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.