The growth of Language 525 
language with difficulty, might readily mistake for the real meaning. 
Thus the Hindu practice of burning a wife upon the funeral pyre 
of her husband is called in English suttee, this word being in fact but 
the phonetic spelling of the Sanskrit satz, “a virtuous woman,” and 
passing into its English meaning because formerly the practice of self- 
immolation by a wife was regarded as the highest virtue. 
The name of the potato exhibits greater variety. The English 
name was borrowed from the Spanish patata, which was itself 
borrowed from a native word for the yam in the dialect of Hayti. 
The potato appeared early in Italy, for the mariners of Genoa actively 
followed the footsteps of their countryman Columbus in exploring 
America. In Italian generally the form patata has survived. The 
tubers, however, also suggested a resemblance to truffles, so that the 
Italian word tartufolo, a diminutive of the Italian modification of 
the Latin terrae tuber was applied to them. In the language of the 
Rhaetian Alps this word appears as tartufel. From there it seems 
to have passed into Germany where potatoes were not cultivated 
extensively till the eighteenth century, and tartufel has in later 
times through some popular etymology been metamorphosed into 
Kartoffel. In France the shape of the tubers suggested the name 
of earth-apple (pomme de terre), a name also adopted in Dutch 
(aard-appel), while dialectically in German a form Grumbire appears, 
which is a corruption of Grund-birne, ‘ground pear’.” Here half the 
languages have adopted the original American word for an allied 
plant, while others have adopted a name originating in some more 
or less fanciful resemblance discovered in the tubers; the Germans 
alone in Western Europe, failing to see any meaning in their borrowed 
name, have modified it almost beyond recognition. To this English 
supplies an exact parallel in parsnep which, though representing 
the Latin pastindca through the Old French pastenaque, was first 
assimilated in the last syllable to the nep of turnep (pasneppe in 
Elizabethan English), and later had an r introduced into the first 
syllable, apparently on the analogy of parsley. 
The turkey on the other hand seems never to be found with its 
original American name. In England, as the name implies, the 
turkey cock was regarded as having come from the land of the Turks. 
The bird no doubt spread over Europe from the Italian seaports. 
The mistake, therefore, was not unnatural, seeing that these towns 
conducted a great trade with the Levant, while the fact that America 
when first discovered was identified with India helped to increase 
the confusion. Thus in French the cog dInde was abbreviated to 
d Inde much as turkey cock was to turkey; the next stage was to 
identify dinde as a feminine word and create a new dindon on the 
analogy of chapon as the masculine. In Italian the name gallo 
1 Kluge, Etymologisches Wérterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Strassburg), 8.v. Kartoffel. 
