Mulberries and lapsī are the topic today. It’s a real joy to work on the Flora of Nepal chapter on the Moraceae as so many of the species in its various genera are part of wonderfully complicated human-plant-animal knots. Figs, of course, are well known, but in the same family are mulberries, jackfruit, and all sort of other interesting plants.

The Himalayan mulberry (Morus serrata Roxb.) is not the same as the silkworm mulberry (Morus alba L) but it is a seasonal treat for those that know it. The word for mulberry  in Nepali is kimu. This doesn’t come from any Sanskrit, Persian or even Chinese word, as do many other terms in Nepali (think of gulāb for rose, or candān for sandalwood). It clearly comes from the Newari term kimbū or kimbūmā. Here the mā suffix is the bound final particle for larger woody plants and trees; it’s also the counting particle for trees.

Mike Hutt’s otherwise excellent Teach Yourself Nepali observes that relatively few terms in what we now call Nepali come from the languages of the local cultures that the Gorkha princes overwhelmed, but I suspect terms for local forest products may turn out to be an exception. In compiling a thesaurus of terms for plants and materia medica, I have encountered a few cases where it seems that the words for rather important plants entered Nepali (or Gorkhali) from Newari (or Nepāl Bhāṣā). The term for mulberry is one of these. The Persian term (tūt) for mulberry travels with the Mughal awareness of sericulture and becomes the word for mulberry in Hindi and Bengali. For whatever reason, Gorkhali speakers adopted the Newar word instead, calling it kimū. The mulberry isn’t widely remembered among Newars as a useful fruit now, but the terms kimba and kimise (-sī suffix: fruit) are attested in the 17th century and kimbū or kimbūmā are the words for mulberry.

So, too—and here I tread on somewhat more tenuous ground—the term in Nepali for Choerospondias axillaris, lapsī, would seem actually to be an old Newari term that has been replaced in Newari by a tadbhāva reflecting its medicinal and taste properties, āmlī. The modern Newari term clearly reflects both the sourness of  the fruit of C. axillaris and its position in Newar medicine analagous to the myrobalans. The Gorkhali term, however, looks like a Newar word and has no cognate anywhere: the ending in -si follows the usual construction of words for fruits. If I am right, then the word for this most Nepalese of fruits is actually an old Newari term, borrowed into Gorkhali, where the original Newari term has itself been replaced by a Sanskrit tadbhāva.

Other terms for culturally significant plants that may originally come from Newari include pharsī (gourd or squash, Cucurbita species — Newari phāsi) and kapāsī (maples, Acer spp). The ending -si is extremely common in Nepali and masks the existence of terms for fruiting plants ending in -si borrowed from Newari, but it also permits borrowings to exist in Nepali without appearing foreign. 

From this we may learn that, just as toponyms can reveal something of the history of a place, zoonyms may also be evidence for the dynamics of ecosocial contact.