In the new environment, pumpkin found several close allies, pump and pomp among them. Yet this root is amazingly appropriate: it resembles plump (that is, round) and pomp (a pompous person puffs up with self-importance). Pump– is not the ancient root of pumpkin. Pompon produced English pumpkin, rhyming with bumpkin, both with a Dutch diminutive suffix. Today, the French for “pumpkin” is citrouille, from the color of a citrus fruit (lemon, orange, and so forth). Plump, pompous pumpkins all over the place.Īnyway, pepo/peponis made its predictable way from Latin to French and became pompon ( om stands for a nasalized vowel), as a vegetable name now obsolete. The Russian for “pumpkin” is tykva, and it makes one think of tykat’ “to push with a finger,” though the association has nothing to do with the word’s etymology. The form of a full-grown pumpkin evokes the idea of amusing plumpness. Whatever the original impulse behind such words, with reduplication ( ku-kur, mur-mur, car-cer, and even cucurri, the perfect of Latin curro– “to run”) they sound like emotional formations (compare she is very, very clever my new job is so-so). Kukurbita, with its kukur-, is a funny word, like murmur and Latin purpur “purple” and carcer “prison (compare English in carcerate). The difference between the pumpkin and the gourd can be passed by in this story, though I may mention the fact that pumpkin is defined as “a kind of gourd” and gourd as “fruit of cucurbitaceous (!) plant.” The more common Latin word for “pumpkin” was cucurbita, whose descendants are known as Kürbis in German and as gourd in English (the latter via French). From Greek the word traveled to Latin and became pepo, genitive peponis “watermelon pumpkin” (note the ambiguity!). But we cannot say the blinds for the blind, as we can do with the whites, the blacks (for instance, in chess) and the reds, without running into the noun a blind, a seventeenth-century coinage meaning “a screen”). English can go even farther: compare the reds, in which the plural ending is the same as in roads, reeds, and raids.
The definite article suggests the presence of a noun. The first step toward becoming a noun can be seen in the plural: the blind. (This process, known as substantivization, or nominalization, is easy to illustrate in English. The word pépōn “large melon” was an adjective but used as a noun. In Greek, síkuos pépōn designated (perhaps still designates?) a kind of melon not eaten till quite ripe (the síkuos being eaten unripe).
PRISON ARCHITECT WIKI EXPERIENCE PROFESSIONAL
I feel duty-bound (they used to say: “It is my bounden duty”) to attack the pumpkin market from my professional point of view and ask: “how did the pumpkin get its name?” The well-known facts can be found in any reliable dictionary, for example, in The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, whose entry I’ll reproduce and amplify below. We are one more week closer to Halloween, and pumpkins are ubiquitous.
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