by Kevin Burton
Most of the English words borrowed from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, have ended up on our dinner plates.
The “tl” consonant cluster common in that language is a mouthful for English speakers, but judging from these words, what a tasty mouthful!
We started our Nahuatl feast Friday, and continue today with a word with two distinct, and Merriam-Webster says correct, pronunciations:
Tomato
People who love red-sauce Italian food might be surprised to learn that the tomato is fruit whose wild ancestors originated in South America, likely in what is today Peru and Ecuador. And yes, it’s a fruit. In fact, the definition of tomato lists the part that we eat as a “berry,” which may come as a surprise.
The word tomato started out as tomate in English around 1600, from the Spanish word that came from the Nahuatl tomatl. Since the potato had been introduced some decades earlier, the word tomate evolved to mimic the form of potato—hence the spelling tomato.
Interestingly, before the Spanish-influenced name of the fruit took hold, a name translated from French, love apple, was also used for what we now call the tomato.
Because tomato came from Spanish, it was initially pronounced \tuh-MAH-toh\ in English. But the older term potato influenced the pronunciation of the word just as it had influenced its spelling, and the long a commonly used in potato began to be used for tomato (\tuh-MAY-toh). Today the \tuh-MAH-toh\ pronunciation is still used by some in Britain and by some people in New England, but both are considered correct.
Chili
Chili comes straight from the Nahuatl word chīlli, meaning “hot pepper.” The word has common variants spelled chilli and chile and entered English through Spanish in the mid-1600s. The reason we call these fruits that are native to the Americas “peppers” is that their spicy taste resembled that of the black pepper made from ground and dried peppercorns imported to Europe from India since Roman times. We may also associate chili peppers with Asian cooking, but it was Portuguese traders who brought the plants east as part of the spice trade of the 1500s.
The spicy stew made with beans, minced chilis, and usually meat called chili con carne came much later, in the mid-1800s, and is now also called just plain chili.
The country called Chile (often spelled Chili in English until the 20th century) in South America is probably not named for the hot pepper. Nahuatl is not the indigenous language of peoples who lived so far south, and though there are several theories about the origin of the country’s name, none of them are spicy.
Ocelot
An ocelot is a small jaguar native to the Americas, from southern Texas to northern Argentina. Slightly larger than a domestic cat and about the size of a bobcat, it has distinctive dots and stripes on its fur like those of a jaguar. Appropriately, its name comes from the Nahuatl word for “jaguar,” ōcēlōtl. In this case, the word went from Spanish to French before coming to English.
The words jaguar and cougar both come from another indigenous language, Tupi, spoken in Brazil.
Chipotle
Most words that have come to English from Nahuatl date back to shortly after the period of Spanish colonization in the Americas, but chipotle is different. Probably because U.S. interest in Mexican cuisine is a 20th-century phenomenon, chipotle wasn’t used in English until the 1920s. Its definition is “a smoked and usually dried jalapeño pepper,” and jalapeño, meaning “from or of the Mexican city Jalapa” is also of Nahuatl origin (and the name of the city is sometimes spelled Xalapa). Jalapeño didn’t enter English until the 1930s.
Chipotle comes from the Nahuatl word that gave us chili combined with pōctli which means “smoke” or “something smoked.”
Mesquite
Die-hard pitmasters have a lot of options when it comes to wood for smoking and grilling, from hickory and maple to apple and oak. Mesquite is another, and is usually recommended for beef, especially brisket, game, and other meats that can hold their own alongside its intense, unique flavor. The word mesquite can refer to any of several spiny leguminous trees of the southwestern United States and Mexico, and comes (via American Spanish) from the Nahuatl word mizquitl.
Tamale
If you’re not familiar with tamales—cornmeal dough that is rolled with ground meat or beans seasoned usually with chili, then wrapped usually in corn husks, and steamed—then boy howdy there’s no time like the present. But in the meantime you can at least get familiar with the word tamale, which comes ultimately (via Mexican Spanish) from the Nahuatl tamalli, meaning “cornmeal dough.” Like tomatoes and avocados, corn originated in the Americas, and is believed to have been first domesticated by Indigenous peoples in what is now southern Mexico about 10,000 years ago, from two closely related species of the wild grass teosinte. Teosinte comes from the Nahuatl teōcintli, from teōtl (meaning “god”) + cintli (“dried ears of maize”).
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