chocolate

[Victor Steinbok]

Damn it! I did not intend to send that message! It was very much work in
progress, in the first stages, really. I did want to point to the book,
but the rest of the comments so far are just jumbled garbage. It's the
kind of work-product notes that should never be seen.

PLEASE IGNORE MY ORIGINAL MESSAGE. (I will reproduce the two links.)

I've already encountered a number of English spellings that are not
covered in the OED. I believe I figured out the source for "jocolat" and
other j variations, but the Latin is actually remarkably
consistent--there are only about four or five words involved and only a
couple of them are interchangeable. It could be one of the Latin cases
where words that start out as close synonyms or alternatives end up
diverging in meaning.

There is a difference in 17thcent. Latin texts between Chocolate,
Chucalate, Succolata, Cacao/Caccao/Cacoa and Jacao, much of it related
to pharmacopoeia of cocoa. Chocolata does not actually fit in that
scheme, which is what makes it so interesting. And all of these (and
more) occur in French and German texts as well (long before the final -t
and the final -d stabilized, respectively). Xocolate does show up, but
almost entirely in Catalan dictionaries, plays by Soler and Baro
(presumably in Catalan) and a 19th century Arabic dictionary
(transcribed rather than script), and one French-Portuguese dictionary.
[OK, I am understating the number of authors, but it's all in
Catalan--one is even a Catalan translation of Turgenev.] Only two of the
online sources are pre-1800 and one is Catalan and the other Portuguese.

Here are the two books I was going to mention. The first is the volume
Chocolata Inda, the second is on tobacco, but includes several mentions
of Chocolata, Coffi, Thee and Cahvvæ (not even sure what the latter is).
http://books.google.com/books?id=uSk7AAAAcAAJ

http://books.google.com/books?id=CHBAAAAAcAAJ

At some point, I will actually try to make sense of all this, unless
someone beats me to it.

     VS-)

On 3/25/2010 11:04 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 10:44 PM, Wilson Gray<hwgray at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>
>> FWIW, I've long been under the impression that the original
>> transliteration was _x_ocolatl. Cf. W:pedia:
>>
>> The Nahuatl word _xocolatl_ means bitter water.
>>
>> As for spellings with j-, in early modern Spanish, _x_ was /S/. /S/
>> later became /j/. Cf. Castilian M=C3=A9jico vs. Mexican M=C3=A9xico, whic=
>>
> h
>
>> maintains the antique spelling with _x_.
>>
>
> Which is why the French call the Knight of the Doleful Countenance "Don
> Quichotte".
>
> m a m
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org