2502: Kappa(maki): Sushi from a Sea-Monster Oct 18, 2021
Kappa rolls—sushi rolls filled with cucumber—are named for a sea monster of Japanese folklore. The connection between a humanoid, web-toed, turtle-shelled sea monster might not seem immediately obvious. This is because in that mythology, the creature was thought to like to eat cucumbers, and people would even make offerings involving the vegetable, hence 河童巻 (kappamaki).
2303: sushi Apr 6, 2021
'Sushi' is the name of a general type of dish usually made with seafood, rice, and seaweed, but only one of these things is the reason for the name. It is actually adopted from the Japanese 寿司すし (sushi) unsurprisingly, but this means specifically "sour rice”, possibly related to 酸すい (sui) meaning “sour; vinegared”. This is because it was originally made by covering fish in fermented rice, which would then just be throw away, but when vinegar was later added to speed up the process, the rice could be edible, and much like pie-crusts, what was once just a gross coating for cooking or storage purposes, it became an integral part of the dish. Seaweed was added only around the 19th century.
2267: How לחם (Lechem) is Related to नान (Naan)
There is a Proto-Semitic reconstructed root *laḥm- which broadly would have meant food, but in many of its descendents like the Hebrew לחם (lechem) and Aramaic לחמא (lachma) it came to mean bread. That said, the Arabic لَحْم (laḥm) also comes from this root, but here it means 'meat'. It is clear it hasn't always though, because a derivative of this Arabic word is the somewhat distant sounding Middle Persian LHMA which becomes نان (nân) in Persian. This did have closer form in other languages like the Old Armenian loanword նկան (nkan); in turn this root lead to the Hindi नान (nān) and Urdu نان (nān): bread which came to English as 'naan'.
