In the warm weather, I had an al fresco hit with my mad-apple bruschette. Mad-apple shows the tangle to which ‘a foreign and unintelligible word is liable under the influence of popular etymology’. It is a name for the aubergine, or egg-plant as it was earlier known in England, as it still is in America. Why mad-apple? Because the Renaissance Latin name was malum insanum, from the lost Italian form mela insana. This was a rationalisation of the earlier melanzana, attested in Sicilian use by the Arab geographer Idrisi in the 12th century. There it was a straight borrowing from the Greek melintzana, earlier matizanion, adapted from the Arabic badinjan.
Arabic is of course no Indo-European language, but that didn’t stop verbal loans, for Arabic itself had borrowed the word from the Persian badingan. Here we’re back in the Indo-European family again, and Persian had derived the word from Sanskrit vatingana or vatigama, said to mean ‘that which removes the windy humour’.
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