Indonesian Commodities in the Schlägl Word-List
Medieval European multilingual glossaries frequently include words for Indonesian commodities. In this brief blogpost I’m going to have a quick look at one such glossary — a Latin-Hungarian word-list written in the early fifteenth century. It contains the (as far as I am aware) earliest attestation of the Hungarian names for a small number of Indonesian spices.
The glossary was written in Latin with Hungarian interlinear glosses, and is now kept in Schlägl, Upper Austria (Prämonstratenser Stiftbibliothek, Cod. [88 Cpl. (817) 156A]). It is thus known as the Schlägl word-list (Schlägli Magyar szójegyzék). An edition of the word-list by the Hungarian scholar Szamota István (1) was published in 1894, and the original manuscript has been digitised, although it is inaccessible to most users with the exception of a few published pages (fortunately including the ones of greatest interest to me — see Figure 1 below).
The Indonesian commodities in the word-list are the ones you might expect: cloves and nutmeg. Cloves (Syzygium aromaticum), as you may already know, came from a small number of tiny islands now in the province of North Maluku in eastern Indonesia, and nutmeg (Myristica fragrans) came from the minuscule Banda Islands south of Seram, also in eastern Indonesia. I have highlighted the names for these in Figure 1 and given the transcriptions below. The numbers in brackets refer to the entries in Szamota’s edition (1894:40, 42):
(855) gariofilus — zeg fiw
[…]
(898) muscatũ — zerechen dio
The manuscript’s zeg fiw ‘clove’ corresponds to modern Hungarian szegfű, literally ‘nail grass’, now the word for ‘carnation’. The words for ‘clove’ and ‘carnation’ are the same or similar in lots of languages (cf. Russian гвоздика), perhaps because the scents of cloves and carnations are similar. In modern Hungarian the word for ‘clove’, szegfűszeg, is distinguished from the word for ‘carnation’, szegfű, by the addition of another szeg ‘nail’ (the standard clove metaphor [2]) at the end of the word. Etymologically szegfűszeg is NAIL.GRASS.NAIL, which is rather fun (Figure 2).
Szerecsendió, evidently the same word as the Schlägl word-list’s zerechen dio, is the modern Hungarian for ‘nutmeg’. It comes from the words for ‘Saracen’ or ‘Muslim’ (szerecsen) and ‘walnut’ (dió). It is perhaps unsurprising that these were seen as Muslim commodities: The trade in nutmeg was certainly connected to the expansion of Islam in the Indian Ocean and into eastern Indonesia. By the time the Schlägl word-list was written some of the people of the nutmeg-producing Banda Islands may already have converted to Islam, and, in any case, these Indonesian perfumes and spices came to Europe by way of a number of largely Islamic ports and countries. European Christians knew they were contributing to the wealth of Muslim traders when they bought and consumed them.
NOTES
(1) Hungarian names have the surname first and the given name afterwards. István, the Hungarian form of Stephen/Stephanus, was Szamota’s given name. <sz>, as in Szamota and szerecsen, is pronounced like [s] (as in set).
(2) Cloves are often known by names originally meaning ‘nail’ because in their dried form they look a bit like nails (the iron kind). The English name ‘clove’ (from Old French clou (de girofle) and ultimately from Latin clavus ‘nail’) is an example of this.
LITERATURE
Szamota, István. 1894. A Schlägli magyar szójegyzék. Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia).
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