Episode 182: World of Confusion

Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 182, World of Confusion.

This time, as we work our way through the story of English, we're going to continue to look at events in the early 1600s.

It was a time when English was starting to spread around the world as speakers searched for new trading partners and new places to settle.

And through that process, English started to become an international language.

But as English speakers encountered people and languages from faraway places, they sometimes became confused.

And that confusion and uncertainty shaped the English language during this period.

and it still shapes the language to this day.

So we'll look at how confusion played a role in the development of English in the early modern period.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com, and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes at patreon.com/slash historyofenglish.

Now last time we looked at the publication of the King James Bible in 1611 and we examined how that translation impacted the English language.

We also looked at the discovery of the telescope and the beginning of the scientific revolution.

Well, at the same time that those events were taking place in Europe, there were several notable developments in North America.

So, this time, we're going to backtrack and look at those events.

And then we're going to briefly turn our attention to England, and finally, we're going to skip over to India to look at the first important English contact with that region.

So, the focus of this episode will be global as the English language started to make its way around around the world in the early part of the 1600s.

But let's begin with European interest in North America.

As we saw a couple of episodes back, England established its first permanent settlement at Jamestown in 1607.

But the French were already exploring the regions further north in modern-day Canada.

And during the summer of 1608, the French explorer, Samuel de Champlain, surveyed the St.

Lawrence River in that region.

He was looking for a place to build a settlement that could be used to buy furs and pelts from the indigenous people who lived there.

Prior to this point, the French had established a few settlements in the region as part of the fur trade, but those settlements had been temporary and seasonal.

Now, merchants back in France wanted a permanent trading post in the region, and Champlain was hired to look for a good spot.

He sailed up the St.

Lawrence in June and July, and he eventually reached a point where the wide river narrowed significantly.

Champlain chose that spot for the settlement, and he gave the settlement a name based on a local Algonquin word.

In Algonquin, the place where a river narrows was called a Quebec.

So this settlement where the St.

Lawrence River narrowed was called Quebec.

It became Quebec City, and of course it also gave its name to the Canadian province of Quebec.

A few decades later, a settlement was established further upriver at a place called Mont Royal, a name which eventually became contracted into the modern name Montreal.

This part of North America was known as New France at the time, and these early settlements helped to secure the French presence in the region.

And of course, it also secured the French language in the region.

Now I mentioned that Champlain's expeditions were related to the fur trade, and that's an important fact in itself.

The early European explorers had hoped to find large deposits of gold and silver in North America, but they didn't really find those.

Despite the lack of precious metals, they did find Native Americans who were eager to trade furs and pelts and other animal skins.

And those furs and skins ended up being some of the most profitable exports from North America in those early years.

They were in very high demand in Europe, and that's why the French were so interested in the region.

The Europeans were particularly interested in beaver furs.

They used them to make felt for hats.

In fact, the word beaver became a sling term for hats in England in the 1600s.

Europeans also bought deer skins and buckskins.

Buckskin was used to make riding pants or riding trousers.

In fact, Buckskins were so heavily traded and bartered in colonial America that they became a common unit of exchange in some regions.

And many scholars think the trade in buckskins and the use of buckskins as a unit of exchange gave American English the word buck for a type of currency, specifically a slang term for a dollar.

So if you have five bucks in your pocket, you don't have deerskins, but you have a word that goes back to the trade in deerskins.

I should note that the word buck as a slang term for a dollar isn't actually found in in writing until the 1800s, but in the early 1700s we do have references to bucks as a short form of buckskins, and we find that term being used as a type of currency.

For example, in the 1730s we have a trader's complaint about an employee who sold, quote, only eight bucks worth of goods, end quote.

It was a specific reference to buckskins, so that's led some scholars to conclude that the use of the word buck in that way led to the modern slang term buck for a dollar.

There's also a popular notion that buckskin gave us the term buck naked for someone who isn't wearing any clothes.

Of course, a buck would be naked in a sense if its hide was removed, but there's another theory that connects buckskins to the term buck naked.

Buckskins could be turned into a type of leather which was brown.

So the word buckskin came to refer to something that was brown or leather colored.

And from there some early European settlers called the indigenous people they encountered buckskins because they had brown skin.

And many of those people wore very little clothing in the warmer months compared to the Europeans.

So it's believed that the term buckskin naked or buck naked originally referred to the indigenous people of the region who wore very little or no clothing.

Again, this this is a bit of conjecture because the origin of the term buck naked isn't clearly documented.

But this is where we encounter a little bit of linguistic confusion.

Whatever the original connection was between the words buck and naked, it was lost on later English speakers.

They didn't associate being naked with bucks, but they did associate it with a person's bare bottom.

So for many people, the term buck naked gradually became butt naked, and that version of the term is still commonly heard today.

When a word gets altered or reworked in that way due to a common misinterpretation of the original term or because people mishear the original term, it's sometimes called an egg corn, E-G-G-C-O-R-N.

That's a linguistic term for that type of mistake.

It's one of many different situations where speakers get it wrong, and those situations are a fertile source of linguistic change.

Generally speaking, there are two ways to think about linguistic confusion.

It can occur when people say something incorrectly, and it can occur when people hear something incorrectly.

In the first instance, people sometimes misspeak or misstate something or use the wrong words when they're speaking.

A classic example of that is a malopropism, where someone confuses one word for another.

We've encountered malapropisms before in the writings of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare used them as comic relief to show that a character was a bit dull.

So he would have a character say reprehend when he meant to say represent.

That's simply a case of misspeaking or saying something wrong.

But we also have cases where we hear something wrong.

A speaker says one thing, but we hear or interpret the word as something else.

Sometimes it's just a mistake that we make as an individual, or perhaps it's a mistake that's made among a small group of people.

When the mistake is limited in that way to a small group of people, it's sometimes called an egg corn.

That's a modern term coined in the early 2000s.

It's based on an example of a woman who misheard the word acorn, A-C-O-R-N, as egg corn, which is a plausible alternative because acorns are sort of shaped like eggs, and they're the nuts or grains of an oak tree in the same way that the word corn can refer to a type of grain.

So the person misheard or misinterpreted the word acorn as egg corn.

It was a mistake that was grounded in a sound bit of logic, and that's what happens when some people misinterpret buck naked as butt naked.

But sometimes this type of mistake becomes so common and so widespread among a group of speakers that the incorrect version of the word becomes the dominant form of the word over time, and it effectively replaces the original form of the word.

When that happens, it's called a folk etymology.

That's a related but slightly different phenomenon, and we will encounter an example of that type of confusion in a moment.

But for now, but naked hasn't completely replaced buck naked, so we can think of them as competing variations, and we can also think of them as terms that apparently have their origin in the early fur and pelt trade in North America.

Now as I noted, Samuel de Champlain founded the settlement that became Quebec City in 1608, but he continued to return to the region in subsequent years.

In fact, the following year he returned to explore the tributaries of the St.

Lawrence River, and during that expedition he discovered a large lake located in what is today the northern part of New York State.

Of course, that lake was named after him and became known as Lake Champlain.

Now, around the same time that Champlain came across that lake in the summer of 1609, another European explorer was in the same general region, but he wasn't looking to trade furs or deerskins.

He was actually looking for a waterway across the continent that would take him to the Pacific, and then to Asia.

His name was Henry Hudson, and he was obsessed with the idea that there might be a shortcut to the East Indies.

In fact, in the prior couple of years he had attempted two different expeditions across northern Europe in search of a shortcut.

If one could be found, it would allow sailors to avoid sailing all the way around Africa to get to Asia.

But Hudson couldn't find a passage across northern Europe, and his English financing started to dry up.

But then a group of Dutch merchants associated with the Dutch East India Company stepped in.

They also wanted to find a shortcut to Asia, and they knew that Hudson had been looking for one.

So in 1609, the Dutch agreed to finance another expedition to look for a shortcut across northern Europe.

But Hudson had given up on the idea of a European shortcut.

He didn't think there was one to be found there.

Instead, he wanted to look for one in North America.

Even though his Dutch financiers insisted that he go east, he ignored their instructions, and he decided to go west instead.

In September, Hudson and his crew reached a small bay along the northern coastline of North America, between the New English colony at Jamestown in the south and the French settlement at Quebec in the north.

The bay was the area we know today as New York Harbor.

When he arrived at the bay, he noticed that a large river emptied into the bay, so he headed up the river.

Of course, that's the river that bears his name today, the Hudson River.

He traveled as far as he could go up the river until the waterway was no longer navigable.

A small settlement was established at that point during a later expedition, and it eventually led to the modern-day city of Albany, the capital of New York State.

But for Henry Hudson, that point was as far as he could go, so he turned around and headed back down the river.

One of the crew members, named Robert Jewett, kept a journal of the voyage, and as the ship approached the mouth of the river, he made note of the landmass that lay on the eastern side of the river.

He said that the indigenous people of the region called the area on the eastern side Maunahata.

He probably didn't realize that the land on the eastern side was actually a long, narrow island.

Of course, Maunahata eventually became Manhattan, the center of New York City.

The original meaning of Manahata is disputed by modern scholars.

Some think it meant island in the native Algonquin language, but others think it meant the place where one gathers the wood to make bows, as in bows and arrows.

At any rate, the name of Manhattan is recorded for the first time here in Robert Jewett's journal of this voyage in 1609.

Now having once again failed to find a short cut to Asia, Henry Hudson returned to Europe.

In fact, he didn't even bother returning to the Netherlands to inform his Dutch financiers about his expedition.

Remember that he wasn't supposed to be in North America anyway.

He was supposed to go the other way and look for a passage across northern Europe.

Well, the Dutch soon found out the details of Hudson's journey, but rather than being disappointed, they were actually excited about what they heard.

They appeared to have given up on the idea of finding a shortcut to Asia, but Hudson had established that there was a vast unclaimed region between the English territory of Jamestown in the south and the French territory of New France in the north.

And much like the French, the Dutch realized that the region Hudson explored would be a perfect place to establish a settlement to buy furs.

And this is important because it was the basis of the Dutch colony that was soon established in the region called New Netherland.

And of course, that island of Manahata eventually became a Dutch settlement called New Amsterdam.

The English later renamed it New York when they took it from the Dutch in the mid-1600s, but for now, the important point is that the Dutch presence in the region was really sparked by Henry Hudson's expedition in 1609.

And since the Dutch language took root there, it eventually had an influence on early American English.

And we'll look at that Dutch influence a little more closely in an upcoming episode.

Now, one other quick note about Henry Hudson before we move on.

After he returned to England in 1609, the English authorities also took note of his records, and they decided to fund another expedition to look for a shortcut across North America.

The following year, Hudson made another trip.

This time he went further north and explored the strait in Canada that bears his name to this day, the Hudson Strait.

That took him to the massive bay in northern Canada that also bears his name, Hudson Bay.

But it still didn't provide a route to the Pacific.

His progress was also limited by extremely cold weather and limited supplies.

His crew finally had enough of his short cut obsession, and a short time later there was a mutiny.

Hudson was placed on a small boat and left to die in the open vastness of northern Canada, and he was never seen again.

But his legacy survives in the names of the river, the strait, and the bay that were all named after him.

Now Now keeping the story in North America, let's briefly turn our attention down to Jamestown.

At this point, the English settlement there was barely hanging on.

It was kept going thanks to limited cooperation with some of the local indigenous tribes, and also thanks to the occasional supply ships that came from England.

In the late spring of 1609, nine more supply ships left England for Jamestown.

In addition to supplies, the ships also also contained more settlers.

But along the way, the fleet encountered a storm, probably a hurricane.

And in the storm, one of the ships called the Sea Venture became separated from the rest of the fleet.

The remaining ships assumed that the Sea Venture was lost at sea, so they continued on to Jamestown.

Well, as it turned out, the Sea Venture eventually ran aground in the Bermuda Islands off the eastern coast of North America.

All of the passengers on the ship survived, and over the following months the passengers managed to use the plentiful wood on the islands to build two new boats, and about a year later they were able to leave Bermuda and set sail for Jamestown.

Again, the settlers at Jamestown assumed that the ship and all its passengers had been lost at sea, so the settlers must have been astonished when they looked on the horizon one day and saw two boats approaching, and the boats carried all of the passengers that they thought had drowned a year before.

Now, the story of this voyage is important for a couple of reasons.

First of all, the English were apparently unaware of Bermuda prior to that.

So, having discovered the islands, they soon began to settle there.

A few years later, the Virginia Company responsible for Jamestown established a permanent settlement in Bermuda.

So, the English settlement in Bermuda actually predates the arrival of the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock.

And in fact, within a couple of decades, Bermuda had around 2,000 settlers, which was almost as many as were living in the entire Virginia colony.

In addition to planting the English language in Bermuda, the tale of the ship that ran aground there in 1609 is also notable for another reason.

It's widely believed that accounts of that ship's experience provided the inspiration for a play by William Shakespeare, which appeared a short time later.

That play was called The Tempest.

It begins with a shipwreck and is set on a mostly deserted island.

It was one of Shakespeare's final plays, and I'll have more to say about it later in the episode.

Also, one other quick note about that ship that ran aground in Bermuda.

One of its passengers was named Stephen Hopkins.

After making his way to Jamestown with the other passengers, he remained there for a while and then returned to England.

But that wasn't his last voyage across the Atlantic.

A few years later, he was on board the Mayflower as it carried the pilgrims to North America, and he was in fact one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact.

So some of these people made history in multiple ways.

Now the year after that shipwreck in Bermuda, three more supply ships arrived in Jamestown.

They were organized and led by the newly appointed governor of Virginia named Thomas West, who was the Baron Delaware.

That peerage title Delaware literally meant of the Ware or of the Ware.

It's a title that had Norman origins, and soon after he arrived in Virginia, the large bay to the north and east of the Chesapeake Bay was named after him.

It became known as the Delaware Bay.

Soon after that, the large river that feeds the bay was also named the Delaware.

And a few years later, the state that was formed on the western bank of the bay was also called Delaware.

So that commonplace name in the region is ultimately named after the title of Thomas West, the Baron Delaware.

Now Lord Delaware basically took over for John Smith, who had been the de facto leader for several months.

But Smith had been injured in a gunpowder explosion and was forced to return to England.

Lord Delaware was brought in to succeed Smith, and his new reinforcements from England England were desperately needed in Jamestown.

Only about sixty settlers remained out of the five hundred or so that had made their way there over the prior three years.

The rest had died from starvation, disease, or attacks by local indigenous tribes.

Delaware's reinforcements helped to keep the settlement going, though people continued to die.

Members of some of the friendly tribes nearby had taught John Smith how to plant and grow maize, also known as Indian corn, or simply corn today in North America.

That knowledge also proved to be vital in sustaining the colony.

And around that same time, one of the settlers named John Rolfe began to experiment with different strains of tobacco to produce a plant that people would want to smoke in Europe.

Europeans were starting to pick up the smoking habit, or addiction, if you prefer, but they preferred the plant variety that was grown in the Caribbean and South America.

The native Virginia tobacco had an unpleasant flavor that most Europeans didn't care for.

So Rolfe imported some seeds from Trinidad and Venezuela, and he produced a new strain that flourished in the Virginia soil and had a flavor that Europeans loved.

The tobacco quickly became a popular cash crop in Virginia.

So John Rolfe was the father of the tobacco industry in North America.

Rolfe is also notable for another reason.

He soon married Pocahontas, the daughter of the local Palatin tribal chief.

I mentioned her a couple of episodes back.

The modern legends associate her with John Smith, but it was John Rolfe who married her.

The circumstances surrounding this marriage are a bit murky.

She was actually taken hostage by the English prior to the marriage, so there's some evidence that she might have been coerced.

At any rate, her father, the Palatin chief, consented to the marriage, and it actually led to a period of relative peace between the English and the Palatins for a few years.

Around the time of that marriage, John Smith returned to North America from England.

But this time he decided to explore the northern coastline, north of the area that Henry Hudson had explored a few years earlier, so north of modern-day New York.

Smith was looking for a place to build a settlement in the region.

He kept an account of the expedition and made a map of the region, and both were published a short time later.

The account is notable because Smith referred to the region as New England, and that's the first known use of that term.

It appears to be a term that Smith coined.

Of course, it was in keeping with other Europeans who loved to designate places in the Americas as the new version of some familiar place back home.

As I noted a few moments ago, the French territory in North America was called Nouvelle-France, France, or New France.

The Spanish called their territory in the New World Nueva España, or New Spain.

The Dutch territory, south of New England, was called New Netherland, and the Dutch settlement that was eventually established on the southern tip of Manhattan was called New Amsterdam.

Around the same time, King James authorized a Scottish settlement in the eastern part of modern day Canada, and that settlement became known as Nova Scotia, which was Latin for New Scotland.

And again, John Smith gave us the term New England for the region that bears that name today.

I should note that Smith returned to England a short time later, and he presented a draft of his map to King James's son, Charles.

Of course, Charles was the future King Charles I, but at this point he was simply the prince.

For most of the place names on the map, Smith had inserted the words used by the indigenous people in the region, but he told Charles that he was free to change any of the names to English terms if he preferred, and Charles did just that.

Several of the terms Charles coined still survive, like the Charles River, named after himself, and Cape Elizabeth in modern-day Maine, named after Charles's sister Elizabeth, and Cape Anne in modern-day Massachusetts, named after Charles's mother, Anne, who was also the Queen.

Charles also changed the name of a region in modern-day Massachusetts, which the local indigenous people called Accomac.

Charles changed the name to Plymouth after the port city in southern England, and when the pilgrims arrived there a few years later, they kept the name.

Now, during this period, John Smith continued to write about his experiences in Virginia as well as in New England.

His account of New England gave us one of the first recorded uses of the word moose in English.

It's an algonquin word used by the indigenous people who lived in the Northeast.

His account of Virginia from this period also included lots of new words that were recorded for the first time.

For example, the account includes the word toadfish, which was a type of puffer fish.

It's a term that was apparently coined by the original settlers in Virginia.

Smith's writings also contain the first recorded use of the word persimmon for a type of fruit found in North America.

It's another algonquin word.

Smith is also the first to record the word pwn for a type of bread made out of corn flour or flour from maize.

Again, it's an algonquin word.

While we don't use that word pwn much today, it does survive in the term corn pone, literally a type of cornbread.

But that word corn pone is better known as a disparaging term for things associated with the rural South or or rural America in general.

So if someone refers to corn pone humor, it means country humor or humor associated with rural matters.

Again, it goes back to this Native American word pone for a type of bread eaten by the indigenous tribes in Virginia.

Smith also gave us the first or one of the first recorded uses of the Algonquin word moccasins for a type of shoe worn by the Native people of Virginia.

The word was later extended to a type of snake in the 1700s, though the connection between the shoe and the snake is unknown, and there's some suggestion that the name of the snake was originally a completely different but similar sounding word.

So again, there may be some linguistic confusion that gave us moccasin shoes and moccasin snakes.

Smith is also one of the first people to record the word opossum for a type of marsupial found in North America.

Again, it's a native Algonquin word.

Of course, today, most people just call it opossum.

The O part at the front isn't pronounced much these days.

And we have evidence that the O was being dropped from the very beginning.

In the early 1600s, we find the word written both ways, as both opossum and possum.

So English speakers have apparently always found that O at the front to be a little odd.

If you're curious about that O and O possum, it actually comes from the original construction of the word within the Algonquin language.

The word op meant white, and the word awesome meant a dog or a dog-like animal.

So an op awesome was literally a white dog.

But when pronounced in English, the O was pronounced as a completely separate syllable, as opossum, rather than op awesom.

That left the o sound hanging out at the front, which was apparently awkward for English speakers, so they tended to drop it altogether.

Now this is actually another example of linguistic confusion.

It's what happens when a multisyllable word or two adjacent words are divided in the wrong place.

It's a phenomenon that linguists call meta-analysis or rebracketing or re-segmentation or misdivision.

So there are lots of fancy terms for it, but I prefer the term misdivision because that really describes what's happening here.

Again, speakers simply divide up a word in the wrong place.

We've actually encountered this before in the podcast.

In earlier episodes, we saw that the articles a and an sometimes created confusion and caused misdivision before other words.

So there was a type of snake called a natter,

and people referred to it as as a natter.

But sometimes they pronounced it as an adder.

So rather than inserting a brief pause after the a, they put the pause after the in.

It was an easy mistake to make, because the article an is used before a word that begins with a vowel.

So an adder made just as much sense as a natter.

It just depends on where you put the pause.

And thanks to that misdivision, the word natter lost its its in over time, and it became the modern word adder.

Through that same process, a nompur became an umpire,

and a naperon became an apron.

And a similar type of misdivision caused an op awesom to become an o possum, and from there it was easy for speakers to simply drop the o at the front, thereby giving us the modern word possum.

These types of linguistic changes are common in the language, but as we can see, they're heightened when people encounter words from other languages.

In those cases, people have to analyze and assimilate those foreign words into English, and they sometimes make mistakes as they try to do that.

Now, again, words like opossum and moccasin were introduced into English by John Smith.

His description of Virginia also contains a description of how the local people prepared their food.

In one passage he wrote, quote,

Their fish and flesh they boil either very tenderly, or boil it so long on hurdles over the fire, or else after the Spanish fashion, putting it on a spit, they turn first the one side, then the other, till it be as dry as their jerkin beef in the West Indies, that they may keep it a month or more without putrefying.

Now I mention that passage because it contains the first recorded English reference to jerkin' beef in the West Indies.

Of course, that term survived in Jamaican cookery as the word jerk for a type of marinated meat that's been smoked, cured, or barbecued.

The word can actually be traced back to the Incas in South America.

The Spanish took the word from there to the Caribbean, and it was from that Caribbean usage that John Smith and other English settlers brought the word into English.

And when John Smith made that first English reference to jerkin beef, he was giving us an early form of the term beef jerky, which later became a popular meal or snack in North America.

So American beef jerky and Jamaican jerk chicken or jerk pork have a common linguistic connection through this word with Incan origins.

Now earlier I mentioned the trade in furs and pelts that was so prominent during this early period of European contact.

Well, the indigenous people of Virginia wore a type of robe or covering made from furs called a match core in the local Algonquin language.

Again, John Smith provided the first recorded use of that term in English.

English settlers soon applied that term to a type of coat made from furs, and through that process, the native word match core eventually became match coat in English.

It's a term that was more common in colonial and early American English.

Now I mention this word match coat because it's a good example of that phenomenon I mentioned earlier called folk etymology.

Earlier we saw that some people convert buck naked into butt naked because they don't really know what the word buck has to do with being naked, so but naked sounds similar and makes more sense.

Since that term is a relatively recent term and is somewhat limited in English, it's called called an egg corn.

But sometimes this type of mistake becomes so common and so widespread in the language that it replaces the original word altogether.

And when that happens, it's called folk etymology.

Again, this phenomenon usually happens when a word is borrowed into English and the sound and meaning of the word resembles a separate object and separate word that already exists in English.

So people associate those two things and they eventually anglicize that borrowed word so that it more closely resembles the English word.

In the case of matchcoat, we had the Algonquin word match core for a type of clothing worn on the upper body, and English already had the word coat for a type of clothing that covered the upper body, so people naturally associated those two things, and over time, the word match core became match coat.

That's a classic example of folk etymology.

Folk etymology is an old phenomenon.

It has a long history in English, and it continues to this day.

Another good example is the French word crevice, which meant crab.

It referred to a type of crustacean found in rivers and creeks in England and later in North America.

And since those rivers and creeks also contained fish, people associated that word crevice with fish, and over time the word was anglicized from crevice to crayfish, and in North America it became crawfish.

But again, that's an example of how folk etymology shapes the language over time.

Now, speaking of crayfish or crawfish, we know that the early settlers in Jamestown also encountered them because we have a reference to them in a separate account written by Alexander Whitaker.

He was the Reverend in Jamestown, and in fact, he converted Pocahontas to Christianity while she was living in Jamestown.

In his description of the region, Whitaker wrote about catching fish and other creatures in the rivers and creeks.

He wrote, quote, I have caught with mine angle, pike, carp, eel, crayfish, and the taup, or little turtle, end quote.

So Whitaker caught crayfish and lots of other creatures in the rivers and creeks around Jamestown.

Now I mention that passage because it contains the first recorded reference to another term, a turup, which Whitaker described as a little turtle.

It was a local Algonquin word for a snapping turtle, and it's notable because turup gradually evolved into the word terapin.

The word terrapin took its modern form by the end of the century.

But that same passage is interesting for another reason.

When Whitaker described a turup or terrapin as a little turtle, he was using the word turtle in a brand new way.

Traditionally, a turtle wasn't a reptile that lived inside of a shell.

It was actually a bird, a turtle dove, like in the Twelve Days of Christmas, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Well, sometimes the dove part of turtle dove was dropped, and the birds were simply referred to as turtles.

So how did the word turtle come to refer to these slow, shell-covered reptiles?

Well, the answer is another bit of linguistic confusion.

During the Middle English period, the Old English words for the reptiles gradually fell out of use.

That included words like venucha and birdling.

In their place, English speakers adopted the word tortoise from Latin.

They also borrowed the French version of that word, which was tortu.

Both versions were common in early modern English, but at some point around the current point in our story, English speakers started to be influenced by that word turtle for a type of bird, and they started to change the pronunciation of that French word tortu into turtle.

It was another case where a familiar English word was substituted for a similar sounding loanword.

And thanks to that substitution, those reptiles became known as turtles.

So there was a period of time when the word turtle could refer to either a turtle dove or a tortoise.

But over time, the word became mostly restricted to the reptile.

So in modern English, we have the Algonquin word terrapin, the Latin word tortoise, and the word turtle.

In modern usage, the word tortoise refers to the variety that lives on land, and the word terrapin refers to the variety that lives in fresh water.

In Britain, the word turtle is largely restricted to the variety that lives in the sea, but in American English, the word turtle has a broader meaning and is more of a catch-all term that can refer to any variety of the reptile.

Apparently, Australian English is trending in the direction of American English in the way it uses the word turtle.

But the point is that these distinctions developed after the early 1600s when these three separate terms came into use.

As I noted, the word turtle was just starting to make this transition from bird to reptile in the early 1600s.

Reverend Whitaker's use of the word that way was one of the earliest recorded cases, but the Oxford English Dictionary actually cites another instance in the prior year, 1612.

and that's the earliest known use of the word turtle for a shell-covered reptile.

and that citation occurs in another interesting book.

It was a book composed by another settler at Jamestown named William Strachey.

He composed a book about his experiences in Virginia called The History of Travel into Virginia Britannia.

Among other features, the book included a dictionary of about 400 Algonquin words used by the indigenous people who lived around Jamestown.

One of those words was tukupek, which he defined as, quote, a sea turtle.

And that's the first recorded use of the word turtle in its modern reptilian sense.

Strachey's account also contains the first recorded use of the Algonquin word pohickory for a type of milky liquid made from the nuts of a tree that was common in the area.

Over time, the word pohickory was shortened to hickory and was used to refer to the nuts themselves, so they were called hickory nuts.

And from there, the word was applied to the tree that produced those nuts.

So the name of the hickory tree is derived from an algonquin word recorded for the first time in Strachey's account of Virginia.

His account also contained the first use of the Algonquin word tomahawk for a type of weapon resembling a small axe.

In later Australian English, the first part of tomahawk was treated as the name Tommy, and it produced the term Tommy Axe, and sometimes simply Tommy for a small axe.

But again, that's a case of linguistic confusion.

Later English speakers in Australia were a little confused by that Native American word tomahawk, so they altered it to the more familiar English name Tommy.

Now again, those terms are found for the first time in William Strachey's account of Virginia.

As I noted, Strachey lived at Jamestown for a brief period, but he's also important important to our story for another reason.

He was one of the passengers on that supply ship that ran aground in Bermuda, before the passengers were able to build new boats and sail on to Jamestown.

Well, a few weeks after arriving in Jamestown, Strachey wrote a letter back to England describing the near disaster that occurred in Bermuda.

There's evidence that the letter was circulated among members of the Virginia Company back in England, and other accounts of the shipwreck also began to appear in England a short time later.

There seems to have been a great deal of interest in this story at the time, and it's widely believed that a copy of Strachey's letter made its way to William Shakespeare, or at least that Shakespeare heard about the contents of the letter from someone else.

Though there's no way to know for certain, it appears that the letter inspired at least parts of a new Shakespeare play called The Tempest.

The play was apparently composed a short time after that letter arrived in England, sometime in 1610 or early 1611.

It was certainly completed by the end of 1611 because surviving documents indicate that the play was performed before the royal court in November of that year.

The play is one of Shakespeare's more popular plays from the latter part of his career, and it opens with a ship being tossed around in a tempest or storm that causes it to run aground on a mostly deserted island.

The big giveaway that this passage was inspired by the Bermuda story is a line where Shakespeare writes that the ship came to rest in, quote, the still vexed Bermuthis, end quote.

Bermouthes is a made-up name that appears to be based on the name Bermudas, which was a common name for Bermuda at the time.

Now I'm not going to go through the whole play, but the story centers around the deposed Duke of Milan who had fled to this island after being deposed.

After making his way to the island, he studies magic, and through his wizardry, he creates the storm and causes a ship to run aground on the island.

He wants the ship to become stranded on the island because it contains his brother who deposed him.

So the tempest and the shipwreck are part of a larger plan for revenge against his usurping brother.

The story takes place entirely on the island, and it features a plot to kill the king of Naples, who's also a passenger on the ship, as well as a separate plot to kill the deposed Duke himself.

There's also a romance between the deposed Duke's daughter, who lives with him on the island, and the king's son, who is a passenger on the ship.

It's actually one of the few Shakespeare plays that's completely original.

Most of his plays were based on other stories that he reworked, but this one appears to have been entirely the product of his imagination.

The popularity of the play has caused a few of the phrases used in it to pass into general English usage.

For example, the term Brave New World is recorded for the first time in the play.

In the 1930s, a writer named Aldous Huxley composed a satirical novel called Brave New World, based on that phrase used in the Tempest, and from there the phrase passed into widespread use in English.

The play also gave us the phrase the past is prologue.

It means that current events are shaped by the past.

It was a line that was added to the entrance of the National Archive in Washington, D.C.

in the 1930s, and that probably contributed to its spread within modern English.

The play also gives us the first recorded use of the term sea change to mean a significant change or alteration.

And the play also gives us the first known use of the term strange bedfellows to mean a surprising alliance between two different people or things.

Today we hear it a lot in the phrase, politics makes strange bedfellows, but it's ultimately a term that can be traced back to the tempest.

And in an important scene in the play where the deposed Duke's daughter and the king's son are attending a makeshift mask or dance with the other passengers, the Duke interrupts the festivities to bring them to an end with a passage in which he says, quote, these our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air, end quote.

So here we have the term thin air, which appears to be a term that Shakespeare coined.

And a few years earlier, in Othello, Shakespeare was the first known person to use the phrase go, vanish into air.

So we have Othello's vanish into air and the Tempest's melted into thin air.

It wasn't until the 1800s that these two Shakespearean phrases were put together to give us the modern blended form, to vanish into thin air.

Perhaps that was the result of some confusion, or perhaps it was intentional.

But either way, if you say that something vanished into thin air, it appears that you're using a phrase derived from those two Shakespeare plays.

In that same passage where the usurped Duke says that these actors were all spirits and melted into thin air, he concludes the speech by saying,

And like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack rack behind.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Now that line is the source of the modern phrase, the stuff that dreams are made of.

But note that the original line in the Tempest is, We are such stuff as dreams are made on,

not of.

As I noted in earlier episodes, during the early modern period, many prepositions didn't have the same precise meaning that they have today.

So they could be used in ways that we don't use them today, especially in phrases like that.

So in many of these earlier works, we find these types of phrases where it seems like the wrong preposition was used.

It's part of what gives Shakespeare's language its unique feel.

For example, a few lines later in the same play, we find the line, we were dead of sleep.

Now today, we would probably say that we were dead from sleep.

But But again, prepositions could be used in different ways back then.

Also, note something else about that line.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, or dreams are made of.

Whichever preposition you use there, it's at the end of the line.

And supposedly, you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition.

You're supposed to say something like, we are such stuff as of which dreams are made, or something like that.

Of course that sounds awkward because English doesn't really work that way.

As Shakespeare shows us, English has ended sentences with a preposition for many centuries.

The modern prohibition against ending sentences with a preposition largely comes from an English poet and playwright named John Dryden, who formulated the arbitrary rule in the late 1600s.

Though he didn't state his reasons, he was obsessed with Latin and thought that English should try to imitate Latin as much as possible.

And since you can't end a sentence with a preposition in Latin, Dryden apparently thought English should follow the same rule.

And interestingly, when Dryden formulated that rule in 1672, he specifically cited a line in a play by Ben Johnson which he found objectionable.

The play was called Catiline His Conspiracy, and the line read, quote, The bodies that those souls were frighted from, end quote.

And I mentioned that play because it was composed around the same time as The Tempest.

So both Shakespeare and Johnson sometimes ended sentences with a preposition, because pretty much everyone else did.

That's simply the way English worked and still works today.

Unfortunately, Dryden's artificial rule only created confusion in the language, and it was a rule that many people failed to adhere to, or it was a rule to which many people failed to adhere.

And so some modern grammarians said, what are we doing this for?

Or for what are we doing this?

They said, look, it's an arbitrary rule that we have to put up with, or it's an arbitrary rule up with which we have to put.

So most of them decided that it was a rule that we needed to get rid of, or it was a rule of which we needed to get rid.

Anyway, for that reason, the rule has fallen out of favor in recent years.

And today, most grammarians say that it's perfectly fine to end a sentence with a preposition.

And I guess all of that gives us something to think about, or something about which to think.

The point is that linguistic confusion usually occurs by honest mistake, but sometimes it's forced upon us.

Now, as I noted, Shakespeare's play The Tempest was apparently composed in late 1610 or 1611.

And around that same general time frame, it appears that he composed another play called The Winter's Tale.

This play is of interest to some fans, but it isn't one of his most popular plays, so it hasn't had much of an impact on the language.

It does contain the phrase, as white as driven snow, which is considered to be an early version of the phrase, as pure as the driven snow.

So that phrase is often attributed to Shakespeare.

But beyond that, the play hasn't had much of an influence on the English language we speak today.

Now one last note about English drama before we move on.

We just saw how John Dryden and others tried to change the English language later in the century because they thought it should be more like Latin.

But not everyone shared that sentiment.

In fact, in the early 1600s, there was already an emerging view that English was just as good as Latin and it was perfectly fine the way it was.

And that was a relatively new opinion.

Back in episode 147, which was set in the mid-1500s, I described how writers of that period thought that English was a rude and rustic language, inferior to Latin and ancient Greek, and even inferior to French, which was still a prominent language in England and much of Europe.

But by the early 1600s, people had gained confidence in English, and that old perception had started to change.

And according to some writers of the period, it had changed in large part due to the way the language had been used on the stages of the London theaters over the intervening decades.

That sentiment is captured in a work by a playwright and actor named Thomas Haywood, which was published in 1612, around the same time that the Tempest appeared.

The work was called An Apology for Actors, and in one of the passages of the book, Haywood described how English drama had changed the perception of the language.

He specifically referenced how playing, which meant acting, had elevated the language.

He wrote, quote,

Our English tongue, which hath been the most harsh, uneven, and broken language of the world, part Dutch, part Irish, Saxon, Scotch, Welsh, and indeed a gallimofre of many, but perfect in none, is now by this secondary means of playing continually refined, every writer striving in himself to add a new flourish unto it, so that in process, from the most most rude and unpolished tongue, it has grown to a most perfect and composed language, and many excellent workers and elaborate poems writ in the same, that many nations grow enamored of our tongue, before despised.

So that passage shows that drama and the London stage changed the perception of English during the late 1500s and early 1600s.

And even if John Dryden Dryden and others never really felt that same level of confidence in their native language, a lot of other people did.

And the days of apologizing for English were largely in the past.

Now, so far, our story of English has taken us from the British Isles to North America and even to Bermuda.

But in the same year that Thomas Haywood was writing about the new perception of English, the language secured a foothold in a new continent.

In 1612, the English East India Company established its first trading post in India.

Now, the English had actually arrived there four years earlier in 1608, but they ran into roadblocks as they tried to deal with the local authorities.

The first English ship arrived in Surat on the western coast of India in that year.

Its captain was William Hawkins.

He worked for the East India Company, which had been established in 1600, to trade with parts of Asia.

When Hawkins arrived at Surat in 1608, he became the first commander of the English East India Company to set foot on Indian soil.

The company wanted to establish a trading post in Surat because Indian goods like pepper and indigo were harvested and produced and came on the market at random times, and the company needed someone on the ground who could buy those goods when they were available, otherwise the company would miss out or be forced to pay a much higher price.

So, the company needed buyers on the ground and a warehouse to store the goods until they could be picked up and brought back to England.

The problem is that the English couldn't just put a trading post anywhere they wanted.

India was governed by the very powerful Mughal Empire.

So, the East India Company had to obtain permission from the Mughal authorities in order to establish a trading post there, and that permission was hard to come by.

The power of the Mughal rulers is still reflected in our language to day.

The word Mughal originally referred to the rulers of India, but over the course of the sixteen hundreds the word started to acquire a more general sense as a powerful leader.

And by the late 1600s the word was sometimes being used in that more general sense to refer to a powerful business leader.

And it survives with that sense to day as the word mogul, as in a business mogul or media mogul.

Moghul is just a slightly altered form of mogul.

So the English had to convince the Indian authorities to allow a trading post to be built, and the East India Company finally received permission to build a trading post in Shurat around the current point in our overall story in the year 1612.

And this is an important development in our story because it marks the first direct and regular contact between the English and the inhabitants of India.

And from this date, we can start to identify words that passed from Indian languages directly into English on a regular basis.

Now before I go any further, I should probably discuss the linguistic situation in India because it's a bit complicated.

There are hundreds of languages in India.

The precise number varies and depends on factors like the fine distinction between a dialect and language.

But generally speaking, most of the languages in the northern half of India are part of the Indo-European language family.

And the languages in the southern part of India are part of a separate language family called the Dravidian languages.

When the original Indo-Europeans arrived in northern India about 4,000 years ago, their language spread throughout the northern part of the subcontinent, but it never reached the far south.

Of course, Sanskrit evolved out of that original Indo-European language, and many many ancient texts were written in that language.

Today, Hindi is the dominant Indo-European language in northern India, and since India was part of the British Empire, it has two official languages today, Hindi and English.

Now, the dominant religion of India is Hindu, but during the British colonial period, the majority of the population in the northwestern part of the colony was Muslim, so after World War II, that region was separated from India and became Pakistan.

And in that region, the dominant language is an Indo-European language called Urdu.

It's closely related to Hindi and is also spoken in parts of India.

But again, it's the dominant language in Pakistan.

So today, Pakistan also has two official languages, Urdu and English.

And I mentioned this history because English speakers had contact with both regions from the early 1600s.

And since since Hindi and Urdu have many similar features, it isn't always clear which language provided particular loanwords to English.

As I noted, Hindi and Urdu are Indo-European languages, so they're actually distant relatives of English.

They're all Indo-European, so they all share a common ancestry.

But England and the Indian subcontinent were located at opposite ends of the Indo-European world.

So words from India rarely made their way into English prior to the current point in our story.

But despite that distance, a few Indian words did make their way to English prior to the 1600s.

So I want to conclude this episode by looking at the words from India that can be identified in English up to the year 1612 when English traders arrived in India.

Many of those early Indian words are associated with commodities that originated in India.

In earlier centuries, those commodities were traded along the famous Silk Road, which took them eastward to China and westward to Persia and the Mediterranean.

And from the Mediterranean, some of those commodities made their way to northern Europe.

For example, the word ginger probably originated in the Dravidian languages of southern India.

Ginger made its way to Europe in the early Middle Ages, and an early form of the word is found in Old English.

It's probably the oldest surviving English word that originated in India.

In the 1300s, the word rice also made its way to English via those old trading routes.

Rice is apparently derived from a Sanskrit word.

Together with those products, early English speakers probably heard about a faraway place called India, so it probably isn't surprising that we find the word Indian in documents from the 1300s.

It's derived from the name of the Indus River in India.

The place names India and Indies are first recorded a couple of centuries later in the 1500s, but they were probably around in the language before that.

By the 1500s, Europeans had started to sail around Africa and reach India directly by ship.

The Portuguese were the first to do that, and those European intermediaries brought those Indian goods and some of those local words back to Europe.

So a few more words from India can be found in the 1500s.

That's when we find the word Mughal recorded for the first time in regard to the rulers of India.

The word Raja also appeared.

It originally referred to an Indian king or prince.

As we'll see in the next episode, a lot of words associated with fabrics and clothing came from India due to the trade in Indian fabrics and dyes.

An early example of those loan words is the word calico, which is recorded in English in the mid-1500s.

It's actually the name of a city on the southwestern coast of India that was known as Calicut in English.

Its modern name is more like Collicode.

The name of the city was used to refer to a type of cotton cloth sold there, known as calico cloth.

In England, the cloth was sometimes called calico for short, and the word calico still refers to a type of cloth, but in the late 1700s, a printed or colored form of the cloth was exported from England to the United States, and as a result, American English started to use the word calico to refer to the colored patterns associated with that cloth.

So American English sometimes uses the word calico to refer to a type of color pattern, specifically a tricolor pattern consisting of white, black, and orange.

So it's common to refer to cats with that color fur as calico cats.

Sometimes horses with a multicolored coat are called calico horses.

But again, the word calico goes back to a type of cloth produced in India, and the word has been around in English since the 1500s.

The word mango is also found in English in the late 1500s.

The fruit was grown in India, and the name mango comes from a Dravidian language in southern India.

It passed into English via Portuguese, which was essentially the lingua franca of traders in India at the time, since Portugal had dominated the early European trade there.

Though the word mango is found in English in the late 1500s, it's only found in descriptions of the fruit which one would find if one travelled to India.

The fruit itself wasn't common in England because it took so long to transport the fruit by ship that it would rot along the way.

But a pickled form of mango could be transported, and pickled mango became very popular in England in the 1700s.

In fact, it was so popular, the word mango became synonymous with pickling.

Sometimes a pickled cucumber or other vegetable or fruit was called a mango.

That usage was transferred to the U.S., and in some parts of the U.S.

today, a green pepper is called a mango because it was once common to pickle green peppers, and for that reason they were called mango peppers, or simply mangoes.

Now referring to a pickled cucumber or green pepper as a mango is another case of linguistic confusion, and it occurred because the word preceded the fruit into England.

So there was confusion as to exactly what mango meant.

When pickled mangoes arrived, it wasn't clear if mango referred to the fruit or the fact that it was pickled.

When people assumed that it meant pickled, it was applied to other fruits and vegetables, only to create further confusion when actual fresh mangoes arrived in later centuries.

By that point the word was being applied to a variety of pickled fruits and vegetables.

But gradually the confusion was resolved, and the original meaning of the word mango as a kind of fruit was restored.

But that's a good example of how contact with a new culture can create uncertainty and confusion in the language.

Another word that passed from the Dravidian languages of southern India to Portuguese and then to English in the 1500s was the word curry.

It referred to a dish consisting of meat, vegetables, or fish cooked in a sauce, flavored with spices, and served with rice.

Of course, the word is still common today, especially in the UK, where Indian cuisine became very popular due to the colonial connections.

And here's one that might surprise you.

The name China is actually an Indian word.

Well, in a way.

I mentioned this in one of the earlier episodes about Shakespeare because he was one of the first people to use the word China in an English document.

The older name for China in much of Europe was Cathay, which came from Persian.

But the modern name China originated in India, where it's first recorded in Sanskrit.

The name probably comes from the Qin dynasty that once ruled ancient China, but the word itself was apparently coined in India, and eventually made its way to England in the late 1500s.

By the way, the Chinese call their country Zhunggua, which means middle kingdom.

At least that's the Mandarin form of the name.

And speaking of Mandarin, that's another term that apparently came from Sanskrit in India.

Sanskrit originally used the word Mandarin to refer to a type of Indian official, and from there the word spread throughout Southeast Asia.

Again, it was the Portuguese who picked up the word when they arrived in the region, and they were the first to apply it to Chinese officials.

From there the word was extended to the dialect or manner of speech used by Chinese officials in and around Beijing in northern China.

And today the word is used in the West to refer to the standard Chinese dialect or language.

In fact, the first English reference to the Mandarin tongue, meaning the official language of the Chinese court, was in the first decade decade of the 1600s.

And speaking of the 1600s, the year 1600 is when we find the first recorded use of the word punch in the sense of a drink, usually a concoction served at parties.

The origin of this word is usually attributed to India and specifically a Sanskrit word that meant five nectars, because it was usually made with five ingredients, water, fruit juice, sugar, spices, and some type of wine or spirits.

That would make the word punch cognate with the English word five.

The original Indo-European word for five began with a P sound, as reflected in the Greek word penta, which survives in words like pentagram and pentagon.

Punch reflects the Sanskrit form of that word, which also began with a P sound.

Of course, as we saw in the early episodes of the podcast, the P sound became an F sound in the Germanic languages, thereby producing the native English word five.

But I should note that even though the word punch apparently came from Europeans who were trading with India in the late 1500s, no drink with that name is known to have existed in India at the time, so some scholars have speculated that European traders derived that word from some other unknown source.

In the first decade or so of the 1600s, we find a few other Indian words recorded in English, presumably picked up by traders in the region.

Those include pilau or pilo, a dish cooked in stock with spices, usually mixed with meat and other ingredients.

That word has survived in a slightly different form in some parts of the American South.

There you might encounter a rice dish called purlo, which is ultimately derived from the Indian dish.

Another variation of the same Indian word is pilaf, as in rice pilaf, which is rice cooked in stock with spices and other flavorings.

Around the time that the English East India Company arrived in Surat in 1612, we find the first recorded use of the Hindi word tadi, which is a sweet sap obtained from palm trees.

It was used in drinks, and it survives in the term hot toddy for a type of alcoholic mixed drink made with honey, lemon, and spices, and served hot.

The word mung for a type of plant found in India is also recorded around this time, as is the word nabob for a provincial governor in Mughal India.

Now we don't really use that word nabob much today, but it does survive in a somewhat well-known line attributed to former U.S.

President Spiro Agnew, who referred to relentless critics as quote, nadering nabobs of negativism, end quote.

It was a nice bit of alliteration that that used that Urdu word nabob and can still be found in political circles to this day.

Of course, traders in India also picked up the word rupee, which was the principal monetary unit of the region.

It's found in English for the first time in 1612, the year that the English established that trading post in Surat.

So, with the English now on the ground in India, we will encounter a lot more words flowing into English from that region as we move forward with the podcast.

In fact, some of them may surprise you by how common they are in the English we speak today.

They include words like dungarees, pariah, guru, cot, tank, juggernaut, shampoo, jungle, and pajamas.

And I want to conclude this episode with one last bit of linguistic confusion, and it has to do with where we began this episode and where we ended it.

We began this episode in North America, and during the course of that discussion and other discussions about North America in prior episodes, you may have noticed that I generally referred to the indigenous people of the region as just that, the indigenous people.

And sometimes I use the term Native Americans, which came into fashion in the 1960s and 70s.

In Canada, the term First Nations is common.

But in those discussions, I haven't used the term that the original English settlers used, which was Indians.

As we saw in an earlier episode, the use of that term goes all the way back to Christopher Columbus, who thought he had reached Asia when he first landed in the Caribbean.

At the time, the term India could be used to refer to all of Asia, so Columbus referred to the indigenous people he encountered as Indians.

And the fact that the indigenous people of North America were called Indians is a reflection of the fact that Europeans were encountering both India and North America for the first time in the 1400s and 1500s, and some of them, like Columbus, were confused as to where they were.

Now today, some indigenous groups in the United States still prefer the term American Indians, and the U.S.

Census still uses that term as well.

But for the most part, the term Indian has fallen out of favor when referring to the native inhabitants of North America.

Part of the reason for that decline is because the term has acquired a negative or derogatory sense over time.

But the use of the word Indian has also declined because it was another case of linguistic confusion.

By incorrectly applying the term to North America, it meant that it was used to refer to two completely different groups of people on two different continents.

So this linguistic confusion was another factor in searching for a more suitable term for the indigenous people of North America.

Now, having brought this episode back to where we began, I think it's a good time to wrap up, and I hope I haven't confused you with all of those discussions about linguistic confusion.

Along the way, we saw how a common shelled reptile was named after a bird, how pickled cucumbers and green peppers were once called mangoes, and how the native inhabitants of one continent were named after the people of another continent.

I guess it just goes to prove that we've been living in a a world of confusion for a very long time.

So, until next time, thanks for listening to the History of English podcast.