The Liver That Turned into Roe
Reader, I reread my own blog. An old post of mine from Serbia surfaced, on Turkish loanwords in the kitchen—among them Serbian džigerica, from Turkish ciğer ‘liver,’ which goes back to the Persian جگر /jigar/.
Persian being an Indo-European language, that jigar contains a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root, *Hyekʷ-. One hypothesis derives from that same root, furnished with the suffix *-r̥ that tends to form nouns denoting a mass, the stem *yókʷr̥-.
From it comes the Greek ἧπαρ /hēpar/, and from that, in turn, heparin and hepatitis. To the same stem, by that account, we owe the Irish eochraí and the Russian ikra—the word an English speaker is likeliest to have met on a tin.
Three Words Where Russian Has One
Here is a small asymmetry between the two languages. Where Russian gets by with the single word ikra, English requires three, and not one of them is related to the others:
- caviar—the roe of sturgeon, and the expensive sort;
- roe (or spawn)—what every other creature that reproduces in the same manner produces;
- calf—the muscle at the back of the leg.
That last one may look like a stray, but it is not: a Russian will tell you that the swell of the calf muscle and a swollen mass of fish eggs are, quite plainly, the same shape, and the language files them under one heading accordingly. In the singular the two are indistinguishable, stress and all. Only the plural gives the game away: the calves of one’s legs are íkry, with the stress hopping back to the first syllable, while roe, being a mass, has no plural to hop in.
Roe and calf go back to Proto-Germanic roots whose etymologies are unknown or disputed; spawn is a relative of Latin expandere. But caviar completes our etymological rondo by returning us to Persian. English took it from French, French from Venetian, Venetian from Ottoman Turkish خاویار /havyar/, and Ottoman Turkish from Persian خاویار /xāwyār/. It is hardly likely that Iran was unacquainted with the roe of any fish but the sturgeon; but the sturgeon’s was surely the only kind exported, which is why it acquired a term of its own, duly borrowed by every nation that bought this Caspian exotic.
The Egg-Bearing Fish
On the most widely held hypothesis, the Persian word was formed from a dialect name for the sturgeon: ماهیِ خایهدار /māhī-i xāya-dār/, ‘the egg-bearing fish.’
Here خایه /xāya/ is ‘egg’ (and, as it happens, ‘testicle’), from the Proto-Indo-European *h₂ōwyóm—which also gave Latin ōvum (whence ab ovo, oval, and ovulation), German Ei, and the English egg you had for breakfast. And دار /dār/ ‘holding, bearing’ scarcely needs translating either: it is the same Proto-Indo-European root *dʰer- ‘to hold’ that surfaces in Sanskrit dharma and, at one remove, in the -dar of zamindar. The egg-bearing fish is egg-bearing root for root.
What is more intriguing still: *h₂ōwyóm- ‘egg’ is thought to be a derivative of another Proto-Indo-European root, *h₂éwis- ‘bird’ (whence Latin avis and the whole international brood of avi- words). The egg, then, is ‘the bird’s thing’—and the question of which came first is settled by comparative historical linguistics in favour of the bird.
How the Caviar Turned into Pepper
Ottoman havyar produced not only the western European caviar but also an eastern—more precisely a Balkan—descendant: ajvar, the celebrated relish of roasted red peppers.
Here is the part that is generally left out. Until the end of the nineteenth century sturgeon not only still swam in the Danube but came up it as far as Belgrade, and ajvar in Serbian households meant precisely what it says: caviar. When the Danube ran out of sturgeon, restaurateurs offered a vegetable substitute in its place, and the name stayed where it was. So the pepper relish is not a peasant imitation of a luxury never tasted; it is what was left behind when the luxury swam away.
Russian, incidentally, did exactly the same thing without any help from Belgrade: baklazhannaya and kabachkovaya ikra—aubergine (eggplant) and marrow (zucchini) caviar—are what every Russian household calls the vegetable spreads in question. Two languages, independently, transferred a fish word to a vegetable paste for one and the same reason: the form survived, and the contents were quietly swapped.
Owing to the great number of settlers from the Balkans, Türkiye now makes ajvar of its own, obtainable in practically any supermarket. But nothing compares with what they make where it comes from. Every time we come back from the Balkans we bring a jar. And we recommend that you do the same.
