History of the World in 5 Words

Viktor Tang
Nov 5 · 9 min read

How can one present the history of the world in five words? How can one present it when all the five words are the same? The answer is etymology through time and space.

Disclaimer: this article will trace the origin of some Eastern-European words. If linguistics and/or Eastern Europe is not your cup of tea, you may still consider reading it because it’s funny and interesting, not to mention promising to open new perspectives.

If somebody prefers to talk about Eastern-European cuisine and tends to travel a lot, they can bump into some strange re-occurring words like the above-mentioned tepsi, which is pronounced in various forms, including something that sounds more like [tepshee] (Hungarian). The question is, what forces one to pronounce s instead of sh and vice-versa? Well, it’s not a big surprise considering that the two sounds are formed on almost the same place of the mouth, and we can find examples of it in English dialects just as well as in Afro-Asiatic languages (see Hebrew vs. Arabic).

However at the moment we’re not so much into investigating sound changes, but rather unearthing ancient stories from mere words. Not so fast — you may say. First of all what is this word at all? Let me answer this later, and for now just accept the fact that the word exist and being used quite widely in Eastern Europe.

Somewhere between Mozart and Mussorgsky there’s a small country called Hungary, where they speak a language that has little to do with the surrounding languages. This language will serve as base-camp to our expedition. It’s even called ‘Magyar’ by its speakers to deceive the negligent observers, so keep your eyes open. The Hungarian language arrived to the area of the Central-European lowlands with its damals fierce warrior-nomad people at about 1000 years ago. Spoiler alert: they’re still there! Although they are not so fierce anymore. Anyways, they kept their language and mixed it up with some fancy new loanwords from the surrounding languages. One of those loanwords is tepsi, which means a large, flat, square-shaped pan to fry in the oven.

Hungarian linguists mention that the earliest versions of this word had the s-sound (as opposed to the current standard sh-sound, which they spell with s to confuse you, see?). Hungarian dialects even reserved the original pronunciation in the form of tepszi or tepszia. Note that the orthographic SZ letter combination stands for the s-sound in Hungarian. One can never lower their attention when it comes to Hungarian.

Although the Hungarians rode the horse into their current habitat, they didn’t pull this word out from beneath their saddles, but took it from Ottoman-Turkish. No wonder here, holding a fry pan under the saddle would have been quite an uncomfortable habit.

Instead the Turks, while they also conquered some forts of the Hungarians and occupied quite an area afterwards in the middle of Europe for like 150+ years, they also offered some luxury products on a tray, that one could not find anywhere else. This product, what we can’t live without these days, was considered suspicious that time, and for that reason Hungarians only called it a black soup. Now the world knows it as coffee.

“Rüstü kapucsi, tüstént a kaput!”

— a line from a popular Hungarian lyrics featuring Turkish loanwords.

The Hungarian capital, called Budapest, is an amalgam of two former settlements Buda and Pest (yes, s is still pronounced as sh). Buda had a high-castle, which was also captured by the Ottomans. But this wasn’t their first maneuver. Before that, they had been spent quality time on the Balkans, and that’s how the Serbs and Croatians also took the vessel, tepsi.

That’s why we can find the word in different forms in Hungarian dialects depending from which language directly they borrowed it. Now we know where this word — nobody asked for — comes from. Many etymological dictionaries would even stop here, but we’re about to discover world history which we hardly touched so far. By the way, I mean world history not as a whole, but rather part of it that’s reflected in five word.

It might be obvious for now that the first word I’m talking about is the Hungarian word tepsi, the second one is the Turkish word tepsi, and so on. Now you can forget the weird Hungarian habit of interchanging s with sh, as the Turks know how to use spelling ‘properly’. To pursue our story, we go back to the year C.E. 1070, when a famous book was written about Turkic languages. Meet Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk a.k.a. ديوان لغات الترك. Its writer, Mahmud Kashgari, Uyghur linguist from Baghdad (yeah, that time they had this as a hobby) has done us a huge favor mentioning our precious word.

Uyghur linguist from Baghdad — what are you talkin’ about?!

If you thought that now you can get rid of this impossible story, I have to disappoint you, because the Turks themselves borrowed this word.

In the 10th century, a branch of the Oghuz Turks (who also partially settled in Hungary), called Seljuqs were living their modest life on the margin of the Islamic Empire. Slowly they got more and more contact with the Muslims, and finally their surprisingly named leader, Seljuq embraced Islam, and triggered an avalanche, which resulted in the Seljuq dynasty, the Seljuq Empire, and the sudden spread of Islam among the Turkic peoples.

Now this empire had about 7 seas, seriously, and more or less encompassed the vast territory that has been called Silk Road. Why is it interesting? It’s because the Seljuqs highly appreciated the Arabic and Persian culture, and the only reason they didn’t have sophisticate advanced diplomacy with the Persian Empire is that their empire embraced the complete Persian Empire too. Nevertheless, the Persian culture remained a role model for pretty much all of their affairs, and they tried to adopt everything from it as much as possible, including its institutions and all that they found beneficial. Yes, they found our vessel particularly beneficial. So they took the tepsi, and spread it all across their enormous empire, opening gate to its entering into Eastern Europe.

OK, it may not happened exactly like this, but nevertheless the Persian language also has its own version of tepsi.

Starting with C.E. 642, the Persian territories, which consists roughly of present day Iran, became part of the Caliphate, and the Persians themselves slowly adopted Islam as their religion. In this very area, even in the time of Alexander the Great there has been a vivid commerce just as well as before that time. Having great tradition to do business with the surrounding peoples, the Omayyads continued to do so, and carrying around our tray, the tepsi. Where the tepsi appeared, it immediately became popular. That’s how it entered Greek (ταψί), Albanian, but also reached Macedonian, Bulgarian (тепсия) and Romanian as well. Although the Arabs were not particularly keen on adopting new terms, yet they couldn’t manage to avoid using the pan, and therefore we can find the word in the name of the popular dish called eggplant made in tepsi (تبسي باذنجان — tabsī bādhinjān).

It doesn’t really matter who imported this cooking vessel, the thing is, that these folks were not the ones who invented it, but they bought it from the Chinese.

C.E. 601, the first Chinese rhyme dictionary, the Qieyun (pinyin Qièyùn) was released. Several other releases followed, because Chinese didn’t mind if the poems of the great Chinese poets were articulated properly. The meaning of the rhyme dictionary is that it sorts words not alphabetically or by structure, but rather by pronunciation or phonetically. Ever wondered how can one type Chinese characters into the computer? Holding all Chinese characters, an average sized keyboard wouldn’t be enough. Instead one can simply type the standard pronunciation of the word with Latin characters, and the input method replaces that with the corresponding Chinese character. One such romanisation system is the above mentioned pinyin.

Rhyme dictionaries can be extremely useful if we find ourselves having a desire to know how Chinese language may have sounded in the Middle Ages. Middle Chinese pronunciation can be quite reliably deciphered knowing that rhyme dictionaries sorted words by how they sounded. And that’s how we know that tepsi was pronounced deptsi that time.

Precaution is advised however before we intend to show off our newly mastered Chinese word in front of a beautiful Chinese girl we try to impress, because most likely we’ll face hard times figuring out our victim was not really skilled in Middle Chinese pronunciation distorted by a foreign accent. There’s nothing to worry about though. As an ancient Chinese proverb states:

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

With our sincere regret, the modern Mandarin Chinese language doesn’t really like closed syllables, and therefore it didn’t preserve the dep- part of our word. Instead it uses dié. For that difference it doesn’t harm to know that the Chinese tonal system was developed from eroding final consonants. We’ve lost a final consonant, but won a nice tone. To increase our chances impressing unsuspecting Chinese ladies, we can try pronouncing this word as something like *dietse (diézi). However, I have to confess, that this word left nothing to do with a frying pan and it rather means a plate. A small plate that is.

But how did the small plate turn into a frying pan? First of all, it wasn’t always a small plate or sauce plate.

碟子

The excellence of the Chinese writing system stands in the fact that one does not (really) need to know how to speak Chinese to understand (something from) a Chinese text. That’s because many characters are actually pictures that explain the word. In our case we have actually two words: dep and zi.

The first one is the complex one. Next to it stands a small baby. Literally. Although it’s head became rather angular for now, it must be only to match the screens we tend to stare.

Zi indeed means infant, a picture of a newborn child spreding its hands having relatively large head.

Dep on the other hand consists of several other signs that reflect not only the meaning but the pronunciation as well:

  • 石 is a small rectangular part (bottom) of a ledge or cliff (top).
  • a strange sign 世 (top right), that itself consists of III (3) stroke through: meaning thirty, figuratively a whole era, age, life or generation
  • 木 (bottom right) something that seems like a cypress tree. The meaning ‘generation’ composed with a ‘tree’ sign stands for the new generation of a tree, which is a leaf. Here it refers to the pronunciation, but also reflects the meaning: a leaf shaped stone — a plate or dish.

The smaller one (zi) that is.

No need to mention that the Chinese traditionally craft state-of-the-art clay pots. Later they also used metals to create vessels which were even prettier and more durable. It’s not an accident that the word for ‘tray’ in Arabic literally means Chinese (sīnīyya, cp. Tk sini). According to the Persians though, the Arabs called the plate used for serving the dish or coffee, tabsī or tabasī. And this is the exact meaning that the Turks, especially the Ottoman Turks, spread all across Eastern Europe.

A journey of a thousand miles a frying pan can take

This is how we could excavate history out of just a couple of words, even if all those words were basically the same word, and this is how we arrived from present day Hungary to medieval China and back, touching great emperors, mighty sultans, worldwide trade, high culture and revolutionary cuisine.

The journey of the frying pan is obviously not over yet, solely because in that case Hungarians would also use it in the sense of a serving dish or plate, but instead it has the meaning of a frying pan or baking tray. Its size is also implied being rather big than small. A man having an excepcionally large mouth can be referred to as tepsiszájú, meaning ‘has a mouth of a frying pan’.

The development possibilities are endless, and who knows, maybe another thousand years after it will appear in a completely different language in yet another meaning.

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