Mind your language | 31 December 2005

I shall look upon two vegetables in 2006 very differently from the easy regard in which I held them in 2005. The first is the aubergine.

I had assumed that it owed its name to Arabic, which, only a couple of steps removed from English, it does. The Portuguese took the Arabic word al-badindjan and made it beringela (which is also whence brinjal comes, an Indian English name for the vegetable). But the Arabs borrowed the word from Persian, an Indo-European language like our own. In Sanskrit the aubergine was called vatinganah.

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Matthew Lynn

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The compilers of that enjoyable but unreliable dictionary called Hobson-Jobson attribute to the Sanskrit word the meaning ‘the plant of Bengal’. But the lexicographer John Ayto leads me to believe that in fact it means ‘the anti-fart vegetable’. In this it is opposed in properties to the Jerusalem artichoke, whose own etymology is familiar.