June 13, 2004
Cherry Season
It's cherry season here in Romania.
The cherries come in two sorts: ciresi ("chiresh") and visine ("veesee neh"). Ciresi are sweet, visine are sour. They're both wonderful.
In fact, Romanian fruits generally are wonderful. Crisp watermelons. Strawberries that are almost painfully sweet. Peaches that are fat, tender, and literally bursting with juice.
Unfortunately, they're also very seasonal. Enjoy them now, because in a few weeks they'll disappear, and then you won't see them again until next year. But even this adds an edge to the appreciation, and gives us something to look forward to. (Raspberry season! Almost here!)
As for the cherries: Romanians consider them a little expensive: 80 to 100,000 lei/kg for ciresi, maybe 50-70,000 for visine. For American readers, that's about $1.30/lb for the sweet cherries, $0.90/lb. for the sour. This doesn't seem unreasonable to us, and we've been buying a kilo every second day or so. It's amazingly easy to just sit with a bowl of them and eat them like popcorn.
We'll probably get sick of them right around the time they disappear anyway. So that works.
Linguistic note: Most of the European words for "cherry" come from the Turkish. The Slavs, though, use a different word -- vishnya. No idea where it comes from. But the Romanians use both the Turkish/European word and the Slavic one -- one for sweet cherries, the other for sour. I find that neat.
Posted by douglas at June 13, 2004 10:37 AMIn Romania, some of them also come with some juicy meat inside. Make sure you test them out before purchasing.
Posted by: David at June 13, 2004 02:18 PMI'm pretty sure most of the western European languages actually picked up the word through Latin, which picked it up through classical Greek kerasos, with the hard 'k' softening in late Latin *ceresia to French cerise, Spanish cereza, English cherry. The initial softened 'ch' in Romanian suggests to me a direct Romance origin as well. (NB: I am not a historical linguist.)
It's possible for the word to have been picked up through some Romance language -- Genoan traders or the like -- into Turkish and later into Romanian, but Occam's razor suggests otherwise. However, the etymology for English 'apricot' should give us pause; it comes from Latin praecox... through the Arabic.
Should I note that the Romanian etymological dictionary at the New York Public Library's research division has apparently been lifted? I *knew* I should have gotten a copy in Bucharest, silly me.
Vishny is Slavic, you betcha, but it's not in my late Slavic wordlist.
C.
Posted by: Carlos at June 13, 2004 02:32 PMThat's sloppy writing, husband. The Turkish word for cherry is "visine". And you know that.
claudia
Posted by: claudia at June 13, 2004 05:40 PMTo Carlos: Yes, "cireaşă" is from Latin, "vişină" is from Slavic and "caisă" is from Greek.
Agh. Claudia's right and I'm wrong, and I should have known better.
So, one Greek-Latin-Romance & Germanic word, another one for Slavs and Turks. Now I wonder -- did the Slavs get it from the Turks, or vice versa?
In my defense, Romania is full of food names borrowed directly from Turkish...
Doug M.
Multumesc y muchas gracias, Bogdan!
You know what you have to do now, C&D -- pie blog! Mmm, cherry pie.
C.
Posted by: Carlos at June 14, 2004 01:39 AMHm. I'm German, I don't do pies. But cherry cake, yes. I can do that. :-) I'll let you know.
claudia
Posted by: claudia at June 14, 2004 09:55 AMVasmer's Etymological Dictionary says вишня [vishnya] is related to latin viscium, which it glosses as "bird glue". In Russian, by the way, there are also two words, one for sour and one for sweet cherries.
Posted by: PF at June 14, 2004 03:00 PMIf I am reading that entry correctly, it's also related to the Old High German word for cherry, wihsila -- Claudia, any current cognates or dialect words? -- and the Greek ixos, 'bird glue' (presumably birdlime) and... mistletoe? Viscum is the Linnean generic name for mistletoe.
Looks like the root referred to the fruit first; and at least one meaning shifted through time.
C.
Posted by: Carlos at June 14, 2004 04:12 PMAh! Yes! "Weichsel" is the word in my local dialect for sour cherries.
Heh. That is neat!
claudia
Posted by: claudia at June 14, 2004 04:56 PMIn Serbian (one of Slav languages), there are two words for cherry -- we actually count them as different fruits:
Sweet cherry is called 'trеšnja' (treh-shnya)
Sour one is called 'višnja' (vee-shnya)
Carlos, thanks for that - the entry wasn't displaying properly on my computer, so I couldn't read the whole thing.
Posted by: PF at June 15, 2004 02:53 AMPF, no problem.
Srdjan, I'd bet that trеšnja is ultimately derived from late Latin ceresia. Loss of an unstressed vowel, and some mild phonological reworking. Sort of like the way Venezia became Mleci.
C.