Posted by Victor Mair
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69884&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=spinach-indian-interlude
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69884
[This is a guest post by Gábor Parti]
It seems that
paalak goes back to Sanskrit, Monier-Williams gives
paalakyaa as "Beta bengalensis" (1st column, middle of the
page), but I found that the botanical identiications in MW are often dubious. MW also indicates his source as Car(aka), which looks like it refers to the Ayurvedic text of
Caraka Samhita.
Beta bengalensis Roxb. is now idenified with the common beet,
Beta vulgaris L., which grows in India and all of temperate Europe, and it is in the same familiy as spinach (
Amaranthaceae), and beet leaves are also edible.
Wikipedia
says that "the ancestor of all current beet cultivars is the sea beet", which then
supplies this introduction: "The sea beet,
Beta vulgaris subsp. maritima (L.) Arcangeli. is an Old World perennial plant with edible leaves, leading to the common name
wild spinach." So far so good.
Spinach is not native in India, so it seems plausible that the word for a plant with edible leaves (some beet) later also pointed to another very similar plant with edible leaves. Would be nice if we knew when spinach became widespread on the subcontinent. Since this plant (both plants) were common and widespread very early on, it is harder to trace their "home", and also the words.
By the way, it is often the case the many words that are initially traced back to Sanskrit are in fact loans from Dravidian languages!, especially those that mark tropical plants native to South India, e.g.
, ela 'cardamom', and I also saw this claim about
tulsi 'basil'. But here I did not find any evidence of this in dictionaries; Tamil and other Dravidian words for spinach are markedy different (cf.
Dravidian etymological dictionary) …until I found this Telugu
entry about
pālakūra,
pālāku for spinach. But since I am not really an expert in this, every assumption beyond this is pure conjecture. However, I even found an online discussion about this specific question on
Reddit, but this seems to be the same pro-Dravida team that would like to see every Sanskrit word to turn out to be Tamil/Dravidian in origin, so, who knows. And there is also a
Kannada pālakye. It would be good to ask a real Dravidologist.
Results for spinach/beet/paalakyaa in the
Comparative Indo-Aryan dictionary show a
pālaṅka,
pālaṅkya form that is the suggestion for Chinese
菠薐 bōléng on Wiktionary
. What do you think? Is this what you are after? [VHM: These are questions we will pursue intensively in future posts.]
It seems to me that the etymology of
paalak takes us back to India but no further; I could not find cognate candidates in the few Iranian dictionaries I have of Sogdian or Middle Persian (but these are very concise and limited). Dari and Kashmiri have
paalak but these are probably just loaned from Hindustani, and Persian uses the etymon of the English word, the same that you mentioned that people usually trace back to a PIE root (cf.
etymonline and the
references on Wiktionary). And the early Arabic and Western borrowings of the Persian *
ispināg shows to me this was the word for spinach in the Iranian speaking heartland.
So in short, these two probably have separate origins with separate meanings, and then the Indic paalak(ya) went through a semantic extension/broadening. But again, we should ask a proper Indologist/Dravidian expert, and also an Iranist; my knowledge here is very limited.
Selected readings
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