How a Mistake Gave Us the Word 'Cherry'

[Lerc]

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.

[b_emery]

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;

[sjcsjc]

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

[dang]

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".)

[ajacksified]

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

[equalunique]

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.

[Lxr]

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

[acqq]

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 )

[danans]

> 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...

[pbhjpbhj]

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).

[fred256]

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

[greeneggs]

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)

[taco_emoji]

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.

[Kuiper]

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.

[rudolf0]

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

[vijayp]

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

[aplusbi]

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.

[tetromino_]

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).

[ksb]

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

[huffmsa]

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.

[luck_fenovo]

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").

[Mikeb85]

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

[danieltillett]

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

[arnarbi]

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

[nivla]

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

[Chinjut]

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".

[mixmastamyk]

Curiously it's manga in Portuguese I believe.

[DonGuero]

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

[careersuicide]

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

[failrate]

William the Concord?

[skookumchuck]

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

[jameshart]

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

[scholia]

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 ;-)

[Buge]

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

>unless we start hacking away them.

[iLemming]

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

[mixmastamyk]

Abogado (lawyer) --> avocado.

[kboukadoum]

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

[grzm]

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

[imh]

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