This is a recovered post from 2012, reposted here after the server was hacked in 2015.<\/p>\n
(31 July 2012)
\nMulberries and laps\u012b are the topic today. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t come from any Sanskrit, Persian or even Chinese word, as do many other terms in Nepali (think of gul\u0101b for rose, or cand\u0101n for sandalwood). It clearly comes from the Newari term kimb\u016b or kimb\u016bm\u0101. Here the m\u0101 suffix is the bound final particle for larger woody plants and trees; it\u2019s also the counting particle for trees.<\/p>\n
Mike Hutt\u2019s 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 Nep\u0101l Bh\u0101\u1e63\u0101). The term for mulberry is one of these. The Persian term (t\u016bt) 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 kim\u016b. The mulberry isn\u2019t widely remembered among Newars as a useful fruit now, but the terms kimba and kimise (-s\u012b suffix: fruit) are attested in the 17th century and kimb\u016b or kimb\u016bm\u0101 are the words for mulberry.<\/p>\n
So, too\u2014and here I tread on somewhat more tenuous ground\u2014the term in Nepali for Choerospondias axillaris, laps\u012b, would seem actually to be an old Newari term that has been replaced in Newari by a tadbh\u0101va reflecting its medicinal and taste properties, \u0101ml\u012b. 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 tadbh\u0101va.<\/p>\n
Other terms for culturally significant plants that may originally come from Newari include phars\u012b (gourd or squash, Cucurbita species \u2014 Newari ph\u0101si) and kap\u0101s\u012b (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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
(In the original post, this was a response to a privately emailed comment)<\/p>\n
(2 August 2012)<\/p>\n
I\u2019m commenting on my own post in part because of an email from my colleague Alex King and in part in order to highlight astute observations from Bh\u0101van\u0101 Tul\u0101dhar-Douglas, whose husband I happen to be.<\/p>\n
Alex wrote, \u2018I think that your point is along the lines that indigenous plants and animals tend to be named in the local indigenous languages and those terms are unlikely to be supplanted by the more high falutin\u2019 terms that invaders might want to bring along? \u2019<\/p>\n
The problem is a little more complicated. I think what\u2019s at stake may be (1) locatedness\u2014that is, the referent of the zoonym is restricted in distribution in a way that plays into the geography of linguistic contact or (2) salience\u2014that is, the plant or animal for whatever reason matters more to the speakers of the language from which the term is borrowed, or possibly it is used in a distinctive way that is picked up along with the linguistic borrowings. The rather charged political history and biogeography of the interaction between Newari and Nepali brings out these features. In some cases, the zoonyms may be evidence for past practices.<\/p>\n
Before 1770, roughly, Newari (or Nep\u0101l Bh\u0101\u1e63\u0101) was the common language for a number of ancient city-states and their dependent regions in about a dozen valleys including the Kathmandu Valley. There were several elite languages at these courts; Newari, of course, but also Persian (the diplomatic language of the Mughals), Maithili and Sanskrit (for religious and ritual texts as well as technical texts about medicine, animal care, ethics and so forth). Operas were often polyglot (imagine having to translate Puccini from Latin, English and French as well as Italian).<\/p>\n
Nepali (or Gorkhali) has its origins further west; it\u2019s not as old as Newari, but the Kh\u0101\u015biya dynasty in what is now far west Nepal in the 13th-15th centuries was a much larger regional power than the Newars ever were. Persian and Sanskrit were elite languages in the old Kh\u0101\u015biya court too. Nepali, unlike Newari, is actually an Indo-Aryan language in the same family as Sanskrit, but Newar culture has a much older literate tradition in the Sanskritic cultural milieu. Thus for several hundred years before 1768\u2014when Gorkhali-speaking armies invaded the Kathmandu Valley\u2014both Newari and Nepali had their own independent processes of borrowing terms from Sanskrit or Persian. That means that a term like \u2018kal\u0101m\u2019 for pen, now cognate in the two languages, is actually the result of distinct borrowings from the Persian.<\/p>\n
The political history of the two languages since 1768 has not been pleasant; I won\u2019t rehearse all the details here, but speaking Newari in public became a criminal offence. Mid-20th century Newar language activists regarded cognates as evidence of oppression and attempted to replace \u2018kal\u0101m\u2019 in Newari with a pure Newari neologism, \u2018cwas\u0101\u2019. Although there are vigorous efforts to preserve and revitalise Newari, unless there is some sort of political settlement in the new constitution that formally establishes Newari as the language of government and education in the proposed Newar region (and the establishment of indigenous cultural regions is strongly resisted by the traditional elites\u2014they killed the constitutional process here a few months ago), I doubt Newari will survive another century.<\/p>\n
For reasons emerging from ethnic tensions, then, mother-tongue Nepali academics are unlikely to admit that there are borrowings from Newari in their language. Where they do survive, it would seem to be evidence of some particular cultural worth or salience. The two examples I discussed in the original post are quite different in that respect.<\/p>\n
C. axillaris\u2014the laps\u012b\u2014isn\u2019t found in western Nepal; its distribution is quite restricted in terms of altitude and latitude. Early Gorkhali speakers, if they had known it, would only have known it as an export from Newar territory. It is, however, tremendously important as a food, medicine, and symbol. One chapter of the book I\u2019m presently writing explores how laps\u012b actually became a symbol of modern Nepali identity. In this case, then, there may never have been no word for laps\u012b in Gorkhali; or it may be the case that the word is a borrowing from Newari into Gorkhali from long before the 18th century.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, mulberries were known to be the source of silk by the time Persian began to expand into South Asia as a court language, and silk is certainly a commodity that matters in Nepal. Silk would have been a sign of wealth in the 14th and 15th century Kh\u0101\u015biya courts as well as the Newar city-states. One might well expect to see the Persian term, t\u016bt, for the mulberry\u2014and that\u2019s what\u2019s odd. Neither Newari nor Nepali uses it. We know Newar traders carried silk as part of the lucrative trans-Himalayan trade that financed the exquisite art and architecture of the Newar culture area, but so far as I know no silk has ever been produced in Nepal. The actual mulberry in question, Morus serrata, is quite close to M. alba, the silk mulberry, but I don\u2019t think the climate is suitable for the moth. My guess is that the use of mulberries as a food or medicine mattered more to Newars than its role in the silk trade. Borrowings into Newari from Persian are almost all to do with political and legal terminology. Thus the term \u2018kimu\u2019 or \u2018kimba\u2019 was well established in Newari for the local fruit tree and was picked up by Nepali, in a completely different semantic domain from those used to discuss sericulture.<\/p>\n
And after all that, Bh\u0101van\u0101 pointed out that my pithy comparion between zoonyms and toponyms actually obscured what could only be called zootoponyms, of which we have many around the Kathmandu Valley, place names which refer to plants or animals. Two well known examples are Bagh Baj\u0101r (tiger market\u2014I was assured by an old friend that it was so named because a tiger really did wander in there once long ago) and Dhapa\u015bi (wild pear tree). She noted, and I am posting her observations on her behalf, that certain place names are a revealing hybrid. The fashionable foreign district Jha\u1e43\u015bikhel is an excellent example.<\/p>\n
Newars grow a wide range of local citrus hybrids in home gardens, all of which are described with Newari words. Jham\u015bi refers to a hybrid citrus with a tough skin, smaller than a pommelo (C. maxima) and not as sweet as a mandarin (C. sinensis). The second element \u2018-khel\u2019 is a Nepali term for a field. Thus the place name Jha\u1e43\u015bikhel is either a later Nepali name, or it\u2019s a Gorkhali-ization from a proposed Newar place name *Jha\u1e43\u015bikhya\u1e25 (that would be the correct term, according to Bh\u0101van\u0101) which neither she nor I have ever encountered.<\/p>\n
Either way, the internal structure of the name shows yet again the complex interactions between political history, linguistic contact, biogeography and local ecological knowledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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