“A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey”

June 26, 2009 at 8:36 pm (World Languages)
Tags: Honey, Honig, Indo-Europeans, Madhu, Miel, Word Origins

“A land flowing with milk and honey” (The Holy Bible, Exodus 3.8)

Madhuparka is a sweet honey and curd drink used in Hindu Vivaham marriage ceremonies.  Madhu, it seems, means honey or nectar in Sanskrit and the word has an intriguing past that language experts believe is a clue to the origins of so many of the world’s languages.

Honey collecting had been a practice in prehistoric times in the Near East as well having been depicted in Egyptian tombs of the third millenium B.C.  It is thought that this ancient food, and the words that name it, are evidence of a single people’s having issued their word for honey and it evolved as they spread out over the continents.  By comparing many of the world’s words for the sweet goodness, it is easy to come to this belief.

“The Sanskrit word madhu and the Chinese word myit are related to the mit of the Indo-Europeans (Aryans), the medhu of the Slavs, and the mead of the English,” writes Reay Tannahill in Food in History.

Following from this, Latin’s honey is mel. In Ancient Greek it’s meli. Gothic had milith which was replaced by the Old English hunig.

Food in History, essentially a materialist view of human progress, relates that:

“Honey is almost pure sugar, and ferments very readily.  If the debris of a honeycomb were left neglected in water for a few days – perhaps to soak out the last drops of syrup – the result would be a delicious and mildly intoxicating liquid.  Honey ale – generally known as mead – was to be popular for thousands of years, particularly in countries where the grape did not grow and grain was not widely cultivated.  In England, mead did not lose its hold until the monasteries – where bees were kept for their wax (used to make votive candles) and the honey was only a commercially valuable byproduct – were dissolved in the sixteenth century.”

But wait, milith or mel didn’t abandon the English ship for good.  Joseph T. Shipley’s Dictionary of Word Origins claims that the pejorative phrase mealy-mouthed is our mel or milith of ancient times.  Meal-mouthed, used to have a more positive sense – ‘honey-mouthed.’  More surprising to me, however, is the origins of mildew:  it comes from the Anglo-Saxon word meledeaw, or honey-dew, now only a melon.

As Shipley argues, the term honey-dew, or mildew, used for mold is at least partially explained by the idea that if you call a disgusting phenomenon by a pleasant name, it becomes a bit more tolerable.

Still not impressed?  With the help of my Concise Dictionary of 26 Languages, check out this list of words of the golden syrupy goo:

Following the ‘M’ trail you have: English – mead; French & Spanish – miel; Italian – miele; Portuguese – mel; Rumanian – miere; Polish – miód; Czech & Serbo-Croatian – med; Hungarian – méz; Indonesian – mada; Russian – myot; Greek – me’li; Hawaiian – meli; Estonian – mesi; Mandarin Chinese – mi; Cantonese – mat; Hindi – madhu; and for good measure Esperanto – mielo.

I’m not sure how the ‘H’ sound came into being but this modest list is yet fascinating:  English – honey; German & Yiddish – honig; Dutch – honing; Swedish – honung; Danish & Norwegian – honning; Finnish – hunaja; and Japanese – hachimitsu.

A few divergent languages, however, include:  Arabic – aasal; Swahili – asali; Hebrew – dvasch; and Turkish – bal.  I don’t know enough about these language to conjecture upon the origins of their expressions.

Nevertheless and for fun, we’ll end with Shipley’s Dictionary of Word Origins as he quotes the ending of Kubla Khan with the lines:

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.