Brinjal, Brown Jolly, and Aubergine — Siblings Separated by Centuries

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi. This is Chuba from Sammamish, Washington.

Welcome to the show. What can we do for you today?

Yeah, my question is about the word brinjal.

And this is another word for eggplant, I suppose.

So, specifically when speaking in English, when talking in English, we would always refer to eggplant as brinjal.

It’s spelled B-R-I-N-J-A-L.

And the word for it in Indian languages is all very, very different and is nowhere close to brinjal.

I’ve always thought that it was from the British.

And lo and behold, I found out that the Brits call it aubergine.

So where do you think this word came from?

And it is so prevalent, almost, it looks like it’s prevalent only in India.

Oh, this is very interesting.

So just to recap here, we’re talking about eggplant or aubergine.

And in Indian English, you say brinjal, B-R-I-N-J-A-L.

Yes.

You know, in one of my reference works, this is the CRC, World Dictionary of Medicinal and Poisonous Plants by Umberto Quattrochi.

He has 116 different words for eggplants in India in all the variety of the language.

And a bunch of them are very similar to brinjal.

And this might really surprise you, but aubergine and brinjal come from the same source.

They’re both modifications of an older word.

They have the same root.

They are connected.

So it starts with Sanskrit, as is often the case, where there was a word referring to eggplant that referenced its ability to stop flatulence.

And that was borrowed then from Sanskrit into Persian and then to Arabic and then into Portuguese.

And the Portuguese brought this word or a form of it back to India, back to the subcontinent.

Where it was readopted to refer to eggplant.

So even though it started in the Sanskrit-speaking world, it traveled around the Middle East and into Europe and then came back.

And so you will find forms of the word in almost every Indian language, except for, I think, Sinhala.

Yeah, yeah.

Because I know of at least three or four different Indian words from different languages referring to the plant.

Yeah, yeah.

So there’s a ton.

Many of them are connected.

Even in Italian, the word is melanzana, which means mad apple.

But even that is ultimately a phonetic modification of this same word where the M and the B kind of traded places.

And in the Caribbean, there was, I don’t know if it’s much used today, but the word was modified to sound like brown jolly, the color brown and the happiness jolly.

And it’s just, this word has traveled the world over about a thousand years.

But it really wasn’t until the Portuguese brought this plant to Europe in the Middle Ages that it really then began to spread to the rest of the world and take its name with it.

Interesting. Oh, my goodness.

I never thought it had such a huge history behind it.

Thousands of years. Unbelievable.

One thousand, at least, because Sanskrit is a very old language.

Yeah, that’s right.

And an eggplant does originally come from the Indian subcontinent.

Okay.

That’s really, really interesting.

Yeah, thank you.

All right.

Take care of yourself and call us again sometime, all right?

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, we are delighted to talk to you about whatever words happen in your language, whether it’s English or not, and we’ll see if we can get to the bottom of its histories.

They’re often more connected than you think.

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