Rice Rice Baby
A Linguistic Journey to the Roots of Rice
The word for rice today in European languages is quite recognisable with each other. English rice sounds the same as German Reis, French and Italian have riz and riso. Russian рис is shared with Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian and Ukranian.
All these go back to late Latin risus from the classical Latin oryza. It this earlier Latin form that gives the genus to the common species of domesticated rice oryza sativa. Here the species name sativa simply means cultivated (‘serō’ means I sow, sat- ‘I sowed‘ — satīva, ‘the thing I sowed’ ). Not unlike the humble Pastinaca sativa for parsnip, or Lactuca sativa for lettuce.
Spanish and Portuguese arroz are slightly more exotic, having come from Arabic أَرُزّ (aruzz, “rice”) which shares the same Ancient Greek root, ὄρυζα (óruza), as Latin. The Greeks probably had that word from a forgotten Ancient Persian word. The middle Persian word برنج (birinj) also gives the rice word to other central Asian languages, including modern pirinç. ]
We can see from this linguistic progression that rice clearly came from the East, and from here the linguistic variety flourishes. Unlike on the European continent where rice shares a common root, on the Indian subcontinent we find at least ten very distinct words for rice: Chawal in Hindi (चावल), Maithili, and Urdu (چاول) and Punjabi (ਚੌਲ), (ধান ) Dhan in Bengali and Assamese and ଧାନ (Dhana) in Odia, भात (Bhaat) in Marathi, బియ్యం (Biyyam) in Telugu, ચોખુ (Chokhu), ಅಕ್ಕಿ (Akki) in Kannada and চাও (Chao) in Manipuri. Tamil அரிசி (Arisi) potentially shares the common root with the Ancient Greek ὄρυζα (óruza), but in Sinhalese, rice is බඩ (Bada).
Not only do the words for rice flourish as we head East across Asia, but distinctions start needing to be drawn between cooked rice that is ready to eat, and uncooked rice. The word for uncooked rice in Tagalog is bigás and beras in Malay and Indonesian, from the same Austronesian root.
Cooking turns it into kanin in the Philippines and nasi in Indonesia or Malaysia. Frying (goreng) rice gives us nasi goreng, which gets borrowed back to English via the menu. It’s also important to distiguish beras, the rice grain, from padi, the rice plant, which is also borrowed back into English as ‘paddy’ — the field where the rice grown. (Meaning a ‘rice paddy’ is literally a ‘rice rice’).
Looking further back, we find these linguistic distinctions in Chinese, where rice was first cultivated ten-thousand years ago. The character 飯 (fàn) refers to the cooked grain — or generally now, any cooked meal. While pronunciation varies, this gives us the same word in Japanese (with multiple readings), Korean 밥반 (bap ban), and Vietnamese (phan).
The Chinese character for uncooked rice 米 (mǐ) is the uncooked rice, also gives equivalent Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese words, as does 稻 (dào) — the Chinese character for the OG cultivated rice plant — Oryza sativa. The way we talk about ‘rice’ in English is crude compared to the linguistic variations available!
To finish off, I should acknowledge that this story started off from an article by Tjahaja — comparing Japanese Sushi with Korean kimbap (김밥).
While the article focused on the foods, Tjahaja mentions that kimbap is made with a type of seaweed called 김 (kim). Put it together with the cooked rice’s 밥 (bap) and we have delicious Korean ‘seaweed-rice’. Which certainly sounds more appetising on a menu than ‘sour’ which is more direct translation of the Japanese menu-word, Sushi (寿司)!
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