form of a real language. But a benefit of this is that much of it happens with modern communication. A ca. 1577 Diccionario de Motul is among the treasures digitized by Brown University. The FAMSI website has a number of online dictionaries, either transcriptions of older ones or works-in-progress on new ones. These include a combined dictionary of Yucatecan, collating some earlier work, including the Motul manuscripts (it is a little fussy to use because there are no separate headword anchors). And two languages of the written form, one slightly more word-oriented and the other slightly more glyph-oriented. Following the naming of pages on the site, the former will be distinguished as “mdp.” Note that there is still no Unicode encoding of Maya glyphs. Sometimes the numbers from Thompson's Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs are used, preceded by the letter T, much as Egyptologists use Gardiner's sign list, although without anything as complicated as the Manuel de Codage for layout. Some maize words:

• ixim 'maize', in general, and specifically kernels of the grain. Motul has this for the translation of Spanish mayz. combined (search for ixim) mdp. Usually written with a logogram (but see below), sometimes preceded by the T679 i- syllable. (Confirming that it starts like that.) A little further away, Huasteca has iziz (for instance, in this 1767 dictionary).
• nal 'maize' still on the cob, but also sometimes in general. Motul nal combined (search for nal) mdp. Written with several logograms, known as the “maize curl”: T84 T86 T86; these are also used as a suffix indicating 'place of/where'.
• wa 'tamale'. Motul vah combined (search for uah) mpd. T506 is also used to write the wa syllable and may well have originated as a picture of a maize kernel. The archeological evidence, in particular the lack of comales, is taken to indicate that pre-contact Mayans ate their maize breads as tamales and not tortillas.
• ul 'maize gruel' atole. Motul vl combined (search for ul 4) mdp. Written syllabically as T738v.568 u-lu or with T513 u- for the first syllable. This was often drunk with cacao. Other words for maize gruel drinks were coyem combined (search for keyem); and sa combined (search for za; note link is to Wayback Machine, since site has corrupt Z PDF file) mdp, T278 sa sa. Note that these are glossed both atol and poçol. English Wikipedia has pozole as a hominy soup (easily made vegan: the recently closed Gracias Madre here in San Francisco cooked one), which feels about right, with a disambiguation to pozol, the dough and drink made from it. While the OED's posole has two senses: a maize preparation, including a soup, and a drink. RAE's DLE has pozol in Honduras as (4) a drink or (5) pozole whose sense there looks more or less the same (take note that the link has #CiatHCn, which is sense 1; so sense 2, Mexican stew, which would be #CialeXc, or the whole entry, is not intended). ASALE's Diccionario de americanismos seems clearer: pozol is a drink and pozole is the same or, in Mexico, a stew. These are from Nahuatl pozolli < pozoni 'frothy'; but note Molina's (1571) pozol atl, a drink (original). The drink is the only sense for pozol given in Vocabulario de indigenismos en las Crónicas de Indias. (I am not sure why, but that work has an inverse index, in which mayz is the last entry.) atole is also enough of an English word for the OED.

The Primary Standard Sequence (PSS) is the term traditionally used for standardized patterns of glyphs on Mayan ceramics, particularly cups, although there is some push for calling these by the more obvious “Dedicatory Formula.” “Folk Classification of Classic Maya Pottery” gives some more detail and less formally Glyphs on Pots. The FAMSI site has a Glyph Guide, one of whose sections is on the PSS; there is also a report on their database of them. The formula supplies one or more of the owner's name, the artist's name, and the intended contents. As noted in its dictionary entry, ul is somewhat common for the contents, though not as common as kakaw 'cacao'; so such a legend would mean “X's cup for atole.”

Maya numerals have an anthropomorphic head form as well as bars and dots. It has long been accepted that the numeral eight represents a form of the Maize God; some now believe that one does as well. “On the Reading of Three Classic Maya Portrait Glyphs” further proposes ixim and nal as possible names for this. The Calakmul murals depict some scenes of daily life. There are several captions using an agentive AJ prefix. One for AJ ul 'maize gruel person'. And the even more interesting AJ i-xi-ma 'maize grain person', because this is the first identified spelling of ixim just using syllables.

Of the illustrations for the months in the final chapter of Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615), eight of the twelve (JFMAMJJASOND) feature maize and consequently have ƷARA in big letters at the top. These are natural out-of-copyright illustrations for writing about the Incas or maize or the Incas and maize. The modern Quechua spelling is sara. Holguín (1608 Q→S S→Q) and Santo Tomás (1560 for the coastal dialect around Lima Q→S S→Q) spelled it çara. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609):

De los frutos que ſe crian en cima de la tierra, tiene el primer lugar el grano, que los Mexicanos y los Balouentanos llaman Maiz, y los del Peru, Cara: porque es el pan que ellos teniã. Es de dos maneras, el vno es duro, que llamã Muruchu, y el otro tierno y de mucho regalo, que llaman Capia: comenlo en lugar de pan, toſtado o cocido en agua ſimple: … Todo lo qual vi por mis ojos, y me ſuſtente haſta los nueue o diez años cõ la çara q̃ es el Mayz, cuyo pan tiene tres nõbres, çancu era el de los ſacrificios, Huminta, el de ſus fieſtas y regalo, Tanta, pronunciada la primera ſilaba enel palador, es el pan comun, la çara toſtada llaman Camcha quiere dezir Mayz toſtado, incluye en ſi el nombre adjetiuo, y el ſuſtantiuo, haſe de pronunciar con m, porque con la n, ſignifica barrio de vezindad, o vn gran cercado. A la çara cozida llaman Muti (y los Eſpañoles Mote) quiere dezir Mayz cozido, incluyen do en ſi ambos nombres. (Lib. viii, Cap. ix)
Of the fruits which grow aboveground, the most important is that which the Mexicans and people of the Antilles call maiz and the Peruvians sara; for it yields their bread. There are two kinds: one is hard and is called muruchu and the other, called capia, is tender and highly esteemed. They eat it instead of bread, either toasted or boiled in pure water. … I saw all this with my own eyes, and was sustained until my nineteenth year on this sara, which is called maize, the bread of which has three names—cancu used for sacrifices, huminta used on special occasions, and ttanta (pronounced with the first syllable from the palate) is the ordinary bread. Toasted maize is called camcha, which includes the adjective and substantive. It must be pronounced with m, because with n it means a great yard or the ward of a city. Boiled maize is called muti (corrupted by the Spaniards into moti). (tr. Markham)

South American Spanish has sanco and humita; the latter even has an English Wikipedia page. As predicted, both Quechua words end up as cancha and it is still mote². Tanta is the regular word for 'bread', often now wheat, including the special tanta wawa 'bread baby' for Nov 2nd. Holguín has (S→Q pan), “Pan de trigo, Ttanta; Pan de quinua, Piſqui ttanta; Pan de maiz, çanco; Pan en empanada, Huminta o tamales.”, so the sense may have already been pretty general. The festival with sanco was situa.

The translator (1847) of the de la Vega excerpts above, Markham, included a footnote giving the Aymara (the substantial majority “dialect” in Collao) word for maize: tonco. A more common modern spelling is tunqu. Bertonio (1612) also spelled it tonco. The system used in the translation of The Book of Mormon, e.g. Mos 9:9, uses tonko. Some anthropological works have t'on'ko, presumably to accurately capture the phonemes. Quri tunqu 'golden maize' is a 2007 stop motion animated short film from Isla del Sol, Bolivia meant to teach ecology; the young superheros use the title stalk to defeat the garbage monster. Not so long ago, one could only see such things at the Carpenter Center or BAMPFA, but now it is on YouTube.

Media Lengua is a mixed language, per Pieter Muysken, “essentially Quechua with the vast majority of its stems replaced by Spanish forms.” (Missing from John Cowan's Essentialist Explanations.) Which just results in mais. But more interesting is Kallawaya, a highly endangered language used only by the (mostly male) itinerant healers of the same name and learned as part of their training and not as a cradle language. All discussions I can find seem to agree that 'maize' is utilu, citing sources like this. I have not found anything that offers an etymology for this word, and a comparison with neighboring languages does not seem to suggest anything. Now, the traditional explanation is that Kallawaya is Quechua grammar with a Pukina lexicon, possibly from contact, or deliberately to obscure it; additional evidence for the latter is the lack of any early European record of the healers having a secret language. This is made harder because Pukina, which Torero's thesis called, "la troisième langue générale du Pérou," is extinct and about all we know of it is from religious works, such as a 1607 Rituale seu Manuale Peruanum. I believe Torero's Idiomas de los Andes has the entire known lexicon. In looking for something that might have given utilu, one possibility with the religious context as a constraint would be the panem of the Pater Noster. (See below for the same idea further north.) But that turns out to be 'tanta', just like in Quechua. Perhaps this was originally shared or perhaps it was borrowed specifically for the prayer after its sense had broadened enough to include what the missionaries wanted for 'bread'. More recent work on Kallawaya by Katja Hannß identifies a wider set of source languages than Pukina and also indicates that it is / was less secret than has been supposed. That work includes an Etymological dictionary of Kallawaya, which has a row for utilo~utilu~utili, confirming the sources giving the word, but the From X etymology column is empty. Moving on, “Pachamama is a Spanish word” gives some special terminology associated with Ch'alla ceremonies, including p'aqula for 'maize'. This is not a secret language, as most adult members of the community understand it, so much as a ritual one. The terms are based on Aymara and the paper proposes a literal meaning of p'aqula as 'brown one' (which is said to be Germanic taboo avoidance giving bear; but that is more probably 'wild one'; the OED s.v. still gives the first, but perhaps the second).

Cobo (1653, but not published until 1890, with modernized spelling) tried to explain the differences among the default maize breads in Central and Northern and Southern South America, (Lib. iv, Cap. iii):

Desta manera se hacen unas tortillas delgadas, que se tuestan ó cuecen en unas cazuelas de barro puestas al fuego; y este es el pan más regalado que los indios hacen de Maíz, el cual en el Perú se llama Tanta y en la Nueva España Tlascale. No son en todas partes de una manera estas tortillas: en la Nueva España las hacen delgadas del canto de una herradura; en Tierra Firme, tan gruesas como un dedo, que llaman Arepas; las que se hacían en el Perú eran como las de Nueva España; y las unas y las otras se han de comer calientes, porque, en enfriándose, se ponen correosas como cuero mojado y son desabridas.
In this way, thin tortillas are made, which are toasted or cooked in clay pots placed on the fire; and this is the most precious bread that the Indians make from maize, which in Peru is called tanta and in Mexico tlaxcalli. These tortillas are not the same everywhere: in Mexico they make them as thin as the edge of a horseshoe; in Colombia, as thick as a finger, which they call arepas; those made in Peru were like those of Mexico; and both must be eaten hot, because when they cool, they become leathery like wet leather and are tasteless.

Acosta also mentions arepas (Historia natural Lib. iv Cap. 16 tr Markham) Pedro Simón included arepa in the glossary to his Noticias. It is enough of an English word to make it into American dictionaries and Collins, but not yet the OED.

One of the notes that Burton added to his friend Albert Tootal's translation, The Captivity of Hans Stade, explains the Tupi word Abbati:

This word is written Abaty, Abatij, Abaxi, Abashi, and Ubatim (Noticia do Brazil); it is applied to the Milho de Guiné, in old Portuguese Zaburro, Zea Mays, Maïs, or Maize, a Haytian word which Yves d'Evreux writes "May", and explains blé de Turquie.

He then calls out Southey for his note claiming that Auati (from de Bry's Latin of this same section) is cashew. The context of all this is the intoxicating liquors made from various grains and fruits.
And then in the introduction to Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay, Burton reminds his readers of the Guarani names for various kinds:

Old writers give four kinds of maize in these regions: — 1. Abati nata, a very hard grain. 2. Abati moroti, in Tupi “Marity” (means shining), a soft and white grain. 3. Abati mini, a small grain which ripens after a month. 4. Bisingallo, an angular and pointed grain, which gives the sweetest flour.

In one of the actual letters, he has another dig at Southey for what the scansion of some lines of A Tale of Paraguay implied about the (mis)pronunciation of Paraná and Guaraní. (Par paranthèse observations are, of course, what Burton's writings are all about.) The old writer that he had in mind is, I imagine, the Jesuit Dobrizhoffer, who gives those names and descriptions in the same order. However, there appear to be printing errors in Burton: Dobrizhoffer wrote hatâ, morotî, and mir̂i. Dobrizhoffer is also the source of the family in Southey's poem. Maize occurs in the poem a couple times, as indicator of their destitute state. Note how both the Latin and the German translation include that the Abipones call it Nemelk and, since the author was Austrian, that some Europeans call it kukurùz (more on that in the next installment). These names are left out of the English translation, by Sara Coleridge, Southey's niece and daughter of his fellow Lake Poet (their wives were sisters). I suspect it's mostly due to this translation that modern English sources don't repeat Burton's typos in their maize name lists. Races Of Maize In South America names only yellow soft flour abati moroti and white flint abati tupi. Paraguay Native Varieties and Preparation of Maize has abati-morote, abati-atâ or abati-tupi, abati-pita, abati-pinchinga, and abati-gaycurca.

Histories of Maize is a series of papers from historical- botany, agronomy, anthropology, and linguistics, and combinations thereof, held together by a common plant / food rather than by discipline. (Here are the opening pages, giving the list of papers and introduction.) “Siouan Tribal Contacts and Dispersions Evidenced in the Terminology for Maize and Other Cultigens,” by Robert L. Rankin, who was one of the editors of the Comparative Siouan Dictionary (mentioned before at Language Hat), uses the maize-related data therein. Siouan maize words tend to be derived from cucurbit words. As explained in an earlier squash post, we are mostly dealing with C. pepo. And 'gourd' and 'squash' distinguish whether or not it is eaten, ignoring edible gourds and ornamental squashes. And many of the squashes in question would otherwise be called pumpkins. Proto-Siouan has an identified common word for gourd, which was used for scooping and storing, but not squash, as domestication came later. Furthermore, maize domestication came later still. Along the way, it is possible that 'gourd>squash' words broadened their sense to cover vegetable crops in general. CSD distinguishes four corn words. This breakdown, and the details given on each of their associated pages, seems to mostly follow that used in Rankin's paper.

• corn (1): a suffix added to a cucurbit (1) loanword. Lakota wagmésa < wagmų́; Dakota wamną́heza < wamnų́; Winnebago wičąwás < wičąwą́. The Proto-Algonquian word is something like *-mekhwaan-; I believe that is the same as Siebert's 'gourd' reconstruction. The possible suffixes are *-heza or *-s(e).
• corn (2): a Siouan compound of gourd > squash and grass (4). For some reason the CSD wordlist does not include the actual maize terms; but they are easy enough to find in old dictionaries, so I have used those as links. Mandan kó-xąɂte = kó· 'squash' + *xąɂte 'grass'; Hidatsa kó·xa·ti; Crow xó·xa·ši. The Mandan compound is transparent, but the others are not, implying that they were borrowed from Mandan.
• corn (3): a suffix added to a cucurbit (2) word common to the South East across multiple language families. Omaha / Ponca wathą́zi < wathą́; Kansa wakhózü < wakhą́; Osage watoⁿçi < wathą́; Quapaw wathą́se < wathą́. The suffix is normally *-se. However, this has sometimes developed into *-zi under the influence of yellow; if so, this is probably recent, as is yellow maize. A further added *-hü is stalk. The *wa- prefix is absolutive. Thus other occurrences of the base word outside Siouan are Choctaw tą·či; Chicasaw / Mobilian jargon tanči, both meaning 'maize'.
• corn (4): a Caddoan loanword. Biloxi ayé•ki; Ofo ačéki. The Caddoan source is related to Pawnee ré·ksu; Arikara ne·šuɂ; Wichita té·s?; Caddo kisiɂ. The paper gives a Proto-Caddoan reconstruction of *Ré·ki-, “where R is an indeterminate sonorant covering the n/r/t correspondence set.” “Comparative Caddoan” has all these same cognates for 'corn', but declines to give a reconstruction, “The forms are apparently cognate, but the initial correspondence is otherwise not attested.”

An Algonquian root *-min forms the ending of some maize words such as Cree ᒪᐦᑖᒥᐣ mahtâmin and Ojibwe mandaamin. J. Hammond Trumbull, who helped Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner with the Gilded Age chapter mottoes, in his Natick Dictionary, said, “smaller fruits, such as corn, berries, nuts.” For maize, it gives weatchimínneash. Roger Williams's Key into the Language of America has Ewáchimneaſh. Eliot's Indian Bible used it for דָּגָן dāḡān, where the KJV and Douay have “corn,” and the NIH “grain,” translating the end of Gen 27:28, as kah wꝏnatit weathiminneath kah wine. So too Lev 2:14. This page breaks down weatchimmíneash into “food growing in the field we eat.”

As noted in that same earlier Twain post here, in an 1872 paper, Trumbull collected forty versions of the Lord's Prayer in Algonquian languages. One of the challenging aspects that he points out is what to do with “daily bread,” seeming to assume quotidianum for ἐπιούσιον, although I don't see how supersubstantialem would be any easier. A choice for 9. Abnaki is abannemena, which he derives from abaⁿn 'baked' and that same -men 'corn; grain; small fruit'.

In another paper, published in the same volume, on English words derived from American Indian languages, Trumbull also claimed that hominy is from this *min root, “with an emphasizing aspirate.” In a similar 1902 paper on Algonquian words, Alexander Chamberlain pointed to W. W. Tooker (1895) having questioned the first part of that, deriving instead from -ahäm “he beats or pounds,” and min, “berry, fruit (maize).” But it gets better. In the American Anthropologist of Apr-Jun 1904, William Gerard wrote a paper, “Tapehanek Dialect of Virginia.” In Oct-Dec 1904, Tooker contributed, “Some Powhatan Names,” criticizing some of it. So, in Apr-Jun 1905, Gerard responded with “Some Virginia Indian Words.” Having got himself worked up, he has at the “delusion” that Chickahominy contains the -min 'fruit' substantive. First, against M. Schele de Vere (of UVa, who had once written a somewhat favorable review of Volapük; Gerard writes Devere), whose Americanisms had the “impossible word” checahaminend. And then at Tooker's:

The special affix or verb -ahäm implies “he beats or batters” the object min', after the manner of the root-word or prefix chick

Into which he throws a “(sic)” and summarizes:

It will be seen from this brief analysis that the combination under consideration does not constitute a word, but is simply a collocation of vowels and consonants.

Rather, he proposes that active transitive forms ending in -mĕn can be used as passive adjectives and so turn into inanimate substantives (that which is x'ed). This is more or less what the OED has, spelling it -amən. Gerard concludes:

Thus originated a term concerning the source and meaning of which there has been, up to the very present (the writing of these lines), more speculation than about any other Indian word that has entered the English language.

Cherokee ᏎᎷ selu is also the name of the first woman in an origin myth, her husband ᎧᎾᏘ Kanati is the hunter. Since it happens that the two glyphs more closely resemble their Roman model, I can imagine that someone running across this Word of the Week, and not paying close attention to fonts, might wonder why the slide has 4M at the top.

Sturtevant includes a typically thorough rundown of all the various references to the spread of maize around the world. Although it does include Rafn's identification of Hóp in Vinland in Erik's saga as on the Taunton River and the sjálfsána hveitiakra 'self-sowing wheatfields' there as maize. Which had been challenged right away (best guess was wild rice). To be fair, this was a climate in which Boston would permit a statue of Leif Erikson on Comm. Ave., looking West toward Norumbega, sculpted by an artist living in a Boston Marriage, and financed by a Harvard Chemistry Chair who made a fortune from an improved baking powder, such as one might use to leaven cornbread.

Moreover, as we will next see, the idea of Pre-Columbian maize is quite persistent.