18.08.24: follow-up; food and drink [10]; how to eat a banana in Latin

I’ve no plans to go into such detail with every fruit listed in the original post! Most of the fruits are “uncontroversial” – the Romans had lots of grapes – but there are, however, some which are not Classical Latin and the origins of which are quite interesting to research.

[i] mūsa, -ae [1/f]: (Mediaeval) banana (from Arabic وْزَة mawza)

From “The journey of Symon Semeonis from Ireland to the Holy Land” (MS written some time between 1335 and 1352), the author using a Latinised version of the Arabic word.

Nōn enim sunt arboris pōma, sed cujusdam herbe [= CL herbae] in altum crēscentis ad modum arboris, que [= CL quae] mūsa appellātur. │ They're not fruit from a tree, but from a plant that grows up in the manner of the trees, called the musa.

It’s no different from the way in which English can adopt words with minimal or no change. The word ‘robot’, for example, comes from Czech, and the same criteria apply when considering its legitimacy. The word has an attested source:

‘robot’ from Czech robota (servitude) “Coined in the 1920 science-fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek) … taken into English without change.”

There is a difference; had ‘robot’ simply remained as a one-off term used in that play, it would never have been considered a valid English word. However, it spread into other works of Science-Fiction and into technology. Consequently, it falls under the category of common parlance and is listed in the dictionaries. That criterion does not apply to Latin:

[ii] Pliny the Elder in Naturalis Historia refers to the fruit commonly found among the Sydraci, a tribe in India:

Folium ālās avium imitātur, longitūdine trium cubitōrum, lātitūdine duum. Frūctum cortice ēmittit admīrābilem sūcī dulcēdine, ut ūnō quaternōs satiet. Arborī nōmen pālae, pōmō ariēnae. │ Its leaf copies the wings of birds, being three cubits in length and two in width. It produces its fruit from its bark, and the fruit is astonishing in its sweetness, one being enough for four people. The name of the tree is the pala, and ariena that of the fruit.

He is referring to the banana tree and its fruit.

ariēna, -ae [1/f]: banana

pāla, -ae [1/f] [i] shovel; spade [ii] banana tree

These words – pāla with the meaning of banana tree – are only attested once in all of the CL literature i.e. in the extract above from Pliny the Elder. It’s been suggested that the word ariēna is from an unattested adjective namely ariēnus (ram-shaped) from the well-attested ariēs, arietis [3/m]: ram, referring to the shape of the fruit. It’s a good example of what the origin of the word might be, but it isn’t certain.

Where a dictionary states that a word is “rare” or with “two or three citations”, it indicates that it may be attested only once or in very few documents. A single attestation, however, is considered sufficient.