This is the regular script form of the Chinese character for horse: 馬.
When I used to give talks in schools, libraries, and retirement homes, anywhere I was invited, I would write 馬 (10 strokes, official in Taiwan) on the blackboard or a large sheet of paper and show it to the audience, then ask them what they thought it meant. Out of the hundreds, if not thousands, of people to whom I showed this character, not one person ever guessed what it signified. When I told those who were assembled that it was a picture of something they were familiar with, nobody got it. When I said it was a picture of a common animal, nobody could recognize what it represented.
All the more, when I showed the audiences the simplified form of the character, 马 (3 strokes, official in the PRC), nobody could get it.
Having just spent a week in close quarters with two large German Shepherds and a big German Shepherd mix, I was primed to learn about the Indian Pariah Dog, which somehow crossed the path of my consciousness yesterday.
Observing the behavior and ability of the German Shepherds, and reading about the history and canine qualities of the Indian Pariah Dog, I became fascinated by how different are the aptitudes and characteristics of various types of dogs, yet all domestic dogs are the same species, Canis familiaris, or more technically, a subspecies of the gray wolf, Canis lupus, hence Canis lupusfamiliaris, and have been so for more than ten thousand years of evolution.
We have had so many posts dedicated to Popeye's favorite vegetable (see "Selected readings" below), but we haven't yet done justice to one of my favorite spinach dishes: spanakopita.
Spanakopita (/ˌspænəˈkɒpɪtə, ˌspɑː-, –ˈkoʊ-/; Greek: σπανακόπιτα, from σπανάκιspanáki 'spinach', and πίτα píta 'pie') is a Greek savory spinach pie. It often also contains cheese, typically feta, and may then be called spanakotiropita (Greek: σπανακοτυρόπιτα "spinach-cheese pie"), especially in northern Greece.[citation needed] In southern Greece, the term spanakopita is also common for the versions with cheese.
Building on observations of Andras Rona-Tas (Tibeto-Mongolica, pp. 213-14), one can observe a basic division in Mongolian words for cultivated plants. They divide into two types: 1) words for grains and grain cultivation; and 2) words for fruits and vegetables.
Words in the first category (tariya "grain" buudai "wheat," arbai "barley," shish "sorghum," am "millet," budaa "grain," anjisu "plow" mill "teerem" etc) are consistent throughout the Mongolic family, and have great time depth — most of them are not obviously loan words from any other language (some have Turkic cognates, but at a considerable time depth).
It seems that paalak goes back to Sanskrit, Monier-Williams gives paalakyaa as "Beta bengalensis" (1st column, middle of the page), but I found that the botanical identiications in MW are often dubious. MW also indicates his source as Car(aka), which looks like it refers to the Ayurvedic text of Caraka Samhita.
Beta bengalensis Roxb. is now idenified with the common beet, Beta vulgarisL., which grows in India and all of temperate Europe, and it is in the same familiy as spinach (Amaranthaceae), and beet leaves are also edible.
Wikipedia saysthat "the ancestor of all current beet cultivars is the sea beet", which then suppliesthis introduction: "The sea beet, Beta vulgaris subsp. maritima (L.) Arcangeli. is an Old World perennial plant with edible leaves, leading to the common name wild spinach." So far so good.
This morning at the Greek stand of the farmers market, I bought spanakopita ("spinach pie") and one other item with the "spanako-" root, which also had spinach as a main ingredient. The resemblance to English "spinach", plus the fact that it was obviously not one of those ubiquitous wrinkled leafy green vegetables related to cabbage, kale, collard, etc., got me interested in what its etymology was.
Just quickly checking a few easily accessible sources, some seemingly contradictory aspects of the common understanding of the etymology of "spinach" started to bother me:
"Cultural Nuances in Subtitling the Religious Discourse Marker Wallah in Jordanian Drama into English." Al Salem, Mohd Nour et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (March 6, 2025). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04515-6.
On the morning of Chinese New Year's Eve, WXPN (Penn's excellent radio station) had a nice program about the significance of the festival and some of the events that would be going on to celebrate it — including activities in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
WXPN did its homework, and most of the information they conveyed was correct, but one thing they repeatedly said stunned me. They didn't call "shé nián 蛇年" "year of the snake" in English, which I had always and ever heard it referred to as. Rather, they referred to "shé nián 蛇年" as "Year of the Wood Snake". So I searched for it on the internet and, lo and behold, it turned up quite often as "wood snake".
