From T.P. Meenakshisundaran's A History of Tamil Language, from a chapter that talks about loan words from Portuguese-
"...tocai is from doce which was the name of a sweet dish; by the process of semantic extension, this has come to mean any rice cake."
Who'd have thunk it?
So what was the dosai (or tocai, which is how I pronounce is anyway) called before the Portuguese arrived in Tamil land? Surely, dosais predate Portuguese colonisation? According to this article, dosais have a two thousand year history in TN.[1]
Why then, has the dosa/dose usage been adopted in the other southern states? Unless dosai-making spread out of TN only in the last three-four hundred years or so. Does anyone even know that dosais were invented in TN? I remember reading somewhere that they are an Udupi creation. Hmm...
Meenakshisundaran also insists that the Tamil vattu comes from the Portuguese word for duck (which quick googling reveals to be pato). Come to think of it, I can't seem to recall a single reference to ducks from what little classical/Bhakti era Tamil poetry I know. By way of aquatic birds, swans and cranes, yes. But ducks, no. Interesting, but why/how? Anyone know the Malayalam/Telugu/Kannada word for duck?
[1]But said article claims that fermentation techniques were brought to South India from Indonesia sometime during the years, 800-1200 AD. Hello? No fermentaion, no dosai.
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8 comments:
> Who'd have thunk it?
Indeed! Who'd have... Delightful nugget of information.
> Anyone know the Malayalam/Telugu/Kannada
> word for duck
Finally, glad to be of service:
Malayalam: taaraavu
Telugu: vaatu/baatu
Kannada: gottilla madam
> But ducks, no. Interesting,
> but why/how?
They couldn't tell them apart from the swans? Highly implausible, I'm thinking.
Migratory waders and dabblers and divers and shovelers and so on have presumably been seen in S. India for aeons.
Scratch: taaraavu. taaRaavu, actually.
Ludwig: TaaRaavu, of course! I've heard it so many times, but just couldn't remember. Thanks for the reminder. I'm reading Timothy Mackintosh-Smith's Travels with a Tangerine and coincidentally, he mentions the Arabic word for duck, batt. Which Wikitionary says is where pato ultimately derives from. Fascinating, eh?
Agree that it's highly implausible that they couldn't tell apart swans from ducks. And yes, ducks and such have probably been around for ages. I'd love to know why/how the Portuguese word came to be widely adopted, and the Tamil one abandoned. There are other such examples: The Tamil word for window, jannal derives from the Portuguese janela; mesai (table) from mesa etc.
Nice to see u back in business
-> Tamil poetry in my opinion fails to recognize the existence of animals which arent as sexy, romantic or noble as swans, storks, elephants, cows, lions, tigers, parrots and the likes.
I havent come across mentions of dogs, donkeys or pigs either :) - Ducks in Tamilnadu were raised by the lower classes - so they fall in the same bracket as donkeys or pigs - i dunno
-> Common names keep changing with times - i guess the next 50 odd years will see a huge amount of tamil getting anglicized or something
-> yeah looks like dosais were around since Sangam times - thats like atleast 1000 years ago - i wunder if the portuguese even walked upright on 2 legs back then :)
My guess - probably gets renamed every century or so
Was just imagining spain or portugual colonizing India - instead of the british - we'd all have been eating tortillas and burritas made of rice batter and writing blogs in espanyol and calling out "Holla" all day!
It's true that our culinary habits changed a lot in the last few hundred years (adding red chillis, for one), but did the name of the ubiquitous dosa really change too? And why would anyone change the name of a traditional dish to a foreign word?
To muddy the waters: swans never existed in Tamil Nadu, the closest they have been is Kashmir. They are not tropical birds by any stretch of imagination.
Which leads me to the question: given ecological facts, it must be true that many Tamil poets/writers whose work features the swan must never have laid eyes on it, except in art. So how come the birds makes such a regular appearance? I also wonder if we aren't mistaking the word to mean swan when it actually refers to some other bird. But checking that should not be hard.
And Kannada for duck is baathkoli.
A: I'd assumed that poets were reasonably accurate and detailed while describing the countryside where their poems are set. I've definitely come across references to buffaloes and dogs. But you're right of course- some animals just don't find mention. And also, my knowledge of Tamil poetry is rather feeble.
Had we been colonised by the Portuguese/Spaniards, things would have indeed turned out quite differently. I thoroughly dislike burritos. Luckily, they are a Mexican invention. They'd only have reached Indian shores in the twentieth century, along with burgers and other American imports. We'd all have been much less prudish, for one thing- we'd probably be drinking a lot more alchohol and lazing around. Just look at the Goans!
Lekhni: Hello, and thanks for visiting! Your questions are exactly the ones I ask, too.
Varali: Hello, and thanks for visiting! You're right about the swans. They were kind of mythical, even in Tamil poetry, I think. The Tamil word for swan, Annam is a corruption of the Sanskrit Hamsa. So I suppose that poets did mean swan when they said annam.
Baathkoli is pretty close to vaathu (baathu+koli? koli or kozhi being hen in tamil) Do you have any idea if there's a more archaic word for duck? The Tamil one I found out is thaaraa which is pretty close to the current Malayalam usage of thaaRaavu
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