one really complicated problem!
Posted by Catherine Cartwright Jones on January 25, 2000 at 15:47:29:
In Reply to: Henna, by any other name...... posted by Michelle on January 25, 2000 at 13:59:41:
been working on it ... this gets really tricky, especially before 500
BCE!
Ugaritic: kpr (about 3000 BCE)
Canaanite: kna or chna (about 1500 BCE)
Hebrew: chna (modern: henna)
Nubian: khofreh
Ancient Egyptian: puker (possibly also kiki)
Arabic-Egyptian: Tamrabene and alcana, alkhenna, al-Henna
Provence French: quene
Bible: camphire
Ancient Greek: Kupros
Modern Greek: keke or kna
somewhere around 700 C.E., when Arabic got written down and spread out
far and fast, "henna" or a close variant of the pronunciation of
henna became standard throughout the Islamic world.
There is a LOT of early language difficulty with figuring out exactly
what plant was meant in which text ... possible variants may include
cyprus and camphor. Henna hangs on the linguistic roots "kpr" from
early Ugaritic, and "kna", the slightly later Canaanite word for
"red". That, and there's some confusion among really early
translators because the young plant looks different from the adult
tree, some places it was valued more for flowers and perfume than dye
.....
Then there's the group of pronunciations from India....
(the problem with spellings from India is that there are MANY
languages and dialects, none of which were written in a roman alphabet
... and various authors translterated the native pronunciations the
best way they could into English. The Mehndi spelling that has become
popular was pretty much unknown in publication before 1960, and then
there was a little 0 over the "n" indicating that there should be an
aspiration between the h and the n. When the body art became popular
in English speaking countries, the book publishers didn't bother with
the little "o" over the n .... which is really needed to indicate that
there is a sort of syllable there. That's why Navneet and so many
other publishers and authors from before 1990 use some spelling
variant of mehandi (not mehndi) ... to more clearly show that there is
in many of the Indian dialects and languages a break between the
first and last syllables of the word.) (note .... me'henna is very,
very near the pronunciation of the medieval Persian word for night of
the henna ... and that's about the time that the night of the henna
tradition may have become popularized in NW India . Henna was
certainly in India earlier, but "night of the henna" doesn't seem to
have been a tradition until the medieval period ... and then coming
in through Afghanistan and Pakistan .... so seems that the linguistic
root of "mehandi" is Persian( from Arabic))
Nepali: Menhedi
Gujurati: Mehandi
18th century Pakistani: Mayendi
? part of NW India: Mehendi
? part of India: Mendeed
? part of India: Menhadi
then, way out there......
Chinese: zhijia hua
and from the West Indes: Reseda, and mignonette
- sorry that went through twice Catherine goofs again 16:12:53 1/25/00
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- And a couple more- Michelle 00:51:23 1/26/00
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- And a couple more- Michelle 00:51:23 1/26/00
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