Huh, well that makes sense. So the idea is that the reason the Chinese use the Tocharian word for it is that beekeeping was introduced by an Indo-European people, so the Chinese borrowed the word for honey along with the practice?
Incidentally, the Japanese word for honey is 蜂蜜, hachi-mitsu (hachi = bee, mitzu = nectar/honey/honeydew), so there's that mi-root again. I'm assuming in their case though that they got it from the Chinese in a game of telephone rather than directly from IE speakers.
I remember reading, years ago, in The History of Salt, that ancient bodies wearing the characteristic colourful robes of the Celts had been found preserved deep in salt mines in Western China.
There is still a fascinating musical affinity between Chinese culture and Celtic culture. I remember watching the award-winning wuxia film Assassin (2015) and being electrified by the music from the closing credits, which sounded like bagpipe music. I did some digging and found director Hou Hsiao-hsien had chosen a track, 'Rohan', from an album by Breton group Bagad Men Ha Tan. The famous Irish Celtic group The Chieftains, which often collaborated with Celtic-influenced folkgroups from Spain, the U.S. etc., also collaborated with Chinese musicians on an album in the 1980s, and I have since heard sampling of Celtic music in the soundtracks of other Chinese film/television productions.
Yes, but in this case from its Latin derivative. So English doesn’t inherit it per se, but you’re absolutely right that, ultimately, mellifluous also comes from the *mélit root.
This is fascinating. I think I remember a mention of honey in relation to tracing language spread from Proto Indo European, in the podcast The History of English. https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
I don't know how academically robust that podcast is.
Does mead as in meadow come from a different root?
Thank you! The word mead, as in meadow, is a different root; it’s related to the verb mow. In Old English, ‘mead (the drink)’ is medu and ‘meadow’ is mǣd. It’s only by a fun coincidence that both became mead in Modern English.
Fascinating piece. Some years ago I spent time with nomadic beekeepers in China, mostly in Inner Mongolia. They had no superstitions around the word for honey, and many of them saw bee stings as therapeutic (they are used somewhat like acupuncture in TCM, traditional Chinese medicine). Most of the beekeepers were from the south and they traveled around the country, following the blooming flowers, in a semi-nomadic lifestyle. They lived in tents and hired trucks to transport themselves and their bees. Back in the late 1990s, there were about 100,000 such beekeepers but the number has doubled or tripled since then, along with China's honey production. A typical path for a beekeeper family from Jiangsu Province would be winter at home in their native village, feeding the bees until the April Qingming Festival, after which they would begin short trips in Jiangsu in search of yellow rapeseed flowers. Then they would head north to Shandong Province in search of yanghuaihua, white flowers from which bees produce prized honey that is almost as clear as water. Then it is on to Inner Mongolia for sunflowers and a wild flower called laoguatou, after which the cycle starts again. The migratory path the beekeepers follow are the same ones that have been used for thousands of years. China's beekeepers were badly impacted by travel restrictions during the pandemic, but they are back on the road again, keeping the tradition - and agriculture - alive and thriving.
Just an aside on bee stings as therapy: in Scandinavia a "targeted bee sting" was used as a therapy for various ailments. I remember well my mother-in-law (1927-2015, ie recently) regularly using a bee sting to help relieve her rheumatism, placing a bee on her wrist or hand and annoying it into stinging her. Seemed to help very much.
She had a small glass cup that enclosed the bee, and she would shake the cup until the bee became "annoyed" enough to sting her. I remember that my MiL remarked once that bees could be supplied by the local apothecary. Apparently the sting and the venom caused a beneficial immune system reaction. I was a bee keeper for over 20 years, and I certainly admired my MiL's fortitude. For me bee stings were only painful, but apparently they even benefited me without my knowledge. They hurt, burned and caused swelling. Still, it was worth it for all else the bees gave in return.
The taboo explanation for the replacement of médʰu with 'honey' is super valuable. Words get replaced for all kinds of mundane reasons, but replacing the name of something while you're collecting it, to avoid attracting the attention of the stinging things, is language shaped by fear in the most literal sense. I write in two languages myself, and what Colin is showing here is that every word is a palimpsest. Scratch the surface of mead and you find a Bronze Age customs officer in China trying to figure out how to tax something that doesn't exist in the statutes yet.
And -- the term "honey-eater" in one form or another was a popular euphemism for "bear" in Northern European languages. (Along with "brown one" and "shaggy one.")
Fascinating indeed! So it seems to me that romance languages do not use the mead Proto-Indo-European root, since they call honey mel, miel (from melit) and the drink is hidromel / aguamiel / idromele (as water+honey). Does it make sense?
I really think this theory is a stretch. Do we have any evidence honey was unknown in in ancient China? Why would our hypothetical tax collector be unaware of what honey was? The honeybee is not an introduced species. Also, the middle Chinese form is identical to 密 mit 'thick'. More likely this is the original of 蜜 mit 'honey', through the pathway of 'thick/viscous stuff' as substitute term.
Same word is used in Finno-Ugric languages, but I am just reading they are not sure what was the direction of the borrowing. I don't really understand it in this article either, what if proto-indo-european borrowed it from Chinese?
_Tocharian_ could have borrowed it from Chinese; PIE was spoken too far from it to borrow anything, and also didn't exist by the time "hard evidence for beekeeping in China dates back only to the later Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BC)"
> The Tocharian form that matches Old Chinese so closely, mit, belongs to Tocharian B, which isn’t attested until the fifth century AD, centuries after the word had reached Chinese. Its reconstructed Proto-Tocharian ancestor, written rather imposingly as *ḿətə (roughly myuh-ta, [mjətə]), is a poorer match.
If my Old Chinese is up to snuff, I believe unpharyngealized *ə also becomes later *i, so that objection wouldn't land.
I had a loving golden colored German Shepherd-Coyote named Meli. She picked her name from the Merck Manual where it is listed as “honey”. As it is a current scientific reference i am guessing that this is from Latin.
BTW, I always let my dogs 🐕 (and cats 🐈⬛) pick their names by trying a few out until they respond consistently to one.
Not just mildew but mellifluous, yes? Or does that not count because it came through Latin?
It's enough to make you want some metheglin.
And also the name Melissa!
Etymonline also thinks that the "-mel" in "caramel" might be from this root! https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=caramel
Huh, well that makes sense. So the idea is that the reason the Chinese use the Tocharian word for it is that beekeeping was introduced by an Indo-European people, so the Chinese borrowed the word for honey along with the practice?
Incidentally, the Japanese word for honey is 蜂蜜, hachi-mitsu (hachi = bee, mitzu = nectar/honey/honeydew), so there's that mi-root again. I'm assuming in their case though that they got it from the Chinese in a game of telephone rather than directly from IE speakers.
I remember reading, years ago, in The History of Salt, that ancient bodies wearing the characteristic colourful robes of the Celts had been found preserved deep in salt mines in Western China.
There is still a fascinating musical affinity between Chinese culture and Celtic culture. I remember watching the award-winning wuxia film Assassin (2015) and being electrified by the music from the closing credits, which sounded like bagpipe music. I did some digging and found director Hou Hsiao-hsien had chosen a track, 'Rohan', from an album by Breton group Bagad Men Ha Tan. The famous Irish Celtic group The Chieftains, which often collaborated with Celtic-influenced folkgroups from Spain, the U.S. etc., also collaborated with Chinese musicians on an album in the 1980s, and I have since heard sampling of Celtic music in the soundtracks of other Chinese film/television productions.
"That *mélit root does survive in English, by the way, but not in our word for ‘honey’. It hangs on very marginally in a single word mildew.²"
How about mellifluous?
Yes, but in this case from its Latin derivative. So English doesn’t inherit it per se, but you’re absolutely right that, ultimately, mellifluous also comes from the *mélit root.
This is fascinating. I think I remember a mention of honey in relation to tracing language spread from Proto Indo European, in the podcast The History of English. https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
I don't know how academically robust that podcast is.
Does mead as in meadow come from a different root?
Thank you! The word mead, as in meadow, is a different root; it’s related to the verb mow. In Old English, ‘mead (the drink)’ is medu and ‘meadow’ is mǣd. It’s only by a fun coincidence that both became mead in Modern English.
Fascinating!
This was just right for me to bite, chew, and swallow. You found the Goldilocks zone for Substack articles.
Fascinating piece. Some years ago I spent time with nomadic beekeepers in China, mostly in Inner Mongolia. They had no superstitions around the word for honey, and many of them saw bee stings as therapeutic (they are used somewhat like acupuncture in TCM, traditional Chinese medicine). Most of the beekeepers were from the south and they traveled around the country, following the blooming flowers, in a semi-nomadic lifestyle. They lived in tents and hired trucks to transport themselves and their bees. Back in the late 1990s, there were about 100,000 such beekeepers but the number has doubled or tripled since then, along with China's honey production. A typical path for a beekeeper family from Jiangsu Province would be winter at home in their native village, feeding the bees until the April Qingming Festival, after which they would begin short trips in Jiangsu in search of yellow rapeseed flowers. Then they would head north to Shandong Province in search of yanghuaihua, white flowers from which bees produce prized honey that is almost as clear as water. Then it is on to Inner Mongolia for sunflowers and a wild flower called laoguatou, after which the cycle starts again. The migratory path the beekeepers follow are the same ones that have been used for thousands of years. China's beekeepers were badly impacted by travel restrictions during the pandemic, but they are back on the road again, keeping the tradition - and agriculture - alive and thriving.
Just an aside on bee stings as therapy: in Scandinavia a "targeted bee sting" was used as a therapy for various ailments. I remember well my mother-in-law (1927-2015, ie recently) regularly using a bee sting to help relieve her rheumatism, placing a bee on her wrist or hand and annoying it into stinging her. Seemed to help very much.
Very interesting, and I love the image of her "annoying" it into stinging her in the correct place!
She had a small glass cup that enclosed the bee, and she would shake the cup until the bee became "annoyed" enough to sting her. I remember that my MiL remarked once that bees could be supplied by the local apothecary. Apparently the sting and the venom caused a beneficial immune system reaction. I was a bee keeper for over 20 years, and I certainly admired my MiL's fortitude. For me bee stings were only painful, but apparently they even benefited me without my knowledge. They hurt, burned and caused swelling. Still, it was worth it for all else the bees gave in return.
The taboo explanation for the replacement of médʰu with 'honey' is super valuable. Words get replaced for all kinds of mundane reasons, but replacing the name of something while you're collecting it, to avoid attracting the attention of the stinging things, is language shaped by fear in the most literal sense. I write in two languages myself, and what Colin is showing here is that every word is a palimpsest. Scratch the surface of mead and you find a Bronze Age customs officer in China trying to figure out how to tax something that doesn't exist in the statutes yet.
And -- the term "honey-eater" in one form or another was a popular euphemism for "bear" in Northern European languages. (Along with "brown one" and "shaggy one.")
"Medvedev" is a rather common Russian surname derived from their "honey-eater" bear euphemism, and sure enough, there's that "med-" again!
Meanwhile Tibetan just calls honey "bee juice" (sbrang rtsi). People have tried to connect the "sbrang" with IE "medhu" but it looks really shaky.
Same joke exists in Arabic lexicology. Every word indicates
1. a thing,
2. its opposite, and
3. a camel.
Fascinating indeed! So it seems to me that romance languages do not use the mead Proto-Indo-European root, since they call honey mel, miel (from melit) and the drink is hidromel / aguamiel / idromele (as water+honey). Does it make sense?
I really think this theory is a stretch. Do we have any evidence honey was unknown in in ancient China? Why would our hypothetical tax collector be unaware of what honey was? The honeybee is not an introduced species. Also, the middle Chinese form is identical to 密 mit 'thick'. More likely this is the original of 蜜 mit 'honey', through the pathway of 'thick/viscous stuff' as substitute term.
Same word is used in Finno-Ugric languages, but I am just reading they are not sure what was the direction of the borrowing. I don't really understand it in this article either, what if proto-indo-european borrowed it from Chinese?
_Tocharian_ could have borrowed it from Chinese; PIE was spoken too far from it to borrow anything, and also didn't exist by the time "hard evidence for beekeeping in China dates back only to the later Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BC)"
> The Tocharian form that matches Old Chinese so closely, mit, belongs to Tocharian B, which isn’t attested until the fifth century AD, centuries after the word had reached Chinese. Its reconstructed Proto-Tocharian ancestor, written rather imposingly as *ḿətə (roughly myuh-ta, [mjətə]), is a poorer match.
If my Old Chinese is up to snuff, I believe unpharyngealized *ə also becomes later *i, so that objection wouldn't land.
I had a loving golden colored German Shepherd-Coyote named Meli. She picked her name from the Merck Manual where it is listed as “honey”. As it is a current scientific reference i am guessing that this is from Latin.
BTW, I always let my dogs 🐕 (and cats 🐈⬛) pick their names by trying a few out until they respond consistently to one.