An ornithology guidebook called Birds of the West Indies , by James Bond was where Ian Fleming claimed to have found the name for his spy. “I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find, and ‘James Bond’ was much better than something more interesting, like ‘Peregrine Carruthers’. Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure — an anonymous, blunt instrument wielded by a government department,” he said in a Readers’ Digest interview.
I am ready to show you some pictures of birds of Mauritius, taken by our correspondent in the Indian Ocean, handsome French spy Siganus Sutor. What kind of a name is that, Curruthers? Would Sig’s pictures be more credible coming from a dull, plain-sounding alias? No.
I suppose this must be where the birds live.
Seaweed and algæ as birdsnest.
A baby bird hiding under a baby veloutier.
The white seabird below is the rare l’oiseau la vierge, or White Tern (sometimes Fairy Tern, but that’s also a different bird) (Gygis alba). It gets its French name fron its blue feet, which evoke ‘the favourite colour’ of the Virgin Mary. You can just see the moon by the tip of her wing in the bottom of the three pictures. It lives for 17 years and it’s related to the noddies. (L’oiseau la vierge in Réunion is a completely different looking brown-coloured bird, according to Wiki.)
Lastly this bird , the curlew — le corbijeau — photographed here on Sig’s roof, migrates to and from Norway every year. I’m hoping to get a picture of her on my roof later this Norwegian spring.
A Bad Guide 
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Gorgeous pictures! Kudos to sig for taking them and to you for sharing them.
Where’s the Norwegian bird of Mauritius? Is it busy totling somewhere else on the blog?
taken by our correspondent in the Indian Ocean, handsome French spy Siganus Sutor
“Baragwining French” would have been more accurate. Mind you, not everyone that speaks French is French and I’ve heard not everyone that speaks English is English, though I have my doubts about this.
Thanks for reminding me. What does baragwining mean?
I think that Siganus is coining this verb on the basis of the French baragouiner which means roughly “to speak incorrectly, like a foreigner with very limited skills”. But he is a very modest person.
He takes beautiful pictures though. It took me a minute to realize that since the beach is in the tropics, the white ground on which the birds are walking is not snow.
Snow, exactly. Our lake is still frozen.
I wish it could be my roof, so I could put a fiddler there as well, next to the corbijeau. Ah, if I were a rich man…
Baragouiner is said to come from Breton bara and gwin, bread and wine. Since Bretons were the only ones understanding Breton, for (French) outsiders their language was just a charabia (Provençal), it was just gibberish, i.e. du baragouin, a word that is attested in French since the fourteenth century. The outsiders managed to pick two words out of this gobbledegook: bread and wine, two things that Bretons were supposed to ask in Medieval French auberges. (They didn’t ask for aubergine in the auberge, and this is why today we don’t know how to say brinjal* in Breton, alas.) However, the good Catholics that they were must have known, in French, that “l’homme ne vit pas seulement de pain (et de vin) mais de toute parole qui sort de la bouche de Dieu.” (Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.)
* bringelle in Martian gibberish
If bringelle is French for eggplant/aubergine, where does the word aubergine come from? It sounds French to me. Is it really from auberge? Is auberge from berge?
Bringelle is not French French. It’s just Mauritian French. Its Creole counterpart is brinzel (both with an ‘-ain’ sound like in “main” or “pain”). I thought that, though being an English word by now, it came from India. But it seems that it comes from Portuguese instead, or was transmitted through Portuguese, at least according to the Collins (“from Portuguese berinjela, from Arabic”).
However, Wikipedia, quoting the Merriam-Webster, lists it among the English words of Persian origin. (“Brinjal – Etymology: from Persian badingaan, probably from Sanskrit vaatingana”.) This is more or less confirmed by the SOED: “Brinjal, -jaul. 1611. [Anglo-Indian, adaptation of Portuguese bringella, adaptation (ultimately) of Sanskrit vatingana. See N.E.D.] The fruit of the Egg-plant (Solanum Melongena).”
Portuguese, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit? C’est l’auberge espagnole ! The good MMcM, at least, would be needed to enlighten the masses on the matter! Even if it may not be as mysterious as the origin of the word car(r)om, it can remind the case of the vindaloo mentioned on Language Hat once upon a time.
Aubergine, on its part, comes from French, okay, but ultimately it’s just a bringelle, and to me that’s amazing! [On the Good Points of Writing Comments for a Bad Guide.] Dauzat (Dictionnaire étymologique) has this to say about aubergine: “1750, Geffroy ; catalan alleberginia, réfection de l’arabe al-bādinjān, du persan bādinjǎn.” So today, 25th April 2009, I am discovering that our bringelle might have exactly the same origin as the French aubergine, and I think it is, er, how do you say in English? flabbergasting*?
Compared to this, auberge has a rather dull taste: it is cognate with the verb héberger, to lodge. It has nothing to do with berge, bank (of a river, not the Lehman-type), which comes from Latin barica — which, interestingly enough, has a Gallic origin (cf. Welsh bargod, edge [Dauzat again]).
* etymology?
Even if the French named their, er, “female” policemen aubergines (because of the colour of their uniform) I don’t see the eggplant as being particularly French. However, it is the French word that is used — even if not exclusively — in English, German, Dutch or Danish.
http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/brinjal
In other languages as well, like Norwegian maybe?
How can it be so? That the Dutch word tulp should be used all through Europe to call that flower, why not, but why “aubergine”?
Ah, “aubergine” seems to be a Norwegian word too:
http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/aubergine
Oh Lord, it’s been ages since the last time I ate moussaka*…
* ultimately an Arabic word (not a Greek one)
norvégien : eggplante (no), aubergine (no)
I think it’s only aubergine. My wife says, about eggplante, ‘nobody knows what that is’.
aubergine
from French, from Catalan albergínia, from Arabic الباذِنْجان (al-baðinjān), from Persian بادنجان Bâdinjân itself maybe originally from Sanskrit.
That’s odd, isn’t it?
Sig, I think there’s enough here for a month’s worth of Language Hat investigation. We’ll have to invite them over…
We can notify MMcM at Polyglot Vegetarian.
Oh, look at this, Sig.
MMcM’s Polyglot Vegetarian blog has these links:
Edible Plants of the World
Multilingual Multiscript Plant Name Database
Siganus has done the right research. The au which begins aubergine is from al, the Arabic article. Other languages have adopted the Arabic word either with or without the article, and modified it according to their own laws and also to the more or less accurate recollection of the foreign word as it passed through several languages. An ultimate Persian origin seems most likely (as with some other fruits and vegetables), and Persian is closely related to Sanskrit (though not derived from it), hence the mention of the Sanskrit equivalent even though it is not directly relevant.
Creole bringelle, brinjal cannot be derived from the bergine part but is compatible with coming into local French by a different route, meaning through the intermediary of a different language, probably Portuguese. (Spanish is berengena).
The French women nicknamed aubergines are not policewomen in the full sense but look after parking tickets.
auberge “inn” is a different case altogether, and the resemblance is coincidental. It comes from the ancestor of German Herberge meaning the same thing, which was adopted in Old French, hence also the French word héberger “to give shelter to someone, to take someone under one’s roof”. The Petit Robert says that auberge is from Occitan, but the Occitan word may have been an adaptation of a Spanish or Italian word: I think that alberga is Italian if not also Spanish, and in any case it would correspond exactly with French auberge. It is quite common for a national language to contain words originating from different parts of the country, as with héberger vs auberge.
Don’t you people know how to use the LH search box? Tsk.
A.J.P.: aubergine
from French, from Catalan albergínia, from Arabic الباذِنْجان (al-baðinjān), from Persian بادنجان Bâdinjân itself maybe originally from Sanskrit.
That’s odd, isn’t it?
Not so much when you think about it, since you can very easily see the word migrating from India to Persia to Arabic-speaking land (Andalucia included) to Catalan-speaking territories and to France. What is strange, though, is that according to the SOED English had brinjal since 1611 and French had aubergine since 1750 only. How did aubergine manage to overtake brinjal? If only moussaka was part of French cuisine…
It also seems that the Portuguese didn’t get their eggplant the same way as the Catalans or the Castillans did.
Marie-Lucie: Creole bringelle, brinjal
Only bringelle is Mauritian, not brinjal. (I wasn’t very clear above.) And since, as a general rule, the soft j- French sound became z- in Creole, the Creole word is brinzel (the rest is pronounced exactly the same). Just like most Norwegians wouldn’t know what eggplante is (dixit Mrs Crown), a majority of Mauritians wouldn’t know what aubergine is, even though nearly all of them have a reasonable knowledge of French.
The Mauritian (French) word is likely to come from Portuguese (instead of French French), but where did the Portuguese get their own word from? Did they take it ‘directly’ from India instead of borrowing it from Arabic?
Incidentally, another type of egg-plant:
(We mustn’t loose sight of the original topic of this post.)
That’s great Steve, thanks! (You just need an addendum to slot our Martian bringelle in :-))
Marie-Lucie: auberge “inn” is a different case altogether, and the resemblance is coincidental.
I’ve read somewhere that Littré first assumed that aubergine was cognate with auberge because that was the vegetable which was served to customers in these restaurants…
dixit Mrs Crown?
But who is this Madhuri Dixit and what did she say?
That Language Hat post about vindaloo coming from Portuguese is really very interesting, Sig. Thanks.
That’s a good suggestion (no, I didn’t — or, at least, I never have).
Aubergine in Spanish:
Tres cosas me tienen preso
de amores el corazón.
La bella Inés, el jamón
y berenjenas con queso.
More here
In my opinion, if more poems of this kind had been written in the past, and somewhat fewer poems of other kinds, the world would be a better place.
Although it was still off track, Littré associated aubergine with auberge 2 ‘a kind of peach’, not auberge 1 ‘inn’.
MMcM, apparently Littré had to rectify something about the assumed link between aubergine and alberge: “On a d’abord cru que l’aubergine tirait son nom de l’auberge ou alberge, mot d’origine germanique. Littré a rectifié ainsi sa première notice.”
http://monsu.desiderio.free.fr/jardin/aubergine.html
Dominique can be wrong sometimes, but I believe most of the time he is not.
(But regarding la carambole (starfruit) he just repeated the mistake that had been made before him, and he didn’t want to listen to a damn Martian who knew what a carambole looked like.)
Incidentally, what is a morelle? I thought it might be a mushroom, but that is a morille, isn’t it?
According to dictionary.die.net, morelle or morel can be an edible mushroom (morille), nightshade (solanum) or a kind of cherry (morello).
Here’s the complete entry:
http://dictionary.die.net/morel (sorry, don’t know how to do links).
Oh, the links are done automatically, that’s very clever, thanks.
I’ve never heard “æggeplante” in Danish, so I don’t know if it’s attested*. But I’ve once found some real, original ovoid aubergines at the market when I tried to make that Imam Billabong thing that Hat stole from MMcM – not bad, actually.
Blackberries are “brombær” in Danish – looks like it should be related to brambles*. (Hat’s thread had been locked.)
Wait! I’m at work! We have the print edition of the Ordbog over det Danske Sprog. Brb as the kids say.
Ægplante – huh. At least it isn’t the current, abridged dictionary (and why aren’t there two “n”s in “dictionary”?) . Interestingly it’s been know as ‘egg pumpkin’ too.
Brombær – looks to be from German word for ‘thorny bush’ ~ bramble. If I’m reading the pronunciation guid correctly there’s been a shift since 1919 (not surprising).
I’m glad to see the Danish at least is linked to the English and German. Norwegian has bjørnebær (bearberries) for blackberries; I’ve often wondered why.
Broom is, indeed, the English name for a bush. I can’t remember what it’s like. I’ll have to look it up… It has yellow flowers in wiki…
Morels, as we call them in English, are the best of mushrooms; not for nothing is their scientific name Morchella esculenta. Saute gently in butter, season to taste, eat. Paradise.
Wikipedia says their folk names in America include dryland fish, hickory chickens, and miracles. I can testify to the last being appropriate.
This thing about morellos being a sour cherry is complete rubbish. As it says in the Wiki article, sour cherry trees are smaller than the wild cherry. I have two morello trees in my garden — we used to have three, but I cut one down because it obscured my view of the cows — and they are enormous. In fact maybe I’ll do a post on them, they are just coming into bloom. What they say about sour cherries being too sour to eat is nonsense, as well. Sometimes in July we go and pick sour cherries at a commercial orchard. The ones we don’t eat we bottle and make into a liqueur, but it takes a while to stone all the fruit.
John, how very nice that you’ve dropped by. I don’t know anything about morels; I must go and look them up in my mushroom book.
The Wiki article also says,
I rather like this morel picture, it looks inside out.
My grandmother used to make cold sour cherry soup in the summer, it was very refreshing.
That sounds lovely. There’s nothing wrong with borscht, but my expectations are always so high when I see its colour.