the origin of... PART IV

When I was a travel agent, I went to Perth quite few times. Our driver cum as guide once told me that; when the first British settlements came to Australia, they saw the beast hop/bounded around and asked the local people – “what is that”? But the aborigine people responded with “gangurru” literally means “I can’t understand you”. There’s where the name Kangaroo, a famous marsupial in Australia has been mistranslated. The aborigine people also call “Koala” bear as koala/kaola which means “no water/drink” in their language.

Whereas mosquito and anchovy came from Spanish. The oldest word (first to surface in English – in 1572) is mosquito, appearing as ‘muskito’. Before then, mosquito had been the Anglo-Saxon 'gnat' to the English. And another long-established Spanish ‘borrowed’ word is anchovy. Spanish called it as ‘anchoa’. Shakespeare has a slightly different spelling anchovies as ‘anchaues’. 

I must be proud when certain words for animals are originally from our mother’s tongue. Such as, Orangutan - ‘orang’ is ‘people’ and ‘utan’ is ‘jungle/forest’ in Malay. Same goes to these indigenous birds; Cassowary or burung (bird) Kasuari is similar yet slightly smaller than ostrich. In Malay, we called ostrich as ‘burung unta’; unta means camel. But we never call it as camel bird. Never ever in history. Same goes to one of parrots’ species named Cockatoo or ‘kakaktua’. Kakak is 'sister' and tua is 'old', but we never call them as an old sister. The name of dugong, a sea-cow were also from Malay language.

If you are one of X-Men’s fan or maybe Deadpool, you must familiar with Juggernaut; a fictional character appearing in Marvel Comics. The character is known as a bad guy; literally merciless, destructive and unstoppable. Juggernaut is actually coming from a bandwagon or steamroller which quite similar to some unstoppable force which is going to crush anything or anyone in its path. The huge wagon that bearing an image of a Hindu God from 17^th century, inspired by the Jagannatha Temple. Jagannath is a Sanskrit word, compounded of ‘jagat’ means ‘universe/world’ and ‘natha’ means ‘Master/Lord’. Jagannātha ଜଗନ୍ନାଥ means “Lord of the Universe”. This Jagannatha Temple is located in Puri, Odisha (formerly Orissa), Eastern India – around 500km from Kolkata.

Talking about Kolkata, or formerly Calcutta; the French people has mistakenly heard as “Quel cul tu as” means ‘what an ass you have’. Well, we Malay people also can easily by chance mistakenly hear “pour qui” as something nasty in our language but actually 'pour qui' means “for whom” in French.

And when talking about dirty words…

When puk* means vagina in Malay / Tagalog slang; there are other dirty etymologies in everyday words. Opppss, you just said “vagina” when you said ‘vanilla’ or ‘fig’. And you just said “testicle” when you said ‘avocado’ or ‘orchid’.

Less well-known is the origin of vanilla since the word is ultimately related to the Latin vagina or sheath. During Hernando Cortes’ conquest of the Aztec empire, his men discovered the vanilla plant and dubbed it vainilla, literally “little pod/sheath”. The name came from the shape of the plants’ bodies which need to be split open in order to extract the beans.

From Aztec, we got the name of tomato (tomatl means swelling fruit in nahualt language), cocoa (cacahuatl : bitter water), chocolate (chocolath) and also avocado (āhuacatl or ahuakati: testicle or ahuacacuahalt : testicle tree).

Introduced in 1845, the name of Orchid flowers came from the Greek orchis, which literally translated as ‘testicle’.

Attention to all my Malaysian’s friend named Fika/Fiqa; please take note..

Italian is similar to French when they have masculine and feminine. To recognize what gender a noun in Italian, is by looking the end of the word. Nearby all words ending in -o are masculine (maschile) and nearby all words -a are feminine (femminile). Fico in Italian means fig, but fica means vagina. In one of Shakespeare’s plays “die and be damn’d and go figo thy friendship! The fig of Spain!”. But ‘figo’ was Portuguese, while Spanish actually called fig as ‘higo’.

Puttanesca is one of the spaghettis that was invented in one of many brothel/bordellos in Naples, Italy. The name came from ‘puttana’ roughly means ‘prostitute’. (prostitute is ‘putain’ in French). While Puttanesca literally means ‘Lady of the night’.

The word ‘pasta’ first found in English in 19^th century although the pasta has been invented since 1^st century ᴀᴅ. Pasta in Latin means ‘dough’, but in Greek παστά, pasta means ‘barley porridge’. There are dozens of different types of pasta, from Spaghetti or spaghetto means ‘thin string’, Rigatoni means ‘tone line’, Orecchiette means ‘little ear’, Linguine means ‘little tongues’, Tagliatelle from ‘tagliare’ means ‘to cut’, to Vermicelli means ‘little worms’. Meanwhile, pàsto means ‘meal’ in Italian.

In cooking, the term ‘al dente’ describes pasta or rice that is cooked to be firm to the bite. In other word ‘to the tooth’. The word ‘dental’ originally from dens/dent- in Latin and later dentalis in late 16^th century.

to be continued~