Some English speakers in the USA use the word ‘Cilantro’ while in the UK we use the word Coriander. What’s happening there?
Let’s start with the etymology. Where the heck did US Americans get the word cilantro? This one is easy: from Spanish. Oh, well does the trail end there? Is it something the Spaniards just made up? We know Spanish is a Latin language, so did it come from Latin? Looks like it did. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=cilantro (Etymonline.com is one of my favourite websites by the way. Excellent resource for English etymology.)
In Latin, it’s Coriandrum. Wait.. isn’t that too familiar? Coriander and Coriandrum — It’s the same word.
Turns out both the English Coriander and the Spanish Cilantro come from the same word: Coriandrum. It’s clearer now, isn’t it? In English the ‘um’ suffix of Latin was dropped and the remaining ‘dr’ smushed into a regular syllable : ‘der’.
Meanwhile, in Spanish, the path to Cilantro was a little more complex, dropping 2 letters: Iand M, then transforming a further FIVE! C to S, O to I, R to L, D to T, and U to O.
Coriandrum /ko.riˈan.drum/ (Classical Latin)
CILanTrO /θiˈlantɾo/ (Spain) /siˈlantɾo/ (Latin America)
Wow.. no wonder I couldn’t recognize it at all. Did you realise it was the same word, with the same meaning, when you first heard them?
This isn’t an unusual process. This is how all natural languages are formed — none are “original” and unchanged. Some have changed less, some have changed more. But being natural doesn’t mean it’s good. The result in this case is we can’t understand one another — even speaking the same word!
Let me give you another easy example: The Latin CAESAR — pronounced as it’s spelt /ˈkae̯.sar/ has become SEE zuh or /ˈsiːzə/ in English. Crazy. That same flip from a ‘hard’ C or K sound to a soft sibilant S is present. As is the change in voicing and the vowel changes. The word is absolutely the same in modern English writing as in Latin — English hasn’t systematically updated most of it’s spelling conventions in hundreds of years, whereas Spanish did that last century. But in speech? It stretches plausibility.
So that’s the etymological question… it’s Coriander. Is there any use for cilantro in modern English?
Coriander seeds, Coriander leaves — that’s a pretty easy pattern to append a word for specific parts. There are specific words for parts of plants or derived products already: like a Pig yeilding Ham & Bacon. Would it really be useful to adopt Cilantro as a word for a specific part? I come down on this question on the side of “no more, thanks.” More words take more time to learn. We have plenty. And it has to fight against a word that many languages already share with English…
Here are some selections from a few languages
- Finnish: Korianteri
- Greek: Koliandros κόλιαντρος
- Japanese: Koriandaa コリアンダー
- Russian: Koriandr кориандр
Ok, sure, that’s a little bit of a biased selection. In Turkish it’s kishnish, or kişniş. In Korean it’s Gosupul 고수풀. And there are a few other roots naturally. Take a look at this list… that’s a lot of Coriander.
But in this case, the most international, inter-lingual word is clearly the one closer to the older Latin: Coriander.
Good. That’s that sorted: It’s Coriander. 4 for 4. Older, Simpler, more international, actually English. If US Americans want to speak Spanish that’s fine. But code-switching is very confusing. 😣
links!
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=cilantro&ref=searchbar_searchhint
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cilantro
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coriandrum#Latin
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Caesar
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-french/coriander
