Zapiekanki

With all the students around, Boston's Allston Village is chock-full of reasonably-priced restaurants: Burmese (with a separate vegetarian menu), vegan Vietnamese, vegan pizza, Egyptian falafel, Indian Chinese; plus old standbys like Tex-Mex, Korean-Japanese and checked-tablecloth Chianti-in-a-basket red-sauce Italian.

One of last year's new additions was Zaps, Polish street food. A zapiekanka is a baguette sliced in half lengthwise, topped with shredded cheddar and mushrooms, melted / toasted, and finished off with ketchup. It's more interesting tasting than that might sound.

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The name seems straightforward. zapiekać is the imperfective of zapiec 'to bake'. zapiekany is the passive participle; add the fairly productive -k(a) for resultative nouns and it's 'something baked'. There are, of course, various other forms of zapiekać in the only Polish cookbook I have. The za- prefix is a Slavic preposition with base meaning something like 'beyond'. piec is cognate with Russian печь 'oven' and so with PIE *pekʷ 'cook', whence also Greek πέσσω 'ripen; cook' and so peptic.

After we went there this weekend, I had another look around online and only then noticed that zapiekanka also means 'casserole'. There is a fairly clean split in English language sources between the two senses:

Street food	Casserole
Phrase books Guide books	Dictionaries Cookbooks

An Online Polish-English dictionary has both senses. An eponymous recipe collection seems to mostly be casseroles. But there are images and YouTube cooking videos of both sorts.

Not that this is all that surprising; both fit the base meaning perfectly. But now I am wondering whether there is a continuous semantic space (and what else is in it) and just how old this particular street food is. Hence this very short post. I would welcome informed comments.

Pineapple

Other demands on my time have made posting here rather spotty, but I have always tried to keep notes on possible posts for when some time appears. One of the 17th century sources cited for peanuts (with a small diversion on sharks) was Jean-Baptiste du Tertre. In the same work, Histoire generales des Antilles habitees par les Francais (1667), he has a chapter on “l'Ananas, le Roy des fruits” 'pineapple, the king of fruits'.

Having recently finished The Pineapple: King of Fruits by Fran Beauman, I was reminded of this and of an analogy:

orange ∶ orangery ∷ pineapple ∶ ______

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orange ∶ orangery ∷ pineapple ∶ pinery

Beauman's book is still in print, though I am not sure there is an American edition yet. It covers the history of pineapples from Christopher Columbus to James Drummond Dole. (Note how one of the Wikipedia editor's uses of ginaca machine isn't capitalized. Beauman only mentions the engineer by name, but it's used several times without even machine in Gary Y. Okihiro's Pineapple Culture, a book that uses pineapple as the common thread for the story of race and empire in the tropics and Hawaii in particular. That is, at least in an appropriate context, ginaca has become a common noun.)

Beauman's book surveys pineapples in English literature from John Locke's taste of a pineapple to Wallace Stevens' academic piece “Someone Puts a Pineapple Together” (snippet only). (Though a quotation from the Wake cataloguing Shem's lowly preference for canned foods is somewhat turned around by leaving out the botulism part.)

A major theme of the book is the role of pineapple in the emergent English (and to a lesser extent American) consumer culture. And the now mostly forgotten mania for growing pineapples in hothouses in Northern Europe.

Beauman wrote shorter pieces on the pineapple for Petits Propos Culinaires (73) before and Cabinet (Fruits) after. The former covered the associations from the start as the finest of fruit and possible causes (including the Golden Mean and Fibonacci series) and the latter the Dunmore Pineapple and aristocratic cultivation efforts.

Consequently, this post will more easily stay (mostly) to the main focus of this blog.

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The word for 'pineapple' in most languages is something like ananas. This comes from the Tupi-Guarani name for the fruit, na´na, which I have seen glossed variously as 'fragrant' and 'excellent'. (Some sources, such as Skeat, also claim that nana is the plant and anana the fruit.)

The word is first reported by André Thevet, who writes (Singularitez de la France antarctique, 1558, pp. 89-90):

Le fruit duquel plus cõmunemẽt ils vſent en leurs maladies, eſt nommé Nana, gros comme vne moyenne citrouille, fait tout autour cõme vne pomme de pin, anſi que pourrez voir par la preſente figure. Ce fruit deuient iaune en maturité, lequel eſt merueilleuſement excellent, tant pour ſa douceur que ſaueur, autant amoureuſe que fin ſucre, & plus.

The fruit which they most commonly use for their illnesses is named nana, as big as a medium pumpkin, formed overall like a pinecone, as you can see from the present figure. This fruit turns yellow when ripe; it is marvelously excellent, as much for the sweetness as the taste, as lovely as fine sugar, and more so.

And in the form ananas by Jean de Léry's Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil:

… Premierement la plante qui produit le fruict nommé par les Sauuages Ananas eſt de figure ſemblable aux glaieuls, & encores, ayant les fueilles vn peu courbees & canelees tout alentour, plus aprochãtes de celles d'Aloes. Elle croiſt auſsi non ſeulement emmoncelee comme vn grand Chardon, mais auſsi ſon fruict:, qui eſt de la groſſeur d'vn moyen Melõ, & de façon comme les Pommes de Pin, ſans pendre ny pancher d'vn coſté ni d'autre, viẽt de la propre ſorte de nos Artichaux.

Ces Ananas au ſurplus, eſtans venus à leur maturité, ſont de couleur iaune azuré, & ont vne telle odeur de frarnboiſe, que non ſeulement en allant par les bois on les ſent de loin, mais auſſi quant à leur gouſt fondans en la bouche, & eſtans naturellement ſi doux qu'il ny a confitures de ce pays qui les ſurpaſſent, ie tiẽs que ceſt le plus excellẽt fruict de l'Amerique. … (1578 ed., p. 211)

… First, the plant that produces the fruit called by the savages ananas, has a form like that of a gladiolus, but with leaves slightly curved and hollowed all around, more like the aloe's. It grows compacted like a great thistle; its fruit, related to our artichoke, is as big as a medium-sized melon, and shaped like a pinecone, but does not hang or bend to one side or the other.

When these ananas have come to maturity, and are of an iridescent yellow, they have such a fragrance of raspberry that when you go through the woods [and other places where they grow], you can smell them from far off; and as for the taste, it melts in your mouth, and it is naturally so sweet that we have no jams that surpass them; I think it is the finest fruit in America. (Whatley, translating a slightly newer edition, such as this)

Interestingly, another Tupi-Guarani term for the fruit, ïu̯a-ka´ti 'fragrant fruit' (confirming de Léry's account), gives Portuguese abacaxi. (In Brazilian slang, both abacaxi and banana can mean 'mess; problem'.) Remarkably, though this word is presumed to date from the 18th century, it isn't found in print until 1833.

Other native names are given by Spanish explorer-conquerers (and Catholic missionaries). Oviedo gave some for Taíno in his Historia general y natural de las Indias:

Hay en esta Isla Española unos cardos, que cada uno dellos lleva una piña (ó mejor diçiendo alcarchopha), puesto que porque paresçe piña las llaman los cripstianos piñas, sin lo ser. Esta es una de las mas hermosas fructas que yo he visto en todo lo que del mundo he andado. … Dixe de suso que estas piñas son de diversos géneros y assí es verdad, en espeçial de tres maneras. A unas llaman yayama, á otras dic,en boniama; é á otras yayagua. (Lib. VII, Cap. xiv, pp. 280-283)

On this island of Hispaniola there are some thistles, each of which produces a pineapple (or, better said, an artichoke), because it looks like what Spaniards call a pinecone, yet without being one. This is one of the most beautiful fruits I have seen in all the world in which I have travelled. … I said above that these pineapples come in different species, and this is true, especially three kinds. Some are called yayama, others boniama, and others yayagua. (tr. Myers)

Francisco Hernández gives one for Nahuatl in his Plantas y Animales de la Nueva España (1615, here, then Ir a Imagen 345 de 429):

Esta peregrina planta, que los yndios llamã, matzatli, cuyo origen dizen ser del brasil, de adonde la traxeron, y de aqui se à communicado à las yslas, y aun à las yndias orientales, à donde le llaman, Ananas, y los Españoles que viuen en este nueuo mundo, Piña, por la semejança que este fruto tiene con las piñas, es vna planta que produze las ojas como las del lyrio, pero espinossa à modo de las del cardo, la rayz hebrossa y gruessa, la qual planta produze sola vna piña, rodeada de muchos pinpollos nacidos à la redonda y en la cumbre del dicho fruto, los quales quitados y sembrados cada vn pinpollo de por si, hechan luego muchas y nueuas rayzes, y nace otra piña en estremo, semejante à nuestras piñas como auemos dicho, rodeada de los mismos pinpollos, al principio sale la fruta bermeja, pero andando el tiempo quedando el pinpollo bermejeando, se pone la piña amarilla como rubia.

This wandering plant, which the Indians call matzatli, is said to originate from Brazil, from which they brought it, and from here it was spread to the island and even to the Eastern Indians, where they call it ananas; and the Spaniards who live in this New World call it piña, on account of the resemblance which this fruit has to pinecones; it is a plant which produces leaves like those of the lily, but spiny like those of a thistle; the roots are many-threaded and thick; each such plant produces a single pineapple, surrounded by many buds [suckers] born from around and on top of said fruit; when these are removed and each bud planted by itself, many new roots are formed, and another pineapple is born on the end, resembling our pinecones as I already said; it is surrounded by the same sort of buds; at first the fruit comes out red, the bud becoming reddish as time goes by, and then it gets as yellow as a blonde.

And his Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae thesaurus gave one of the earliest illustrations of a pineapple (1651 edition here, Imagen 349 de 1083).

Achupalla is given for Aymara by Ludovico Bertonio Vocabulario de la lengua aymara (1612, p. 168) and for Quechua by Diego González Holguín's Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Perú llamada lengua Qquichua o del inca (1608, p. 6). These are downloadable as huge PDF files from here and here, respectively; the former is also in Google Books. (It also gives chulu as the name of the plant.)

As pineapples spread, they were occasionally named after other existing fruit that they resembled. For instance, in Hawaiian, it is hala kahiki 'foreign Pandanus'. (Note that while Tahiti is the canonical foreign place in Polynesian, there is no indication that Kahiki is meant to be a proper noun to claim is that they come from there. Also cf. ʻuala kahiki 'potato', literally 'foreign sweet potato', like 洋山芋 yang2 shan1yü4 or มันฝรั่ง man farang.) In Sumba, pineapple is (or was) known as panda djawa 'Pandanus from Java'.

In Persian, Urdu, and Arabic, 'pineapple' is normally انناس ananās or اناناس anānās. But the Ain-i-Akbari says, “Pineapples are also called Kat'hal i Safarí, or the jackfruits for travels, because young plants, put into a vessel, may be taken on travels, and will yield fruits.” (Blochmann's translation, p. 68. I have not been able to locate the Persian text online — this is the second part; so is this, just collated differently — or at an accessible library. The same site has a translation of the later Tuzk-i-Jahangiri, which also mentions pineapples at the Mughal court coming from Portuguese ports.) On the claimed etymology of کتهل سفری kaṭhal-i-safarī, Hobson-Jobson says (s.v. ananas):

Abul Faẓl, in the Āīn, mentions that the fruit was also called kaṭhal-i-safarī, or 'travel jack-fruit,' “because young plants put into a vessel may be taken on travels and will yield fruits.” This seems a nonsensical pretext for the name, especially as another American fruit, the Guava, is sometimes known in Bengal as the Safarīām, or 'travel mango.' It has been suggested by one of the present writers that these cases may present an uncommon use of the word safarī in the sense of 'foreign' or 'outlandish,' just as Clusius says of the pine-apple in India, “peregrinus est hic fructus,” and as we begin this article by speaking of the ananas as having 'travelled' from its home in S. America. … The lamented Prof. Blochmann, however, in a note on this suggestion, would not admit the possibility of the use of safarī for 'foreign.' He called attention to the possible analogy of the Ar. safarjal for 'quince.' …

Many other Asian names are likewise derived from ananas, including Tamil அன்னாசி aṉṉāci and Burmese နာနတ် nanat. And Sub-Saharan Africa: so, Burton's Lake Regions (p. 35 of the JRGS report):

The mánánázi or pine-apple grows luxuriantly as far as three marches from the coast. It is never cultivated, nor have its qualities as a fibrous plant been discovered.

The enthusiastic reviews by Europeans given above are typical and more like that are easy to find. For instance, here is du Tertre, as mentioned in the introduction to the post:

Ie peux à treſ-juſte titre appeller l'Ananas, le Roy des fruits, parce qu'il eſt le plus beau, & le meilleur de tous ceux qui ſont ſur la terre. C'eſt ſans doute pour cette raiſon, que le Roy des Roys luy a mis une couronne ſur la teſte, qui eſt comme une marque eſſentielle de ſa Royauté, puis qu'à la cheute du père, il produit un ieune Roy qui luy ſuccede en toutes ſes admirables qualitez : … (p. 127)

I can quite rightly call the Pineapple the King of fruits, because it is the most beautiful, and the best of all those which are on earth. It is no doubt for this reason that the King of Kings has placed a cron on its head, as an essential mark of its royalty; then at the fall of the father, it produces a young King who succeeds him in all his admirable qualities.

A mystery among all these early accolades is one claimed for de Léry (see above). It is repeated by ordinarily reliable sources, such as Sturtevant's Edible Plants of the World and Food by Waverley Root. And in Collins' Pineapple and Beauman's PPC essay (but not her book). Here is the version from Lindley's The Treasury of Botany (p. 60):

Three hundred years ago it was described by Jean de Lery, a Huguenot priest, as being of such excellence that the gods might luxuriate upon it, and that it should only be gathered by the hand of a Venus.

Which seems to be the source used by Sturtevant at least. It is not inconceivable that a Huguenot priest would make such an allusion. (Venus is not usually a gardener, though she says through Ovid that she picked some “golden apples” — whether these are oranges or quinces is another topic — from her island of Cyprus for Hippomenes to use to distract Atalanta.) But there does not seem to be any such passage in his published work. At least I have not found it in any of the French editions of the Histoire or the Latin translation. Versions even show up in French works, often in guillemets, but apparently as translations from Lindley's English. Before that, it appears in Floriculture Magazine (1840), where it's Jean de Leary. And the remaining sources are the works of Charles McIntosh: Book of the Garden (1855), The Orchard (1839), The Practical Gardener (1828). The earliest even says, “in the inflated style of those early times,” which certainly suggests that he found the quotation in an older source. If it were before 1716, there might be some mention in Lochner's extensive Commentatio de Ananasa sive nuce Pinea indica Vulgo Pinas (online). And nothing similar is in EEBO or ECCO. So I do not know where it came from (and would welcome suggestions).

Of course, the three most popular languages in the world are exceptions to the ananas rule. English pineapple, modeled after Spanish piña, is due to the resemblance of the fruit to a pinecone. Originally, pineapple in fact meant 'pinecone', as pijnappel still does in Dutch. So, a contemporary translation of Linschoten can be:

Ananas, van die Canarijns Ananasa geheeten; van die Brasilianen Nana, ende van anderen in Hispaniola, Iaiama; van die Spaengiaerden in Brasyl, Pinas, om eenighe ghelijckenisse die dese vrucht heeft met die Pijnappel; (here, p. 212 – 269 from the menu)

Ananas by the Canarijns called Ananaſa, by the Braſilians Nana, and by others in Hiſpaniola Iaiama: by the Spaniards in Braſilia Pinas, becauſe of a certain reſemblance which the fruite hath with the Pine apple. (Iohn Huighen van Linschoten. his discours of voyages into ye Easte & West Indies, 1598, p. 90)

Which almost always warrants a footnote in modern editions in either language. Some dialects of Spanish have ananá and English did have ananas for a time. It's in Johnson's dictionary, with a quotation from James Thomson's Seasons:

Witneſs, thou beſt Anâna, thou the pride
Of vegetable life, beyond whate'er
The poets imag'd in the golden age: (685-687)

Pineapple is naturally included in the great herbals and plant lists of the period when scientific botany was emerging, which therefore propose various classifications:

• Clusius: Exoticorum libri decem (1605), Cap. XLIV, pp. 284-285, “De Ananas.”
• C. Bauhin, Pinax (1623), Lib. X, Sect. vi, p. 384, “Carduus Brasilianus foliis Aloës.” 'Brazilian thistle with aloe leaves'
• J. Bauhin, Historiae plantarum universalis (1650), T. 3, Lib. xxv, pp. 94-95, “Nana sive Strobilus Peruvianus.” 'Nana or Peruvian cone'
• Lobel, Icones Stirpium (1581), p. 375, “Aizoi maioris ortu persimilis exotica planta.” 'exotic plant similar to a descendent of a large sempervivum (aloe?)'
• John Parkinson, Theatrum Botanicum (1640), Vol. II, Chap. LXXXV, pp. 1626-1627, “Anana seu Pina.” He also adds a qualification to his praise:

  But this Pinas as I ſaid, ſurpaſſeth all other fruites of the Weſt Indies, for pleaſantneſſe and wholeſomeneſſe, ſo that many eate them abundantly, and thinke they cannot ſufficiently be ſatisfied with them, but the ſurfet of them is dangerous, even as it is uſuall of the beſt fruits :

• Leonard Plukenet, Phytographia (1691), p. 29.
• Hans Sloane, Catalogus Plantarum quae in Insula Jaimaica, p. 77-79.

Then, both books and pineapples were still relative rarities. But with the establishment of industrial printing and the progression of pineapple growing from mysterious failure to aristocratic folly to upper middle class hobby, the number of works giving detailed instructions for the construction of pineapple growing buildings and their use increased dramatically. And while these are now somewhat rare except for specialized booksellers and larger (and older) libraries, they are just the books that recent massive digitization efforts have done best on. Waves of improvements in transportation brought fresh imported pineapples, then canned, and fresh again. So this is mostly all forgotten, just like the words pinery and pine-stove. (Pine stove is a better search key than pinery, since the latter has several other meanings; for instance, the house in Germantown where Louisa May Alcott was born was called The Pinery on account of the trees surrounding it.)

Some examples (for books before 1906, there is this bibliography by Harold Hume of the University of Florida Agricultural Experiment Station):

• Pieter de la Court-van der Voort (1664-1739; he doesn't have a Wikipedia page — even in Dutch — though his father does), Byzondere aenmerkingen over het aanleggen van pragtige en gemeene landhuizen, lusthoven, plantagien en aenklevende cieraeden (1737). As so often happens, the scan does not manage to capture the large fold-out pages, one of which is of a pineapple.
• Richard Bradley, “An Account of the Ananas, or Weſt-Indian Pine-Apple, as it now flourishes in Sir Matthew Decker's Gardens at Richmond in Surrey, under the Care and Management of his ingenious Gardiner Mr. Henry Telende” (1726). De la Court waited until late in life to write the preceding book, though he was the first to construct a working pinery.
• id., “A particular easy Method of managing the Ananas or Pine-Apple, …” (1739)
• Adam Taylor (gardener near Devizes), A Treatise on the Ananas or Pine-apple: Containing plain and eaſy Directions for raiſing this Moſt excellent Fruit without Fire, and in much higher Perfection Than from the Stove (1769).
• Dictionnaire des jardiniers, “Ananas” (1785). Actually, I haven't found any comparable French sources; this is just a translation of Miller's Dictionary.
• J. C. Loudon, The different modes of cultivating the pine-apple (1822). Inexplicably snippet view in Google Books.
• id., The Suburban Horticulturist, “Culture of the Pine-apple, and Management of the Pinery” (1843).
• The Journal of Horticulture, Cottage Gardener, and Country Gentleman, “Construction of a Pine Stove” (April 11, 1865).
• Tilton's Journal of Horticulture and Florist's Companion, “Pine Growing Simplified” (1870). Up until a year before that, The American Journal of ….
• John Fleming (gardener at Kilmahew Castle), A Treatise on the Vine, Pine-apple, Peach, Plum, Nectarine &c, Adapted for the Use of Cottagers and Amateur Gardeners (1872).
• Wilhelm Hampel (Gartendirektor in Koppitz in Schlesien), Handbuch der frucht- und gemüsetreiberei: Vollständige anleitung um ananas … (1898).

The Wikipedia stub article on Pineapple pit, to which the Pinery disambiguation page points, looks to have been quickly thrown together from a single pamphlet. Some obvious potential improvements (I know, I could do it myself):

• Add some synonyms, at least the ones that point to that page.
• Pineries were originally developed in the Netherlands, not just the UK.
• Most of the major developments were in Georgian times, not Victorian. In fact, the one that the article is based on is Georgian.
• Many (though not this one, apparently) burn tanner's bark, not manure, or a mixture.
• No mention is made Tim Smit, even though he already has a Wikipedia page and wrote a book on The Lost Gardens of Heligan giving the story of presenting the second modern pineapple grown there to the Queen.
• There are a number of relevant books from the period online, Beauman's history of pineapples, and similar cultural histories of greenhouses.

And, of course, here is a cautionary note from the Dec. 29, 1787 number of a Thomas Monro's periodical Olla Podrida:

of Fathers who have beggared their Families to enjoy the Pleaſure of ſeeing Green-houſes and Pineries ariſe under their Inſpection;

Pineapples were grown in even more improbable places. Charles De Geer grew them on his Leufsta estate. Peter Ivanovich Shuvalov introduced them to fashionable parties in Russia and they were grown there by the time of Catherine the Great.

In his footnote to Eugene Onegin's ананасом золотым 'golden pineapple' (I. xvi.; the stanza inventories a luxurious dinner also including truffles and comet year wine — I think there was a bottle of comet brandy around here once), Nabokov supposes that, “everybody remembers the kindly lines in James Thomson's Summer (1727),” (see link above) and then quotes them anyway. He resumes, “of less repute is a short poem by William Cowper, The Pineapple and the Bee (1779)” (here), and then doesn't quote any of it, even though it's more perhaps more relevant, being concerned with whether some things should be reserved for those who are entitled to them. Beauman notes that despite this Cowper himself had a pinery. These kinds of decadent associations led to Mayakosky's slogan, “Ешь ананасы, рябчиков жуй, / день твой последний приходит, буржуй.” 'Eat your pineapples, chew your grouse; / Your last day is coming, bourgeois [louse].' Which in turn inspired Peter Sellars, while still a senior at Harvard, to include a giant pineapple in the A.R.T.'s first season production of The Inspector General. (I have not had any luck digging up a photo of that set; all their site has is this.)

The obsessive General Tilney in Northanger Abbey had a surprisingly productive (despite his fretting) pinery. The Bank Director in Dombey and Son had one too.

In praise of the pineapples raised by Otto von Münchhausen (see here), Leibniz wrote (Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain, Chap. IV, §. 11):

tous les voyageurs du monde ne nous auroient pû donner par leur relations ce que nous devons à un gentilhomme de ce pays, qui cultive avec ſucces des Ananas à trois lieues d' Hannovre preſque ſur le bord du Weſer & a trouvé le moyen de les multiplier en ſorte que nous les pourrons avoir peut-être un jour de notre crû auſſi copieuſement que les oranges de Portugal, quoiqu'il y auroit apparemment quelque déchet dans le goût.

all the travelers of the world would not have given us through their accounts what we owe to a gentleman of this country, who successfully grows pineapples three leagues from Hannover near the banks of the Weser and has found a means of multiplying them so that perhaps we shall have them one day of our own growth as abundantly as oranges from Portugal, though there will apparently be some loss in the taste.

In the meantime, pineapples had spread to tropical Asia, where they could grow naturally, and so were also becoming associated with the East.

In the chapter “Voltaire's Coconuts” in Ian Buruma's Anglomania (that title is used for the whole book in a UK edition; the proposal in the entry on Government is that one should try the English form, with its guaranteed liberties, everywhere, just as one should at least try to grow coconuts, native to India, in Bosnia and Serbia), the author relates that Voltaire tried to grow pineapples at Ferney. In the Philosophical Dictionary (that Wikipedia article badly needs some editing), s.v. Loix (Laws), Voltaire tells a story of some Jews of the time of Vespasian stranded on the island of Padrabranca in the Maldives (Pedra Branca is actually near Singapore). “… on y trouve les plus gros cocos & les meilleurs ananas du monde” 'there one finds the largest coconuts and the best pineapples in the world'. (Of course Voltaire probably knew that pineapples wouldn't have grown there back then. The story revolves around the refusal of a pious Essene to marry what might be the last Jewish women to preserve the race, on account of Mosaic Law; when the castaways move to a nearby populated island, where the law says that all strangers are automatically slaves, he refuses to believe there is such a law because it isn't in the Torah, but is made a slave anyway.)

In particular, pineapples became a common design element in Chinoiserie, as in the “Chinese” (or maybe “Indian”) garden pavilion in Veitshöchheim built for Prince Bishop Friedrich von Seinsheim by Ferdinand Dietz. (See Chinese Influence on European Garden Structures, pp. 183-184 and fig. 49. Its source hasn't been scanned that I can find. The other reference it gives is in JSTOR with a tiny photo. There is a Flickr photo but only in one size.) Or the several Beauvais Tapestries known as La Récolte des Ananas.

And, of course, this continues today. One can purchase reproductions of the tapestry and a decorating blogger was inspired by the Dunmore Pineapple to make her own interior-size folly.

In Chinese, 'pineapple' is 菠蘿 (simplified 菠萝) bo1luo2. Athanasius Kircher's China Illustrata (1667) says (p. 188; also in Gallica; the Stanford site appears to have rotted), “tanti & tam exquiſiti ſaporis, ut inter nobiliſſimos Indiæ ac Chinæ fructus primum facilè locum obtineat” 'such is the taste that the fruit easily holds first place among the nobles of India and China'. The baroque engraving on the facing page shows a farmer planting some while an ape eats one; only the first two characters of the name given there, Fam polo nie, are drawn in it. Kircher's source was the Polish Jesuit Michael Boym, whose Flora Sinensis (1656) has plates for 反波羅密 Fan•Po•Lo•Mie (fan1 bo1luo2mi4) 'pineapple' and 波羅密 Po•Lo•Mie (bo1luo2mi4) 'jackfruit' (I do not know how to deep link to that facsimile; the first is Plate G at position 34 and the second Plate L). That is, pineapple is 'foreign jackfruit' (like kaṭhal-i-safarī), more properly written with 番 fan1. As Bretschneider points out (Early European Researches into the Flora of China, p. 23), 波羅密 bo1luo2mi4 is apparently a transcription of Sanskrit पारमिता pāramitā 'transcendent; excellent'. That is certainly true in the Buddhist context, where the Six Perfections is 六波羅蜜 liu4 bo1luo2mi4. (It may be just a coincidence that a Tamil word for the jackfruit tree is பலா palā.) 菠蘿 bo1luo2 is today usually written with the grass radical 艸, just like 菠菜 bo1cai4 (covered here earlier). 菠萝蜜 bo1luo2mi4 is now written with the character 蜜 mi4 'honey', so that it appears to mean 'sweet pineapple'. I don't think I know enough to understand what this song (video starts right away) by a TV hostess from a couple years ago is about (if anything).

Another word for 'pineapple' is 鳳梨 feng4li2 'phoenix pear', I assume on account of its appearance.

My wife likes pineapple chunks for lunch, but I think most of the ones I eat are in Thai entrees. Thailand has been the world's largest producer of pineapples since 1975. I do not know the etymology of สับปะรด sapparot (I can only manage transparent ones and don't have access to an appropriate resource). They are mentioned there by Louis XIV's ambassador Simon de la Loubère, who was also a friend of Leibniz. The same work gave to Europe an Indian method of constructing odd-order magic squares; the rules for Chinese chess; and one of the earliest mentions of and translations from Pali. (The Google Books scan did not manage to get the alphabet table fold-outs; fortunately the Gallica one did.)

The common Vietnamese name for pineapple is trái thơm 'fragrant fruit' (like ïu̯aka´ti in Tupi) given in Flora Cochinchinensis (p. 237) as Tlái Thɔm.

If one of the current proposals for the addition of emoji to Unicode passes, the number of extra-linguistic one character foods will greatly increase, and in particular will then include pineapple.

Vegetus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Hiawatha:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Magnets

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a basic uppercase Roman set:

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

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

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

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

The Devanagari only has the independent form of the vowels:

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

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

No vowel points, but extra matres lectionis.

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

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

For Arabic, a rather different approach is called for:

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

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

Ginger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marco Polo evidently found ginger at Kollam:

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

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

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

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

and in China:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

& gingiuere & licoriz:
he hom lefliche ȝef.

and ginger and licorice he gave them lovingly.

And the Ancrene Riwle (p. 416):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

आर्द्रकं शृङ्गवेरं (स्यात्)

ārdrakaṃ śṛṅgaveraṃ (syāt)

undried-ginger ginger (may be)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

وَيُسْقَوْنَ فِيهَا كَأْسًا كَانَ مِزَاجُهَا زَنْجَبِيلا
عَيْنًا فِيهَا تُسَمَّى سَلْسَبِيلا

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

والفلفل والزنجبيل بها كثير جدا. (iv, 80)

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

pepper and ginger are very abundant there [Mangalore].

And Niccolò da Conti:

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

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

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

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

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

Another other similar accounts:

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

And similarly for Kollam. So, Odoric of Pordenone:

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

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

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

And da Conti, again:

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

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

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

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

wəšām yimāṣê haqāneh wəhazangəbil ûmînê bəśāmîm harbēh

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

And some for Mecca:

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

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

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

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

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

In Jamaica & Insulis Caribeis ubique excolitur & luxuriat.

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

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

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

Da Conti relates some different kinds of ginger:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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