[This entry is the introduction to chapter 43 of part II of the open textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]
Introduction
Herbs and spices have been used for cooking for a very long time. Herbs are easy enough to come by, but spices were rarer and thus very valuable since antiquity. We have evidence of the trading of spices in South Asia and the Middle East dating back some 4,000 years. They were a big part of European trade with Asia and Africa, the sources of most spices, for a long time. The monopoly that Venice had over the spice trade from the 8th through the 15th century, and their resulting high prices, is in part what drove the Spanish and the Portuguese to search for a direct route to the source of spices, one which did not go overland through the Middle East, which is what eventually led to the European colonial expansion in Africa and the Americas. Columbus was not searching for a new continent when he came upon the Americas, but for a shorter route to India, the source of spices, and hence the early name for the “new” continent.[i]
The terms Indies in
English and Indias in Spanish to refer
to the Indian subcontinent and other parts of Asia where spices and other exotic
things came from was popularized by the famous traveler Marco Polo in the 14th
century. When Columbus reached the American continent, he thought he had reached
the very same Indies and that is what he called this land. The term Indias was used in Spain to refer to the
American colonies until at least the 19th century. Likewise, in the British
Empire the term West Indies in English (Indias Occidentales in Spanish)
is used to this day to refer to Caribbean islands that were former colonies and
are now part of the British Commonwealth. Of course, the terms Eng. Indian and Sp. indio to refer to native American peoples derives from the original
place name and is used to this day.
Figure
124: Referents of the word Indies
in English from the 16th to the 19th centuries. East Indies (Indias Orientales):
(bright orange) narrowly conceived. (light orange) broadly conceived (includes South Asia
and South East Asia). West Indies (Indias Occidentales): (dark green) narrowly conceived (light green) broadly conceived.[ii]
Figure 125: The narrow term West Indies includes three
major Caribbean island groups: (bright orange) Bahamas (Islas Bahamas or Islas Lucayas in Spanish); (yellow) Greater Antilles (Antillas Mayores in Spanish); (green) Lesser Antilles (Antillas Menores in Spanish). (brown)
The Cayman Islands (Islas Caimán) are not considered to be part of
these groups.[iii]
Eng. spice ~ Sp. especia
The word spice /ˈspaɪ̯s/ in English means ‘an aromatic or pungent vegetable
substance used to flavor food, e.g. pepper’ (COED). It is a 12th century
borrowing from Old French espice (Modern
French épice /e.ˈpis/), which comes from Late Latin
(plural) spĕciēs ‘goods, wares’, and from
that meaning, ‘spices’. The original Latin (singular) word spĕciēs ‘kind, sort, type’ and, earlier, ‘look, appearance’ (singular
and plural of this word are identical in the nominative case, but not in the other
cases).
The Spanish equivalent of Eng. spice is especia, a cognate
and an early learned borrowing (mid-13th century) from the same Latin
word, with the meaning this Latin word had in the plural, namely ‘spice’. The words Eng. spice ~ Sp. especia are doublets of the also learned words Eng. species ~ Sp. especie. Spanish especie is
a common word in Modern Spanish, first attested in the 15th century,
with the same meaning singular species had in Latin: ‘kind, sort, type’. The biological
sense of especie came later, in the 17th
century. The doublet of Eng. spice, namely
species /ˈs.pi.ʃis/,
entered the language in the late 14th century as term in logic and in
the early 17th century it came to take on its current biological sense.
The Latin noun spĕciēs
is itself derived from the root of the Old Latin verb specĕre ‘to observe, watch, look at’ (speciō, specere, spexī, spectum), with the suffix ‑iēs, which was used to create abstract nouns.
From the root of the verb specĕre
we get many English and Spanish cognates, such as Eng. inspect ~ Sp. inspeccionar,
Eng. prospect ~ Sp. prospecto, Eng. respect ~ Sp. respeto/respecto, Eng. perspective ~ Sp. perspectiva,
Eng. specimen ~ Sp. espécimen, Eng. spectacle ~ Sp. espectáculo,
Eng. specify ~ Sp. especificar, Eng. specific ~ Sp. específico.
All of these words are learned borrowings, but Spanish also has a patrimonial word
that contains that root, namely Sp. espejo
‘mirror’. The Latin root goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *speḱ‑, which gave us patrimonial words in
Germanic such as spy in English.
Latin had an adjective derived from the noun spĕciēs by addition of the adjectival suffix
‑āl‑,
namely the third declension adjective masc./fem. speciālis (speci+āl+is; neuter
speciāle). Its meaning was ‘specific,
particular, individual’. This adjective came into English in the 12th
century as special, through French special (also written especial and especiel, Mod.Fr. spécial)
‘special, particular, unusual’. A number of words have been derived from this adjective:
Eng. especially & specially[1]
~ Sp. especialmente, Eng. specialty ~ Sp. especialidad, Eng. specialist
~ Sp. especialista, Eng. specific ~ Sp. específico, Eng. specify ~
Sp. especificar, and Eng. specialize ~ Sp. especializarse.
Eng. herb ~ Sp. hierba
The English word herb,
pronounced /ˈɜɹb/ or /ˈhɜɹb/, is
used to refer to certain culinary and medicinal plants.[iv]
Its popular meaning is ‘any plant with leaves, seeds, or flowers used for flavoring,
food, medicine, or perfume’, though technically in botany it means ‘any seed-bearing
plant which does not have a woody stem and dies down to the ground after flowering’
(COED).
The source of the word herb is Latin hĕrba,
though the Latin word was broader in meaning, since it meant ‘grass, green crops,
herb’. The Spanish patrimonial descendant of Lat. hĕrba is hierba,
which has the same meaning as its Latin source, namely ‘grass’ and, in the right
context, and especially in the plural, hierba
can have the same meaning as the ‘popular’ meaning of Eng. herb.
English
|
Spanish
|
grass
|
hierba
|
herb
|
English got the noun herb from Old French erb in
the 13th century. Old French, like Old Spanish and even post-first-century
Latin, did not pronounce the Latin h and
in some cases, such as this one, it didn’t write it either. English reintroduced
the h to the spelling of this word in
the 15th century, to make it look more like the Latin original and, for
at least some English speakers, this h
began to be pronounced in the 19th century, a phenomenon known as spelling
pronunciation.[v]
The French borrowings haste /ˈheɪ̯st/ and hostel
/ˈhɒs.təl/ are examples of the many words where the spelling pronunciation
has succeeded, even though the h’s in
these words were originally silent. The h
in other French borrowings has remained silent, as in honor, honest, hour, and heir. In other cases, such as humble,
human and humor, the h is pronounced
in some dialects but not in others. The h
in English patrimonial Germanic words, such as in happy and hot, is always pronounced.
Spanish hierba, pronounced /ˈʝeɾ.ba/ reflects the
diphthongization of Latin short ĕ to ie [i̯e], with the expected consonantization
of an initial [i̯] to [ʝ] ([j] in some dialects in some contexts). Sometimes one
hears this word pronounced [i.ˈeɾ.ba] (or even [ˈi̯eɾ.ba]), which seems to be nothing
but a spelling pronunciation based on mistaken assumptions. There is an alternative
spelling for this word (same pronunciation), namely yerba. This spelling is most commonly used in collocations such as yerba buena, a perennial herb of North America (same in English, since it
is a 19th century borrowing from Spanish, as we will see later on), and
yerba mate or yerba maté, another name for maté, an Andean plant that is used in infusions
(the name comes from the Quechua word mati;
in English it is called yerba maté and the Latin botanical name is ilex paraguariensis).
Some dialects
of Spanish do not use the word hierba
for the meaning ‘grass’, preferring alternatives such as pasto, lit. ‘pasture’, grama,
lit. a type of grass, and césped, lit.
‘lawn’. In some countries and among some people the word hierba is used to refer to marijuana, much like grass used to have that meaning in English.
[1] There
are two ways to spell this word in English and supposedly each spelling
corresponds to a different meaning or usage, though that is probably not widely
known. OALD explains the supposed difference between especially and specially,
one that is probably rather artificial to most English speakers: “Especially
usually means ‘particularly’: She loves
all sports, especially swimming. It is not placed first in a sentence: I especially like sweet things [OK]. *Especially I like sweet things [not OK].
Specially usually means ‘for a
particular purpose’ and is often followed by a past participle, such as designed, developed or made: a course specially designed to meet your
needs, She has her clothes specially
made in Paris. In BrE, especially
and specially are often used in the
same way and it can be hard to hear the difference when people speak. Specially is less formal: I bought this especially/specially for you.
It is especially/specially important to
remember this.
[ii] «Las Indias» by user Maulucioni, derived from
image by user Deepak, Wikipedia en español. Disponible bajo la licencia Dominio
público vía Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Las_Indias.png
[iii] «CaribbeanIslandGroups». Publicado bajo la
licencia Dominio público vía Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CaribbeanIslandGroups.png
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