Spinach: Mongolian rhapsody
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[This is a guest post from Christopher Atwood]
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).
The other have little time depth, are inconsistent across the Mongolic family, and in any given Mongolic language or dialect are usually borrowed from the neighboring non-Mongolic farming people. In modern languages there's a push to adopt more Mongolian sounding terms (usually either Turkic in origin or else calque translations), but they often fail. For example, in Ulaanbaatar, alim "apple" (Turkic origin) is usually yaawlag (Russo-Mongolian from yábloko, and örgöst xemx ("spiny melon"=cucumber) is usually something like oguurcai (from Russian ogúrec). On the other hand in Inner Mongolia, what is baicaa and sheegua in Ulaanbaatar is usually cagaan nogoo (cabbage, calqued from Chinese, literally "white greens"), or tarwas (watermelon, from Uyghur) in Inner Mongolia.
One lovely exception to this is "potato," which in most Mongolian dialects I know is tömös, which is originally the word for "lily bulb," repurposed with the introduction of potato. The Buryats, however, adopted xartaabxa, from Russian kartófel'.
The obvious socio-linguistic root of this distinction is that grain-farming has been a continuous tradition among Mongolic-speakers, with all of them doing some grain farming, in continuous tradition from the distant past. Growing fruits and vegetables, however, has been something adopted independently from various sources, and often dropped and then picked up again, under different influences.
So, to your question "spinach" in Mongolian:
I have never actually knowingly purchased or eaten spinach in Mongolia, and I wasn't aware of the word, so I looked it up in Mongolian. I get two versions: buucai and örgöst nogoo "spiny greens". No prizes for guessing either 1) where buucai came from, or 2) which one is actually used more in the groceries if you want to buy it (I wouldn't be surprised if some derivation of špinat is also used, although it would have to be pretty massively altered to fit Mongolian phonotactics). What is not so clear is whether the reference to "spiny" is a calque translation from some other language, or just an obvious reference to the observable features of the plant, as it is with cucumbers. (When my wife started active gardening, I was surprised to see how spiny real fresh cucumbers actually are — those sold in stores rub off all the spines.) I'd guess the latter.
Victor Mair said,
July 10, 2025 @ 7:57 pm
From Greg Pringle:
I've always found the names of vegetables confusing. There is a vegetable that the Mongolians call юуцай yuutsai, which is called 小白菜 xiǎobáicài in Chinese (there actually appears to be a variety of names for this vegetable in Chinese, but 油菜 yóucài doesn't seem to be among them — it's used for a different vegetable in Chinese). In English the юуцай is known as bak choy, in Japanese as チンゲンサイ chingensai. (Spinach is also confusing for me because when I was growing up in Australia the word 'spinach' was used for the vegetable elsewhere known as 'silverbeet'. So we were actually eating the wrong vegetable if we wanted to be like Popeye.)
The word for 'tomato' is a good one. It's usually known as помидор pomidor in Mongolia, obviously from Russian, ultimately from Italian. The officially preferred name, which no one uses, is улаан лооль ulaan lool' or 'red lool', the word "lool'" apparently being an old loanword from Chinese. In China it's called төвд хаш tövd hash, an obvious calque on Chinese 番茄 fānqié, which literally means something like 'western region eggplant'.
I don't know I've ever heard the word yawlak in Mongolia. The authorities seem to have been successful in resuscitating алим alim. Unfortunately the apple is known in China as almarad — you used to see shops in Inner Mongolia that sold 'Almarad computers'. Alim is used for the pear in China.
Greg Pringle said,
July 10, 2025 @ 8:16 pm
To correct my comment above, 油菜 yóucài does actually appear to be used for the bak choy in China, so юуцай is correct. The term is a direct borrowing from Chinese.