On 2/7/08, Abhijit Menon-Sen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/Cinn_cas.html
The reference/details in this page appear to be incorrect. - at best it confuses between cassia tamala and cinnamomum cassia. sad. The saving grace is that, it is all in the (lauracea) family. ;-) > At 2008-02-07 20:23:00 +0530, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: <snip> > The unclear parts are the ultimate etymological origin of "cinnamon" and > (at least to me) what the link is between cinnamon and sugar that would > cause similar terms to be used; but it seems very unlikely that the word > means something other than "from China" for sugar. > Anything that alludes/traces its origin to china origin is tagged so in sanskrit and other indic languages - like (as much as my memory would allow): chinani - peach chinakarpura - a variety of camphor chinarajaputra - pear sinchitikaphala - apple chinasalit - lettuce A notable exception (again AFAIK) is that of soybean - whose chinese origins aren't trapped in its Indic name. (I think it was called sou or something similar in china and anyway reached india only in 1900s) And, actually cinnamon is called dalchini (chinese bark) in both sanskrit and hindi - and north and west parts of India used to import it around the first few centuries, post JHC's death, from srilanka and NOT china. But this dalchini refers to a cluster of inferior varieties of cinnamon (all are equal, but some are more fragrant and heady than others, or well) - cassia tamala and cinnamomum cassia The best ones grew in south india - cinnamommum zelanicum and particularly in srilanka. Some Indian parts seem to have imported chinese goods, perhaos not having an easy access or knowledge of the otherparts. The thing is that while some parts exported cinnamon, some other parts imported the same. The economics is cutely reminiscent of the curret times... We export wheat, and sometimes import, ditto with sugar. Sometimes BOTH go on merrily and concurrently! And again the name cinnamon seems to be still getting debated, etymologywise, AFAIK. There is no other connection between cinnamon and sugar, AFAIK. > Ironic, isn't it? China got sugar from India, and the word sugar is > itself apparently derived from Sanskrit; but Indian languages call > sugar "Chini" because cinnamon came to India from China. > Hmm... Getting back to Sugar - A common current word in the hindi and allied speaking areas for sugar (white, cane, crystalline - wcc) is chini (but again, not in all languages - in Malayalam and Tamil, they are respectively called charkarai and chakkara, AFAIK - there are also cheenchakkari, chenjeeni etc in colloquial refs) . There are some recorded instances of cc sugar being imported into western india from china (during circa 1-200 ad); on the contrary, in a chinese delegation visited Harsha's court (NO, this is not a random block of new apartments on Bannerghatta road, jutting out like a grotesque male reproductive organ) to learn specifically the indian modes of sugar processing; and again, in 1406 Ma Huan (a chinese admiral) visited Bengal and noted down details of both brown and white sugar, random notes: 1. At one level there are some interesting things in the history of india and china - while some parts of india were dealing with some parts of china commercially and 'culturally' other parts in the respective countries were not very aware of it. There are various proximate and not so very proximate kinda reasons for this. But the names that have been given to a given produce in the western part of India seem to have been well entrenched. 2. Probably there is some incipient branding principle involved in calling certain kind of items cheeni, kum to think of it. 3. Chinese goods have been flooding the world markets, from the time of the flood, I think. 4. I started reading up about all these stuff, when i was hunting around for the etymological and cultural origins of THE 'Idli' (as in idli-sambaar-vada). It was a day of sadness when I learnt that Tamilnadu was not the origin of the idli in india - but kannadaland was - there were umpteen refs to it starting from circa 1000 AD. And again, more tragic to me, is the fact that, this idli seems to have invaded india from indonesia, where it used to roam around in the name of kendli! May be it still is. And that maid hunting kings from Indonesia with their entourage of cooks and kooks transplanted the idea and stuff - some thousand years back.. But, I love idlis, nontheless! ;-) References: (memory dump - sorry about the sketchiness) * Henry Yule, AC Burnell - Hobson-Jobson * George Watt - The commercial products of India * Om Prakash - Food and drinks in ancient India * NW Simmonds - Evolution of crop plants. * MS Randhawa - A history of agriculture in India and some more random refs - and if one wants it I can dig them up and send across - including complete citations. -- http://www.qsl.net/vu2sro/ "Mathematics has given economics rigor, but alas, also mortis." -- Robert Heilbroner
