Spinach: the Persian vegetable

January 19, 2021 @ 7:16 am · Filed by under Borrowing, Etymology, Language and food

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The other day, when we were discussing where Napa cabbage came from, Diana Shuheng Zhang mentioned to me that the Chinese word for "spinach", bōcài 菠菜, indicates that it came from Persia.  She's usually right about such things, and she was in this case too:

From earlier 波斯菜 (bōsīcài), from 波斯 (Bōsī, “Persia”) + 菜 (cài, “greens, vegetable”).

where bōsī 波斯 is obviously a transcription of "Persia":

Borrowed from Old Persian (Pārsa).

Middle Sinitic: /puɑ  siᴇ/

(source)

That was a bit of a surprise for me, but not much, since China borrowed so many words for plants (and the plants themselves, of course) from Persia, as we can read about in Berthold Laufer's classic Sino-Iranica: Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization in Ancient Iran, Publication 201, Anthropological Series, Vol. XV, No. 3 (Chicago:  Field Museum of Natural History, 1919).  His account of "The Spinach" may be found on pp. 392-398.

More of a surprise to me was the fact that the English word "spinach" seems to mirror the Sinitic in also having a Persian derivation, though not exactly the same one.

From Middle English spinach, from Anglo-Norman spinache, from Old French espinoche, from Old Occitan espinarc, from Arabic إِسْفَانَاخ‎ (ʾisfānāḵ), from Persian اسپناخ‎ (espanâx).

(source)

 

Middle English, from Old French espinache, from Medieval Latin spināchium, from Arabic 'isfānāḫ, from Persian espenāj, espenākh.

(AH, 5th ed.)

 

c. 1400 (late 13c. as a surname), from Anglo-French spinache, Old French espinache (14c., Modern French épinard, from a form with a different suffix), from Old Provençal espinarc, which perhaps is via Catalan espinac, from Andalusian Arabic isbinakh, from Arabic isbanakh, from Persian aspanakh "spinach." But OED is not convinced the Middle Eastern words are native, and based on the plethora of Romanic forms pronounces the origin "doubtful."

Popeye, the spinach-eating superman, debuted in 1929. Old folk etymology connected the word with Latin spina (see spine) or with Medieval Latin Hispanicum olus. For pronunciation, see cabbage. In 1930s colloquial American English, it had a sense of "nonsense, rubbish," based on a famous New Yorker cartoon of Dec. 8, 1928. Related: spinaceous.

(source)

You can see the New Yorker cartoon here, together with another one from 1934 with the same caption punch line:  "I say it's spinach, and I say the / to hell with it."

As we will glean from the long list of Persian forms of the word that follows here, it looks as though the old folk etymology connecting "spinach" with Latin spina may be close to the mark.]

 

/esfeˈnɒːd͡ʒ/, [ɛsfeˈnɒːd͡ʒ]   اسفناج

Alternative forms

Etymology

Kulturwort of Iranian origin. According to Asatrian, there were probably two forms in late Middle Iranian, *ispanāg (or *ispināg) and (the dialectal) *ispanāx (or *ispināx), yielding Arabized forms إِسْفَنَاج / إِسْفِنَاج‎ (ʾisfanāj / ʾisfināj) and إِسْفَنَاخ / إِسْفِنَاخ‎ (ʾisfanāḵ / ʾisfināḵ), which were popularized in Persian and Arabic, respectively (alternative forms with پ‎ (p) are directly from Middle Iranian). The Old Iranian form would be *spināka-, *spinaka- (compare Northern Kurdish sping), from the root *spin- (Northwestern Iranian), *sin- (Southwestern Iranian), ultimately from the Proto-Iranian *spai- (*spi-), from Proto-Indo-European *spey- (“thorn-like”) (*spi-), which are also reflected in Latin spina, Persian سنجد‎ (senjed), Ossetian сындз (synʒ), синдзӕ (sinʒæ, “thorn”), Baluchi [script needed] (šinž), Central Iranian šeng, Kermani šank (“thorn”). Also akin to Semnani esbenāγa.

According to Cabolov, related to Northern Kurdish siping (“meadow salsify, possibly also spinach”) and Persian سپند‎ (sipand, “wild rue”).

Pronunciation

Noun

اسفناج • (esfanâj, esfenâj) (plural اسفناج‌ها‎ (esfanâj, esfenâj-hâ))

  1. spinach

Synonyms

Descendants

Most are directly from Middle Iranian

(source)

After all of that, the one thing that puzzles me more than anything else is that I have never thought of spinach in any way as being "spiny", even though Popeye may have had a strong spine.  But, digging a little deeper, I find that there is a reason for this characterization:

Spinach seeds are generally referred to as round – which is relatively smooth – or prickly, with seeds that are sharp and pointed borne in a capsule with several spines. If you have ever tried removing the seeds of prickly spinach from the stalk by hand, you quickly learned why it is called prickly. It hurts.

(source)

 

Selected readings

January 19, 2021 @ 7:16 am · Filed by under Borrowing, Etymology, Language and food


15 Comments

  1. David C. said,

    January 19, 2021 @ 8:53 am

    I didn’t know anything about the origins of spinach before reading this, but a quick search suggests that 菠菜 was previously called 菠薐, not 波斯菜, though there’s no questioning here that it did originate from Persia by way of Nepal or somewhere from the west.

    The Kangxi dictionary entry for 菠 notes:

    【集韻】逋禾切，音皤。【玉篇】菠薐，菜名。【本草註】《劉禹錫·嘉話錄》云：菠薐，種自西國，有僧將其子來，云是頗陵國之種，語訛爲菠薐耳。李時珍曰：按《唐會要》云：太宗時尼波維國獻菠薐菜，類紅藍，卽此也。

  2. Tom Dawkes said,

    January 19, 2021 @ 10:16 am

    You can add 'peach'. OED: < Anglo-Norman pesche, peche, peese, peiche and Middle French pesche … < post-classical Latin persica (6th cent.), alteration (see below) of classical Latin persicum (Pliny), use as noun (short for Persicum mālum , lit. ‘Persian apple’) of neuter of Persicus Persian (see Persic adj. and n.)

  3. KeithB said,

    January 19, 2021 @ 11:28 am

    Doesn't this kind of add evidence to the point of Guns, Germs and Steel? That foodstuffs started in the fertile crescent and moved east and west?

  4. Victor Mair said,

    January 19, 2021 @ 12:44 pm

    The Iranian-speaking areas where peaches and spinach came from were not part of the Fertile Crescent. They were farther to the east, including parts of Central Asia.

  5. TKMair said,

    January 19, 2021 @ 1:29 pm

    Wonderful to know. Persia, was indeed an ancient gardening powerhouse. But spinach originating there is interesting, as spinach is a cool weather crop. For it to have made it to Northern Europe via the South route (North Africa, Gibraltar, Catalonia) is interesting. But then again, it could have made it rapidly, not garden by garden along a South route, but through Eastern Europe… and the word just went with it.

  6. TKMair said,

    January 19, 2021 @ 1:32 pm

    The other thing about Spinach is it's very happy to grow in Sandy soils, if well drained.

  7. Y said,

    January 19, 2021 @ 2:11 pm

    Does Hindi pālak, from Sanskrit pālakyā (per Wiktionary), have anything to do with this etymology?

  8. Victor Mair said,

    January 19, 2021 @ 4:27 pm

    @Y:

    Given what David C. said about bōléng 菠薐 in the first comment, your mention of Hindi pālak, from Sanskrit pālakyā is very interesting.

  9. Michael Watts said,

    January 19, 2021 @ 5:40 pm

    where bōsī 波斯 is obviously a transcription of "Persia":

    Borrowed from Old Persian (Pārsa).

    Interesting. There was a big fight on the wikipedia page for the Achaemenid Empire over how its indigenous name should be listed. Originally, it was listed as Pārsa (with images of cuneiform), and it is now listed as Xšāça (with Unicode cuneiform), but for a while someone was insisting that the indigenous name for Achaemenid Persia (6th – 4th centuries BC) had been written in Arabic script. (See e.g. August 2015.)

    Elsewhere on Wikipedia I found the argument that Iran has been the indigenous name for the region since perhaps the second century BC, and the name "Persia" used by foreigners was a misunderstanding of the name of a province ("Pars") within the empire. This argument is obviously hogwash, since the name Persia goes back well before the second century BC, but it's not obvious what the truth is.

    So I find it interesting that China chose to use the same word. When does the Chinese term come from?

  10. Michael Watts said,

    January 19, 2021 @ 5:44 pm

    You can add 'peach'. OED: < Anglo-Norman pesche, peche, peese, peiche and Middle French pesche … < post-classical Latin persica (6th cent.), alteration (see below) of classical Latin persicum (Pliny), use as noun (short for Persicum mālum , lit. ‘Persian apple’)

    Doesn't this kind of add evidence to the point of Guns, Germs and Steel? That foodstuffs started in the fertile crescent and moved east and west?

    Not really, as applied to peaches; they are named after Persia but they come from China. Origin terms for things are generally not reliable; you may know who you got an exotic import from, but you don't know where they got it from.

  11. Peter Grubtal said,

    January 20, 2021 @ 2:11 am

    KeithB and Victor Mair

    "Doesn't this kind of add evidence to the point of Guns, Germs and Steel? That foodstuffs started in the fertile crescent and moved east and west?"

    As I remember, one of Diamond's main points in GG&S was that east-west transmission is more likely than north-south, so the history spinach is consistent with that.

  12. Andreas Johansson said,

    January 20, 2021 @ 2:31 am

    Parsa in the Old Persian inscriptions means Fars, I believe. Xšāça is surely simply "kingdom" rather than a proper name.

  13. Misha Schutt said,

    January 20, 2021 @ 5:53 pm

    Chickens (originally from Southeast Asia) wee know cri the Greeks as Persian fowl. I don’t have documentation or vocabulary on hand right now, but it’s not controversial.

  14. Hiroshi Kumamoto said,

    January 21, 2021 @ 12:09 am

    I don’t know why the Wikipedia on the “Achaemenid Empire” gives xšāça with a long ā (the cuneiform there is OK). It is xšaça (Av. xšaθra); see Kent, Old Persian, 181a.

    Edward H. Shafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, A Study of T’ang Exotics (1963), states (pp. 146-7) that spinach was sent in 647 to Tang by the king of Nepal, although it is ultimately of Persian origin, called “Persian herb” by the Taoists.

  15. Victor Mair said,

    January 22, 2021 @ 3:27 pm

    On peaches and the west, see:

    "Persian peaches of immortality"

    https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=50030

    Vintage photo of VHM in Samarkand about 35-40 years ago; The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T'ang Exotics; mythic peaches; pántáo 蟠桃 ("flat peach", etc., etc.); Queen Mother of the West; Cybele; peaches of immortality; Journey to the West; Monkey / Sun Wukong; Hanuman; Daoism; oracle bone inscriptions; Silk Road; Iranian kulturvermittlers par excellence

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