Trade Names: How Geographic Mistakes Shaped Our Vocabulary

It is easy to forget, in our age of global trade and intercontinental flights, that the world was once a vast and mysterious place. Leaving the place of one’s birth was a difficult and dangerous proposition. But for the intrepid few, the profits to be gained in the East Indies or the New World offered sufficient motivation to risk life and limb for the sake of shiny nuggets or piquant powders.

A shockingly large trove of our modern vocabulary still derives from centuries-old accidents or marketing gimmicks, often with little regard for, or in direct contradiction to, where things actually came from. China (i.e., porcelain), for example, did indeed originate in China, but there is no particular reason why luxurious footstools should be associated with the Ottoman Empire.

What we use our china for is even stranger. Tea is known in almost all Chinese dialects as cha, and it retains versions of that name in Japanese, Hindi, Arabic, Swahili, Russian, and many others. But English and Dutch sailors happened to wash up in the one province whose weird dialect names it “tee,” and thus it was transformed in all the languages of Western Europe. The lone exception is Portuguese, whose own merchants found it in a more normal area.

Spain, which was under Islamic rule for centuries, has even more words in the vein of our ottomans. Pillows (almohadas), carpets (alfombras), and drapes (persianas) are all named for medieval dynasties whose lavish lifestyles people were keen to emulate. Sometimes, the same exotic locale lends its name to completely unrelated products. To English speakers, Damascus is forever associated with damask cloth, while in Spanish and Portuguese, damascos are apricots. Rather than drink from a china cup, Spaniards drink jugo de china, which apparently appealed to late medieval consumers more than orange juice, though oranges have nothing to do with China.

Some names reflect intentional deception. Potatoes are a South American crop that Europeans initially held in suspicion. Creative monarchs in France and Germany thus rebranded them as pommes de terre (“apples of the earth”) and Kartoffeln (which sounds like the Italian word for truffles) to trick their soldiers and peasants into eating them. A less welcome parting gift from the Incas is syphilis. That name for the malady is a relatively modern one — it was traditionally, and sometimes still is, known as the French disease, in several European languages with the notable exception of French.

His Highness inspects an apple of the earth. (Photo credit: Escòla Gaston Febus).

Other items reflect a genuine attempt to preserve the original name, which got hopelessly garbled via a transcontinental game of Chinese whispers. An Indian spice known as srngaveram passed through half a dozen languages before arriving in English as “ginger.” The same thing happened with cinnamon, pepper, and several other staples of your spice cabinet (traditionally, these were known not as spices but as “drugs,” from the Dutch word for dry goods).

The Mayan verb sik’ar, “to smoke,” ultimately became our noun “cigar,” while “tobacco” comes from the unrelated Arawak language of the Caribbean. British merchants in Singapore took a liking to a version of soy sauce the local Chinese community called koechiap, but on its way back home it somehow transformed into a completely different tomato product known as “ketchup.” Americans enjoyed it as well, but many insisted on a slightly different recipe known as “catsup” well into the 1980s.

Some of the most bizarre creativity has been reserved for exotic birds. Spanish explorers in the Caribbean encountered a delightful little bird which flapped its wings so rapidly that it hovered in the air while sampling flowers with its long beak. The natives explained that it was called a colibrí, and, since neither they nor any other Europeans had seen such a thing before, they stuck with that name. Today, these birds retain that poetic, authentic name in every single European language, from Portuguese to Russian to Gaelic to Greek. The lone exception is English, where they became “humming-birds.”

Around the same time, a bigger, uglier, but more useful bird arrived from the New World. Englishmen for some reason thought it was from Turkey, and thus called it a turkey cock, or simply, turkey. The French, by contrast, called it dinde (shortened from oiseau d’Inde, “Indian bird”). In Portuguese, it became a peru, while the Macedonians named it after Egypt, Arabs thought it was from Ethiopia, and the Dutch went with kalkoen, after the Indian port of Calicut. On the other side of the world, the bird is known in Malay as ayam belanda, “Dutch chicken.”

In Latin and medieval Spanish, peacocks were known as pavos. When turkeys arrived from God knows where, they became pavos, while their cousins were upgraded to pavo real (royal turkey). (Photo credit: Flickr).

Some crops have likewise been subjected to particular creativity in certain languages. Medieval Spaniards popularised a useful fiber picked from bushes that the Arabs called al-qutn. This became Spanish algodon, French coton, and some variation thereof in most European languages. The Germans, however, preferred Baumwolle, “tree wool.”

On the other hand, Germans, like most other Europeans, were content with the name ananas to describe a prickly but sweet fruit first received as a gift from the natives of South America. Englishmen, who were perhaps too distracted by their new hummingbirds to learn the foreign word, preferred “pine-apples.” Perhaps ironically, in Hawaii, the land people most associate with the them, it was traditionally known as palakahiki, “foreign fruit.”

While Anglo settlers in Texas were content with the Spanish word armadillo, German immigrants who found them on their “tree-wool” farms called them Panzerschweine, “tank-pigs.”

In many cases, entire countries are named after products or misunderstandings. Brazilians and Argentines are among the most patriotic peoples of the world, but it is a bit odd to see people defining their national identities based on brazil nuts or silver (Latin argentium). Greenland was a deliberate lie invented by an exiled Viking who wanted people to join him from the relatively verdant land of Iceland (his like-minded son went on to christen his settlement in the Canadian Arctic as Vinland, “Land of Vines”).

Early settlers had less choice to end up in Australia, which is just Latin for “South” — by contrast, Canada almost became Borealia, “North.” But they were better off than colonial subjects in places like Ivory Coast, or its erstwhile neighbours Gold Coast (later renamed Ghana, after an ancient African empire that was actually located a thousand miles away), Pepper Coast (Liberia), or Slave Coast (roughly southern Nigeria).

Greenland’s population today is mostly Inuits who arrived in the 18th Century, because not many Scandinavians survived one of history’s deadliest marketing gimmicks.

Two of the most amusing toponyms in the world have amusingly simple origins. When Spanish explorers washed up in Mexico, they asked the first man they saw where they were and where they could find gold. He responded yucatan, which in Mayan means “what did you say?” In a similar interaction centuries later, German sailors named a newly-discovered Pacific island Nauru, which in the local dialect means “I’m going to the beach.”

The people of that island should count themselves somewhat lucky. The more conventional European naming practice might have had their country be known by its principal export, guano, which is dried bird droppings. In any case, one can only guess what they’ve ended up calling turkeys.