sumac

In my other blog I’ve occasionally showed pictures of flameleaf sumac, Rhus lanceolata, a small tree whose compound leaves turn yellow, orange, and red in the fall. The English word sumac is spelled two ways, the other being sumach, and pronounced two ways, with the first consonant sounded either /s/ or /∫/. The Spanish name—and one with a single pronunciation*—for trees in the genus Rhus is zumaque, clearly a cognate of English sumac(h). Both the English word (via Old French) and the Spanish word trace back to the Arabic name for a tree in this family, summaq, but its roots are even older. Arabic had taken the word from Aramaic, where it meant ‘dark red,’ based on a Semitic root meaning ‘red,’ “por el color de sus semillas,” “for the color of its seeds,” as the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española explains.

It turns out that the reddish fruits of the zumaque contain high amounts of tannin, so that the Spanish verb zumacar, used with reference to tanners and curriers, means ‘adobar las pieles con zumaque,’ ‘to tan hides with sumac.’ As far as I know, an English speaker can’t sumac anything (though if someone named Mac does you an injustice you can sue Mac).

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* In any given Spanish-speaking region everyone will pronounce zumaque the same way, but of course the pronunciation of z in Spain differs from that in other regions.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

Weak vowels

One peculiarity of English phonetics is that weakly stressed vowels tend to be pronounced as a shwa. For example, the a in sofa, the e in modest, and the o in police are all pronounced as a shwa. Due to that leveling, a person hearing a shwa in a word may not know which corresponding written vowel to use in spelling the word—as we see in the common misspelling definately for the correct definitely.

I bring all this up because some months ago I discovered that Google gave me 264,000 hits for *antisematism and 90,000 more for *anti-sematism. The numbers were small when compared to the 25,000,000 for the correct antisemitism, but still large in absolute terms. In contrast, because of the distinctly pronounced vowels in Spanish, a search for *antisematismo produced only 32 hits on Google.

As for the origin of the correct antisemitismo/antisemitism, the anti- is the familiar prefix meaning ‘against’ and the main part of the word is a reference to the semitas/Semites. The Encyclopedia Britannica says this about the word Semite:

Person speaking one of a group of related languages, presumably derived from a common language, Semitic (see Semitic languages). The term came to include Arabs, Akkadians, Canaanites, some Ethiopians, and Aramaean tribes including Hebrews. Semitic tribes migrated from the Arabian Peninsula, beginning c. 2500 bc, to the Mediterranean coast, Mesopotamia, and the Nile River delta. In Phoenicia, they became seafarers. In Mesopotamia, they blended with the civilization of Sumer.

The word semita/Semite itself goes back to the Greek version of Shem, the Hebrew name of the son of Noah from whom the Semitic peoples are supposed to have descended. In the term antisemitismo/antisemitism, of course, the Semitic group almost always being referred to is the Jews, though I suppose someone who hates Arabs could also be called an anti-Semite.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman