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'.
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.
- corn 𓋴𓎞𓏬𓈖𓌾
- wheat 𓋴𓎞𓏬𓈖𓋴𓅱
- 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. 🌽