How a Mistake Gave Us the Word 'Cherry' | Hacker News Reader

How a Mistake Gave Us the Word 'Cherry'

merriam-webster.com

126 pointsohaikbai72 comments

Somewhat relatedly, when my daughter was younger she picked off one of the solidified tendrils that flows down the side of a candle and called it a wack. Obviously candles are made of wacks.

That is a good one. Here are a few from my 4 yr old:

off-board: as opposite of onboard;

both-turnal: awake in day and night;

sand-boni: Tractor smoothing sand at the beach;

I've actually heard "off-board" used by adults in a non-ironic way numerous times, usually in regards to the procedure taken when someone leaves a company (i.e. the inverse of "onboarding" a new hire).

"Off-board" as in "off-board fare collection"? (A basic requirement of every BRT system.)

I recall thinking the singular of sheep was shoop, probably from foot/feet.

Hahahaha, silly! "Shoop" is obviously the past tense of "sheep", not the singular!

Gabe should know – he's a published author, after all! ;o)

For some values of "published", chief ;)

You're right. I always wondered what Cher was on about.

When my son was 4, he found out he was a Pisces, thought that was a plural and proudly announced "I'm a Pisce!" (Rhymes with "icy".)

So who is the mac?

Same here - "Look, I have a beeswack" instead of "Look, I have some beeswax."

Some say memory is contained in DNA and passed down through generations, hence why intuition gives unlearned young the basic instincts needed to survive and grow.

When I was a kid I used to say "rash" of bacon because I thought the plural was "rashes", not "rashers".

The article cites Old English: "ciris" as in "cirisbeam" (the ciris tree) and claims the error from the "Old North French" variant "cherise" but the word is much older. E.g.

Latin, 1 century AD: Cerasus (AFAIK C is pronounced ch as in chain, Edit: thanks to danans for the correction: ch is a modern and k as in king the traditional pronunciation, so it's even closer to the Greek one)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cerasus

And even older, ancient Greek:

(pronounced probably like kera-sos):

"κερασός Of Anatolian origin. Compare Akkadian "karšu""

Of course, Akkadian is the oldest Semitic language for which the records exist, at least 4000 years old, i.e. around 2000 BC. Their empire was in the part of today's Iraq -- in the area to which the people who later wrote the Torah (which even later became the part of the Old Testament) referred as "the garden of Eden."

The cherries are our direct connection to the mythical paradise.

(And, when I'm by Eden and fruits, the famous "forbidden fruit" wasn't an apple in the original text, that's a wrong, later, interpretation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_fruit#The_Apple )

> Latin, 1 century AD: Cerasus (AFAIK C is pronounced ch as in chain)

In the 1st century, C was always pronounced as "k". The "ch" borrowed from Italian was something that was adopted only in the 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_spelling_and_pronunciati...

One more nice detail: it seems that the German word and pronunciation for "cherry" somehow turned to have again similarity to the Akkadian "karšu" it's Kirsche, pronounced like "kirše."

There's a certain cleverness in then rendering that "Eve tempted Adam to take her cherry" (a euphemism for deflowering, ie taking a person's virginity).

Seems similar to how "a napron" turned into "an apron". More examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing

The fruit example of rebracketing (which doesn't seem to be on that Wikipedia list) is "orange". It came from "naranj", but lost the initial 'n' (except in Spanish, where "una naranja" protects the 'n').

[1] http://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/ingredients/article/t... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(word)

Fruit linguistic is specially fun because names imply discovery dates and politics. Old fruit have all regional names, say, strawberries, but new discoveries thend to use the discoverer name, like ananas, except when they hate each other, like bananas which is the name used everywhere except where they went platanos in spite.

I also like how the color was named after the fruit, not the other way around.

(there's a similar example with "escalator" and "escalate"; the latter was named after the former)

Though “escalate” is a kind of funny one.

“Scale” (meaning climb up) and “escalade” (a military attack of a fort by soldiers climbing up ladders leaning against the walls) are both from the Latin words for ladder/climb.

“Escalator” was the trade name of the first commercially successful version of the moving staircase idea at the turn of the 20th century. The company otherwise made elevators, so “escalator” was some kind of invented mashup of “elevator” and “escalade”. There were various competing products under other names, but “escalator” was memorable and easy to understand in relation to the word “elevator”, so their name became the generic term.

Well, of course it is. Who would name a fruit after a colour?

It only seems surprising because the colour is more mentally salient, so there's a cognitive bias toward assuming it's the original (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic).

By the way, "pink" is also named after a plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_%28flower%29).

Well, some fruits are sort of named after colors. "blueberry", "blackberry", "Red Delicious", etc. But point taken.

something close is "greens"

It might be interesting to know that an Arabic, there's still a fruit called Naarinj. It's basically a bigger and more bitter type of orange.

"Alligator" comes from "el lagarto" ("the lizard")[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing

And the reverse happened with "an ewt" => "a newt".

And interestingly neither "eft" nor "napkin" got rebracketed, even though they're cognate with "[n]ewt" and "[n]apron", respectively.

Pure speculation, but an apron (or 'a napron' if you prefer) is (or was) a very personal item, compared with a napkin which is usually part of a large set of similar-to-identical items. So the expression 'mine napron' (hard to say) becomes 'mine apron' (easy to say). Whereas people weren't possessive about napkins.

Trivia: British English gets the word 'nappy' from 'napkin', whereas the American English 'diaper' comes from the type of fabric from which the 'napkin' was made

I remember when Orson Card drew my attention to the "a napron -> an apron" example, because the new rebracketing obscures the fact that "napron" and "napkin" come from the same root.

Now I'd like to know how the French word for "shampoo" (the noun) came to be "le shampooing".

http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/shampooing

I don't know if you read it (because it's in French) but it basically says that it comes from shampoo (which comes from the Hindi champoo) but not why it comes from the gerund shampooing.

I googled for a good half hour and came across that link in my searches, but no clear consensus on why it stems from the gerund form.

The only thing I can think of is that the original Hindi word is "to lather/massage" so maybe the French took the English transliteration and merged it with its Hindi gerund origin to end up with shampooing?

According to the CNRTL link, in 1877 it was used in the same way we would use the gerund in English, to refer to the action ("signifying the washing of hair") then in 1890 became the word for the product used in that process (shampoo) as well.

That seems to happen from time to time in French, when the gerund also becomes the name of an object involved in the process, as with "le parking".

Sometimes it happens in English too, like "building" and "booking".

Have an upvote, that makes sense.

Kind of like how the word "pirogi" is plural (a single dumpling is a "pirog"), but in English multiple pirog are usually referred to as pirogies.

Example in the other direction: "baks" (бакс), from English plural "bucks", was borrowed into Russian as the singular colloquialism for a US dollar. A hundred bucks would be "sto baksov" (~ a hundred buckses).

I got a hundred buckses in my pocketses.

Or how we say "tamale" as the singular of "tamales" when the singular is "tamal" in Spanish.

I'd hazard that all of the prepared food one's come from the vendor having multiples.

Nathan's Famous Hotdogs, not singular. As it would be Giovanni's Pannini shop and Boris' Perogi shop.

And along the same lines, in Italian a sandwich is a panino. In English we call a specific type of sandwich a panini (or, "a sandwiches").

I recently ordered the Arancino at a local Italian restaurant, and was confused when I got only 1, then I remembered how Italian plurals work.

And the same goes for a biscotti ("a cookies").

There's no such thing as a singular perogy....

I think I am going to start calling cherries cirisapples to annoy my kids.

In modern Icelandic they are called "kirsuber" (ciris berries).

In modern Danish they are called "kirsebær" (kirsu ber, ciris berries)

Similarly the word mango comes from the Malayalam word māṅṅa (pronounced: "manga"). The European traders mispronounced them into the now known mango.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mango#Etymology

Hm, this seems like just ordinary pronunciation corruption of the kind which happens a million times to a million words, not reflecting any actual mistaken interpretation as in taking "cherise" as the plural of a hypothetical "cherri".

Curiously it's manga in Portuguese I believe.

Yes, it is... So it was not the "Europeans" who misspelled the word, it was the British. The Portuguese were the first to get to that part of the world from Europe, so they might have brought the word to Europe themselves.

This wouldn't have happened if William the Conqueror was known as William the Conquered.

Perhaps it would look like this: https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language...

William the Concord?

Truly, he was a grape man.

Grape is actually what we call "faux amis" (false friend because they are homophonic but with different meaning) in french with the french word 'grappe'. The french word for grape is actually 'raisin'. But 'une grappe de raisin' which is commonly used means 'a bunch of grapes'

If he'd lost he wouldn't be known at all. Nobody remembers who William conquered.

But we do remember the Battle of Hastings.

For those who are curious, the loser in the Battle of Hastings was Harold II of England (or Harold Godwinson as his father was Godwin, Earl of Wessex).

Interestingly enough, we do remember King Cnut, whose sister married Harold II's uncle.

If he'd lost, he would have remained "William the Bastard"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_the_Conqueror#cite_not...

Some British remember a little too well perhaps ... bloody immigrants.

The same mistake is in the process of giving us the word 'kudo'.

In computing, it also gave us the mip, as in "a one-mip workstation".

MIPS came from millions of instructions per second, so a mip would only be "millions of instructions per".

In the early 1980s, "a one-mip workstation" was a very expensive thing you bought from Sun ;-)

Good point. I've also seen people talk about a singular megaflop.

Good point ;-)

An article about a grammar mistake contains a grammar mistake in the first sentence:

>unless we start hacking away them.

For a moment I thought it's about git and cherry-picking.

Abogado (lawyer) --> avocado.

Pretty neat to look at this wikipedia link https://goo.gl/kAR1LW and see the descent of a ton of words of English!

Please don't post URLs from shorteners as they obscure the destination URL.

They also increase link rot (full urls give you at least some information like: the domain, date, and title slug) and deteriorate the open nature of the web by locking a link behind some company's proprietary database that is liable to disappear without a trace. Please just share the full link next time, even if it is long.

> URL shorteners may be one of the worst ideas, one of the most backward ideas, to come out of the last five years... To someone in the future, it'll be like everyone from a certain era of history, say ten years of the 18th century, started speaking in a one-time pad of cryptographic pass phrases. - Presentation at PDAC 2011 by Jason Scott

In the interest of other readers and posterity, the link goes here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_English_words_by_coun...

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