zompist wrote:The word is said to come from Tamil kaṟi 'relish, sauce'.
கறி can apparently mean all kinds of things in Tamil, even dry dishes with no sauce at all. This may even be true in Malayalam, at least to some extent. After all, our word for 'vegetable(s)' is [pəˈt͡ʃəkəri]. [pəˈt͡ʃa] just means 'green'.
Ironically, I would say that the
English word
curry does mean to us exactly what you said.
To complicate things, there's also the curry leaf (Tamil kaṟivēmpu), which is often used in curries— I don't know which word influenced which.
I think that comes from கறி rather than the other way around and the name of the leaf is a compound word (I think
vēmpu has to do with cooking). In Malayalam, it's written കറിവേപ്പില
kaṟivēppila, but the only way I've ever heard anyone pronounce it is [kəɾiˈjaːpla].
Vēppu is surely a nominalization of the verb
vēvikkuka 'to cook (something)'.
Ila just means 'leaf'.
My parents grow a curry leaf plant in our backyard. It's remarkably resilient for a tropical plant. Here, it dies every winter but just comes back to life again in spring (you do have to bring most of it inside the house in winter, though). It doesn't even seem to require all that much water. We had the same plant in St. Louis and I think Cleveland, too.
Also, Malayalees (if not South Indians in general) put curry leaves in EVERYTHING (unless it's either plain rice or something sweet)! I mean, I love my heritage culture and all, but my dad once said Westerners were silly for putting salt and pepper in everything, because black pepper goes well with some things and not others, and I'm like "but you do the exact same thing with curry leaves, and it's just as silly!!" My family also occasionally makes the biggest fucking deal over the fact that I don't actually eat the curry leaves in most dishes, which is ironic given that my dad also recently claimed that a real Malayalee never actually eats them! (OK, rant over. Sorry
).
Is this the same as Malayalam cāru?
Nah, Tamil has
cāṟu, too, and I think it means the same thing as our
cāṟu. AFAIK
ṟ is [r] and
r is [ɾ] (றி is [ri]), but...
Chuma wrote:To complicate things a bit more: Apparently there's a root kar "black", whence we also get kari "charcoal; grill; stir-fry". I also distinctly recall seeing a claim that kari can mean "black pepper", which I guess also makes sense?
zompist wrote:These are different words, though. Kaṟi is கறி, kar is கர்.
...'(the color) black' in Tamil can be either கருப்பு or கறுப்பு. In Malayalam, it can only be the latter, so with ṟ [r]. (It can also means 'opium', though, and apparently 'stain' and 'infamy').
I've never heard of either
kari or
kaṟi meaning 'black pepper', and that's definitely not the case in Malayalam, where if you want to distinguish between black pepper and any other kind of pepper, you say what literally translates to either 'seed pepper' or 'good pepper' (my dad says it's called 'good pepper' because it's milder and thus perceived as more easily digestible). However, it is true that
kari [kəˈɾi] in Malayalam can mean either 'charcoal' as a noun or 'burn' as a verb, not 'grill' or 'stir-fry' to my knowledge.
Though I believe ṟ today reduces to r in this position. It behaves differently in clusters.
[ɾ] is in the process of undergoing a merger with [r] in modern Dravidian language varieties, and this merger is already complete in a bunch of them (definitely at least in some varieties of both Indian Tamil and Telugu). In Malayalam, they're still distinct phonemes but in neutralization directly before or after a consonant or word-finally, because only [r] can occur in those environments AFAICT, never [ɾ]. (Also, note the irregular pronunciation of [kəɾiˈjaːpla] and also the Portuguese loanword for 'chair', written
kasērā (from
cadeira) but pronounced [kəˈsaːre]).