Speaking of Words
By Michael Ferber
When I was a little boy I sometimes stayed with my great aunts for a few days. They had lots of old things, some from Germany, where their parents had emigrated from. One day my Aunt Clara said something about her “dresden,” maybe that I should be careful not to touch it. I had no idea what dresden was, but it was apparently in the same cabinet that held her china.
It turned out, as I learned later from my mother, that her dresden was her china, and that it was called dresden because it was made in Dresden. Or more likely in nearby Meissen, where porcelain had been manufactured long before a factory was set up in Dresden proper. “Meissen” can also stand by itself to mean items made there: a passage from a 1961 novel reads, “Her face . . . had the smooth, pleased prettiness of Meissen.”
And then one day it dawned on me that “china” was made in China! Or more accurately, China was the original porcelain-producing country, and so even porcelain made in America is called china. And there is “Dresden china” too. And “Meissen china.”
Linguists have long noticed how many items, generally material objects, have taken on the name of the place they come from, or are exported from. One of the oldest is copper, from Latin cuprum (or coprum) from the more formal Cyprium aes (“Cyprian metal”), which refers to the island of Cyprus, long known for its copper deposits. (Aphrodite comes from there too, but that’s another story.) Another old one is Bible. Our word comes from French bible, which descends from Latin biblia, a feminine singular noun. But that form is based on a misreading of the Greek source, biblia, which is a neuter plural noun, meaning “books.” (The Bible was not a single book.) Biblia and the singular biblion are diminutive forms of biblos, which is named after the city Byblos, in Phoenicia, which was a source of books or maybe the papyrus they were made of. So biblion means “a little thing from Byblos.”
Various kinds of cloth are named after the place they come from. Silk goes back to Old Slavic selku, from Greek serikos, from Seres, Greek for “Chinese” (“the silk people”); the Mongolians called it sirkek. Calico comes from Calicut (now Kozhikode), in India; cashmere comes from Kashmir; dungarees come from Dungri, a district of Bombay (now Mumbai); and madras comes from Madras, also in India. Damascus gives us damask, Gaza gives us gauze, and Phrygia gives us frieze (by way of French). Our word denim is from French de Nîmes, short for (serge) de Nîmes (France). Serge, in fact, is related to silk, more directly from Greek serikos.
An amazing number of foods are named for their origin. Having been told as a boy that hamburger is named after the German city Hamburg, I remember wondering if there were another city called Cheeseburg. (There is not, nor is there one called Whopper.) We owe the frankfurter to Frankfurt, the wiener to Wien (Vienna), the braunschweiger to Braunschweig (Brunswick), and baloney to Bologna, Italy.
There are even more cheeses than sausages named for places. In England Cheddar, Stilton, Gloucester, and Wensleydale all named a cheese. Gruyère in Switzerland gave us gruyere, and perhaps the generic swiss. Tilsit is a city in West Prussia, and Limburg is a duchy partly in Belgium. Brie comes from Brie, France (modern Seine-et-Marne), camembert from Camembert (Normandy), comté from Franche-Comté, and roquefort from Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. From Italy: parmesan or parmigiano is from Parma, taleggio from Val Taleggio, and there is a town named Gorgonzola (in Milan) that makes you’ll never guess what cheese.
While you are enjoying your camembert on your dresden china, perhaps in a sandwich, for which you can thank the fourth Earl of Sandwich, perhaps with a dab of mayonnaise, for which you can thank Mahon, the capital of Minorca (captured by the French in 1756), you might also like a slice of peach, which comes from Old French peche, from Latin persica, plural of persicum (malum), which means “Persian (apple)”; or a damson, that is, Latin prunum Damascenum, “prune of Damascus,” the same place that gave us damask. And by all means enjoy them with a little Burgundy, Bordeaux, Chablis, or Chardonnay, or almost any other French wine, or madeira (from the Madeira Islands), or port (from Oporto, Portugal), or sherry (from Jerez or Xerez, Spain, which comes from Latin Caesaris (urbs), “(city) of Caesar,” of all people). Or just a wee dram of scotch.
Since you have gotten out your best dresden you might order some take-out pheasant, which comes all the way from Phasis, a river in ancient Colchis (modern Georgia), where Jason stole the Golden Fleece; he probably nabbed a couple of pheasants too. If you can’t order a pheasant you might open a can of sardines, for which you can thank Sardinia. Or you might unwrap some cold turkey. But hold on, the turkey is an American bird. It’s not from Turkey. In fact the Turks call it hindi, which means “from India.” The French word for it, dinde, means the same thing. Something strange is going on here. Put the turkey back in the fridge, and I’ll try to sort things out in a later column, perhaps in November.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.