BUY BOOKS ONLINE / Submit Sayings / Photos / Contact / Links / Site Map / Home
sample page 3 from Canadian Garden Words
At Least 5 Things Most Canadians Don't Know about the Word
MAPLE
published by McArthur & Company
Samara or Maple Key
The dry, winged seeds of maples (and a few other genus like elm) are samaras, from the Latin word samara which Pliny and Columella, a writer on Roman agriculture, used to mean elm-tree seed. Samara is a Latin dialect version of an earlier form like *semera related directly to the seed words in Latin like semen.
Further back in the verbal time span, samara derives from the Indo-European root *se and its extension *sem, roots that mean ‘one and the same.’ Thus the metaphor behind sowing seeds was basically: making more of the same living thing.
Children make keen whistles from samaras, best caught on the wing as the seeds helicopter down to spiral themselves into any soft earth below.
An Ojibwa Myth About The Maple Tree
The maple looms large in Ojibwa folk tales. The time of year for sugaring-off is "in the Maple Moon." Among Ojibwa and other Algonquin-speaking peoples the mythic earth-mother and primordial female figure is Nokomis, the wise grandmother.
In one story about seasonal change (among other things), cannibal wendigos, creatures of evil, chased dear old Nokomis through the countryside. Wendigos throve in icy cold. When they entered the bodies of humans, the human heart froze solid. So these wendigos represent here oncoming winter. There the evil beings were, chasing poor Nokomis, the warm embodiment of female fecundity who like the summer has grown old, pursuing her to the death.
But Nokomis outsmarted the cold devils. She hid in an autumn stand of maple trees, all red and orange and deep yellow. This maple grove grew tall beside a waterfall whose mist sometimes blurred the trees' outline. And the maple trees saved Nokomis.
As they peered through the mist of the waterfall, the wendigos thought they saw a raging fire of red, in which their prey was burning. But it was only old Nokomis being hidden by the bright, autumn leaves of her friends, the maples.
For their service in saving the earth-mother's life, these maples were given a special gift: their water of life would be forever sweet, and humans would tap it for nourishment. All sugar maples, says the story, are descended from these trees.
THE HISTORY OF THE WORD MAPLE
Genus: Acer < acer, aceris Latin, maple < *ac Indo-European root ‘sharp, pointed.’
The Latin term has a cognate in the modern German word for maple, Ahorn, and a direct descendant in Spanish arce. The Latin word may refer to the hard wood. Romans used maple, among other hard woods, to make spear and pike hafts. The wooden base of a Roman child's writing tablet was often a maple board scooped out to hold the wax on which the student wrote with a stylus. But the genus name Acer may also refer to the maple's distinctively pointed leaves. Compare a synonym for the usual German Ahorn, Spitzblatt sharp leaf.' Russian has ostrolistnie klejen ‘sharp-leaved maples.’ Turkish borrowed the Latin acer to produce akçaagac ‘maple’ where -agac is tree.
French: érable < acerabulus Vulgar Latin < acer Latin, maple + -abulus possible Latin diminutive suffix, but more likely a Latin-Gallic hybrid word whose last part contains abolo Gallic ‘rowan tree’ ultimately < *abel Indo-European root, fruit of any tree, tree-fruit. Compare the same origin for our English word apple.
Quebeckers have the standard sirop d'érable for maple syrup, but add a near insult to define imitation syrups that are thick with glucose glop. They call this sugary impostor sirop de poteau ‘telephone-pole syrup’ or ‘dead tree syrup.’
Word Lore of Maple
Maple < mapultreow Old English, maple tree < *mapl- Proto-Germanic root, maple. This appears to be a compound in which the first m- part's meaning is lost, but is likely the nearly worldwide *ma, one of the first human sounds, the pursing of a baby's lips as it prepares to suck milk from mother's nipple. The *ma root gives rise to thousands of words in many, widespread world languages, words like mama, mammary, mammal, maia, Amazon, mummy, etc. Here it would make the proto-Germanic compound *mapl- mean ‘nourishing mother tree,’ that is, tree whose maple sap is nourishing. For indeed the second part of the compound, apl-, is a variant of Indo-European *abel ‘fruit of any tree, tree-fruit.’ The primitive, etymological analogy compares the liquid sap with another nourishing liquid, mother's milk. Akin to English maple are Old Norse möpurr, Old Saxon mapulder, Middle Low German mapeldorn, and modern Irish mailp.
Maple Syrup Not Unique to North America
The contention of writers like Leo H. Werner in The Canadian Encyclopedia entry: Maple Sugar Industry, that maple syrup is unique to North America is nonsense. China has more species of maple than any country in the world. More than one hundred species of maple are native to China, while Canada has ten native maple species. In China maple sap has been tapped for thousands of years. North America does happen to be home to the sugar maple, the species that produces the sweetest sap and the most abundant flow. But it is likely that Proto-Amerinds who crossed the Bering land bridge to populate the Americas roughly 20,000 years ago brought with them the knowledge that maple trees held a sugary sap that could be extracted for a brief period in early spring. Maple syrup may have been news to European French newcomers to North America in the seventeenth century, but it was not to Oriental peoples and to northern Europeans.
Next Sample page of Canadian Garden Words.
published by McArthur & Company
SELECT SAMPLES FROM OTHER WORD BOOKS
