Taro
This piece appeared on my Patreon account way back in 2022. I thought I’d move it here so that it would be more accessible.
Taro is a tropical root vegetable valued for its large, starchy, edible, somewhat nutritious corm. In the Middle Ages, it was cultivated across much of tropical and subtropical Africa and Asia, and even as far as southern Europe. It crops up in medieval texts in many languages, including Southeast Asian ones. In this post, I’d like to take a brief look at taro, and specifically at the names given to it in island Southeast Asia, so that we can look at some of these medieval references in more detail in the future.
Taro has large sagittate (‘arrowhead-shaped’) leaves, and this has led to an alternative common name: ‘elephant ear’ (Figure 1). This appellation is shared by a number of other arums or aroids with edible roots and sagittate leaves, including giant taro (Alocasia macrorrhizos) and swamp taro (Cyrtosperma merkusii). All three of these plants appeared to have first been cultivated and domesticated in New Guinea several thousand years ago, although true taro — Colocasia esculenta, the subject of this piece — was probably domesticated from wild relatives more than once. This is because there are at least two common forms of taro, and these two forms are distinguished by separate names in many languages worldwide.
Roots and tubers often have very variable names; human beings aren’t particularly choosy about the names they use for a plant if the useful, edible part is buried deep in the ground and doesn’t make it to the surface until harvesting. The English word ‘yam’ is a good example; it can refer to a bewildering range of different species in different contexts and dialects, including sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batata, domesticated in South America), African yams (Dioscorea cayenensis), and Asian yams (Dioscorea alata, D. hispida, D. bulbifera), only some of which are closely related to one another. In supermarkets here in Portugal, taro is usually labelled as inhame, the direct source of the English word ‘yam’ — which almost never refers to taro. Inhame can refer to African and Asian Dioscorea yams as well. The point is: each speech community divides up the root-tuber-corm space differently.
In some Malayo-Polynesian languages we see a distinction between two common types of taro. In Malay/Indonesian, the two relevant words are tales and keladi, the former referring to ‘normal’ taro (Colocasia esculenta) and the latter to a smoother-surfaced and slightly more bitter varietal. The distinction can be found in other languages — in West African Englishes the equivalent of tales is ‘dasheen’ and the equivalent of keladi is ‘eddo’, for example (Figure 2) — and back in the eighteenth century Linnaeus even distinguished the keladi/eddo type as a separate species, Colocasia antiquorum. Both tales and keladi are now considered to be the same species (C. esculenta), though, and even in Malay/Indonesian the distinction between tales and keladi is largely theoretical, with keladi often referring to taro in general.
Tales is an old word, in any case. It appears in a number of early surviving texts from the Indo-Malaysian archipelago in Old Javanese, Malay, and Old Sundanese, and an ancestral form, *tales or *taləs, can be reconstructed to proto-Malayo-Polynesian, the roughly four-thousand-year-old ancestor of most of the languages of the Indo-Malaysian archipelago and Pacific Ocean. Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *tales is also the source of the English word ‘taro’, incidentally, by way of Māori taro and proto-Oceanic *talos. The proto-Malayo-Polynesian form may have come from an Austroasiatic word, by the way: Austroasiatic is a language family now largely restricted to mainland Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, including within it such languages as Khmer, Vietnamese, and Mon. It’s possible that there were Austroasiatic speakers in some of the western parts of the Indo-Malaysian archipelago before Malayo-Polynesian speakers got there.
The origins of keladi are less certain. A protoform, *kaladi, has been reconstructed to proto-Western Malayo-Polynesian, but Western Malayo-Polynesian is no longer considered a valid clade. All the keladi-words are extremely similar to one another, and the form is absent from the languages of eastern Indonesia and the Pacific, so these words could easily have been borrowed. I’ll admit that I’m not familiar enough with the literature to know whether any viable sources have been proposed.
Anyway, like sugar cane and bananas, taro was probably domesticated in New Guinea in prehistory, and like them it was a remarkably widespread plant in Afro-Eurasia in the Middle Ages. In addition to mentions of tales and keladi in medieval Indo-Malaysian texts, there are descriptions of and references to taro under many other names in medieval texts in many other languages, including Chinese and Arabic. Taro was one of the many phenomena that served to link Afro-Eurasia together before the Columbian exchange, and we will certainly look at it in more detail in future posts.
A. J. West — Lisbon, 2022 (posted here 2024).
