Frustrating Words I: International Food Items

Word frustrations for spellers are primarily those situations where a word can reasonably be spelled more than one way. This phenomenon occurs quite often when trying to spell items of international cuisine, though it can occur elsewhere (does the "k" at the beginning of a Greek word become a "k" or "c" in Engish? e.g., cataphasia but katabatic; whereas catabasis can either be spelled beginning with a "c" or "k," according to the Unabridged). This and the next essay focus on foods, with a digression into the Addenda, i.e., the "new words," for the 1993 Unabridged.

You say Tabbouleh, I say Tabouleh

This word appears either as tabbouleh or tabouleh in the Collegiate. For those who didn't know, it is a salad of Lebanese origin that includes cracked wheat, onions, parsely and tomotoes. Thus, if the Collegiate was our guide, the word wouldn't be used in a bee. Yet, the Unabridged lists the word as new in 1993 and spells it tabbouleh. Thus, if the Unabridged is the basic dictionary, the word can be used and it is spelled with two "b's." Because there is no unanimity of how to render Arabic words in English, even the sacred book of Islam cannot be tested on, because our dictionaries spell it either Quran or Koran.*

[*I decided to have a little "fun" and so I continued down the page from tabbouleh in the Unabridged's Addenda (new words), and here were some of those that followed. See if you know them. A tabla is a pair of different sized hand drums used primarily in India; tacan is a system of navigation (tactical air navigation); tachism is "action painting," which itself (i.e. action painting) is a new word in 1993--it means "a nonrepresentational paining marked esp. by thickly textured surfaces, etc."--though this word now has more attestations as tachisme on the Net, and the Wikipedia article is entitled tachisme, referring to the French style of abstract painting of the 1940s and 1950s. Then, we have tachyarrhythmia, which is a rapid irregular heartbeat; tachyon, a hypothetical particle able to move faster than the speed of light; tagliatelle, a pasta in the shape of noodles; and tagmemics, a grammar describing langauge in terms of the relationship between grammatical function and the class of items which can perform that function. That definition of tagmemics isn't very helpful, so let's humanize the definition. The word was coined by linguist Kenneth Pike about 50 years ago as a practical aid to help missionaries translate the Bible into languages without alphabet or codified grammar. As this web site says, "Pike intuited that the resolution of translators' challenges lay both beyond the sentence in discourse and beyond discourse itself in the socio-cultural frameworks in which language is used. Pike and his colleagues thus began to formulate a theory of discourse based upon the centrality of language use to human rationality and to the building of human community." Thus, tagmemics is the way of trying to learn not just a language but the larger social context in which the language is spoken. A very good thing, I would add. Thus, all of these words neatly open worlds to us. The Collegiate has most of them. It has tabboule/tabouleh, table, tacan (which it writes TACAN, and so the word can't be used], tachism, tachyarrhythmia, tachyon, and tagliatelle. Unfortunately, tagmemics, a quintessentially "college"- or "theory"-type of word, is missing from the Collegiate. Back to food.]

Continuing with Food Items/Dishes

The Wikipedia article on tabbouleh defines it with a term or two that take us deeper into food. It calls tabbouleh a Mediterranean salad dish, often used as part of a mezze, which has ingredients such as parsley, mint, and bulgur. Well, the Collegiate has both italicized words, though it spells mezze as meze--"an appetizer in Greek or Middle Eastern cuisine..." The Unabridged neatly solves the issue by not having the term. The OED lists the word under meze, but gives us eight possible spellings. Well, let's follow the thread, by "clicking" on the highlighted word mezze in the article on tabbouleh. It takes us to an article entitled meze, but the author of the article then gives us the Anglicized version of this word from about eight languages, including Perian, Bugarian and Montenegrin. Then we have the following. We learn that a starter in Lebanon is called a muqabbilat. I think it will take generations until this word is taken into English.

In Turkey meze is served with raki in establishments called meyhane. No English dictionary that I know has an entry for meyhane (though raki always appears); indeed, "mey" words in English are nearly non-existent. We are told, however, in another article that a meyhane is a Turkish restaurant or bar serving alcoholic beverages with meze and traditional food. It is analogous to a Greek ouzeri. Well, the Unabridged has ouzo, the Greek anise-flavored liqueur, which is served in an ouzeri, but only the OED has ouzeri. I would think that the next iteration of the OED has to have ouzeri. Possibly even meyhane. After all, we have our defense bases in Turkey; we might as well borrow their words, too.

These mezedes (the plural) consist of many items with Turkish names, only one of which seems to be in any English dictionary (dolma). But now you see the process of "word-creep" into English. If we have ouzo, why not bring in the place where ouzo is served (ouzeri)? And, why not bring in the Turkish place which is just like the Greek place (meyhane)? But if you do that, why not also bring in the other items you can get for mezze in a meyhane or an ouzeri? Really no reason to exclude them, unless we have an "immigration quota" of "foreign" words.

Well, we also learn that an ouzeri can serve ouzo or tsipouro, a "distilled alcoholic beverage, more precisely a pomace brandy.." Surprisingly, to me, the OED has tsipouro, attested in English first in 1947. The author in 1947 called tsipouro a "lower-class cousin" of ouzo. Neither the Unabridged nor the Collegiate have tsipouro. But every dictionary has the word "pomace." Derived from the Late Latin pomum (apple), pomace is the "dry or pulpy residue of material (e.g., fruit) from which a liquid has been pressed or extracted." As the Wikipedia article goes on to say, tsipouro is served in shot glasses along with meze or accompanying halva or other desserts. Halva is spelled two ways in the Collegiate and three in the Unabridged, and is "a flaky confection of crushed sesame seeds in a base of syrup."

Conclusion

None of this is going to make me refuse to eat, I believe. But it shows why spelling is much less of an exact science than you might think. I want to do one more "food" essay to illustrate more of the same.

2596