IV 



ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORDS CROCUS AND SAFFRON. 



have borrowed this particular word. It is noticeable that in Persian, and Persian 

 alone, are found words both of the KRKM and of the K*KM type. And this 

 is what we should expect, for Persia is the geographical borderland between, 

 the two groups, and in a sense the philological borderland as well, owing to the 

 enormous number of Semitic words in the Persian vocabulary. 



It has been assumed by various German scholars {e.g., Fiirst, Weber, Low, &c), 

 and, seeing that the change of R into a nasal N or M offers no philological 

 impossibility,* it appears probable that the KRKM and K*KM types are not of 

 independent origin, but whichever was first used was imported together with the dye 

 it signified, and altered into the other, either in the mouths of the carrying 

 merchants, or of the races who received both word and dye as foreign goods. 



Crocus is a Latin word borrowed by us in its Latin form without any alteration, 



as the Latin itself is borrowed from the Greek.t and the Greeks in turn received 



their Krdkos, k/doko?, from some Semitic tongue. All inquiry into the history of 



these words is much complicated by the constant confusion which has been made 



between three "totally distinct plants, whose only resemblance is that all three produce 



somewhat similar yellow dyes or drugs. As this confusion appears in their very 



names, and will make constant reference to all three plants necessary, it will be 



well to distinguish them at once. They are : (A.) Crocus sativus, L., Saffron. The 



yellow dye-stuff is obtained from the styles and stigmata, often adulterated with 



the stamens of the flower. As in the case of almost all plants which have been 



cultivated from very ancient times, no form exactly identical with that found in 



cultivation is known anywhere in a wild state, but the five truly wild so-called 



'species,' so nearly allied to it as to be grouped by Mr. Maw as varieties of 



C. sativus,\ range through 35 of longitude, from the Abbruzzi in central Italy 



through south-eastern Italy, Dalmatia, Greece, the Crimea and Asia Minor to 



Kurdistan. It is not improbable that other closely-allied wild forms may yet be 



found in the little-known regions of Persia, Turkestan, and Northern Afghanistan. 



No species of the genus Crocus is indigenous to India or the Himalayas, to 



Arabia, or to Egypt. 



* The following instance of the change of rk into mk, extracted from Beames' Comfort*** Grammar 

 of the Modem Aryan Languages of India, i, 318, may shed some light on the point, although not stnetly 

 parallel as the Sanskrit kunkuma already contains the nasal, and the laws of change in affiliated and cognate 

 languages do not apply to the mispronunciations which often cause words adopted from foreign languages to 

 be altered in the process. Sanskrit ^Z , karkata, 'a craV; Prakrit ^ft , kakkadoj Hindi <*^1TT, 

 kemkadaj Sindhi Hfrf fa^T , kamkidoj Oriya and Bengali cfT^T , *flm**& 



t As to the origin of the less usual Latin form crocum, see below. 



\ C. sativus Cashmerianus, Royle, is merely the plant cultivated in Kashmir. Royle, ///. Htmal, p. 37 1- 



