Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour cleverly hidden at the intersection of religion and politics. This is an open thread where we can share our thoughts and comments about the day. Our species, Homo sapiens, somehow manages to evolve a liking for—or perhaps, a craving for—sweet foods. For those of us who like sweet things, let’s start today by looking at honey and sugar.
Honey
One of the earliest sweet foods used by Homo sapiens was honey. Hunting and gathering peoples throughout the world went to great pains (literally) to gather wild honey which was not only esteemed for its taste but was felt to have medicinal and spiritual properties as well. The honeybee may have been the earliest domesticates.
The modern English word honey comes from the Middle English hony which is from the Old English hunig. English is, of course, a Germanic language and therefore it is not surprising to find that hunig is from the Proto-Germanic *hunang- whose exact origin is not known, but some linguists and etymologists feel that it may have come from the Proto-Indo-European *k(e)neko- which denotes yellow, golden, or brownish colors.
Note: the * indicates that the word is a linguistic reconstruction.
Sugar
Honey’s primary rival for sweetness was sugar—called “honey without bees” when Europeans first encountered it. Sugarcane was first domesticated in New Guinea about 10,000 years ago. The cultivation of the plant then diffused to India, where the manufacture of sugar began about 2,000 years ago. It was the Arabs who brought it to Europe and began to cultivate it in Spain and Sicily. Following the Crusades, sugar began to rival honey in Europe.
The etymology of the English word sugar seems to show the diffusion of sugar from India to Europe. The Sanskrit word sharkara became the Persian shakar which then became the Arabic sukkar, which became the Medieval Latin succarum. It was, of course, from the Medieval Latin that Old French obtained sucre, and from the Old French, the word sugre came into English in the late thirteenth century.
Phonetically, the initial s in sugre became pronounced as sh because of the initial strong vowel (as in the pronunciation of sure). The shift from the Old French c to the English g is somewhat obscure.
During his second voyage to the Americas, Columbus carried sugarcane seedlings to Hispaniola. Following the opening of the Americas, the Spanish found that the West Indies was ideal for growing sugar cane and by 1506 there were sugar plantations there. In 1523, the Spanish began raising sugar in Cuba. In Medieval Europe, sugar was a “fine spice” and very expensive but with the opening of the American sugar plantation sugar soon became less expensive and more indispensable for satisfying the human sweet tooth.
Open Thread
This is an open thread—all topics are welcome.