auberge

[prettygoodword]

auberge (oh-BAIRZH; French oh-BERZH) - n., an inn or hostel.


Or sometimes a restaurant, because some inns also serve food, but more strictly it's a place to sleep for the night. Dictionaries wildly disagree on when this was taken on from French, ranging from the 15th to 18th centuries, which highlights that dictionary compilers have very different databases. The French word is taken from Provençal, with alberga/alberja attested from the eleventh century, which okay would technically be in Old Provençal, at which point it also meant an encampment/hut as well as inn, from a Germanic root (compare Old Saxon heriberga, army shelter, and Old High German heriberga, army headquarters) that also gave us harbor.

---L.

Comments

[full_metal_ox]

I’d periodically wondered whether aubergine, the French and British English word for eggplant (as well as the blackish-brownish-purple color of some cultivars), was regarded as characteristic of (Mediterranean) auberge fare, but it looks as though the etymology is completely unrelated, following a convoluted and branching game of Asia-through-MENA-to-Europe telephone tag:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220622081004/https://morph.surrey.ac.uk/index.php/2022/06/22/the-story-of-aubergine/

[prettygoodword]

Yeah, that's a wild one -- and at the root is Sanskrit vātigagama, “the plant that cures the wind,” and I rilly want the story behind that. Vedics peoples thought it helped with flatulence?

ETA: TIL it looks like Solanum incanum was domesticated into Solanum melongena twice, once in South Asia and once in East Asia, and both times this turned a yellow fruit into a purple one. Wild.

[full_metal_ox]

Which has me wondering if the mere act of cultivation—selecting for higher crop yield, less bitter flavor, and the like—somehow had a collateral genetic effect on the fruit color, as with the Russian researchers who, breeding foxes selectively only for tameness, wound up with surprise mutant color variants and such domestic canine traits as lop ears.

[prettygoodword]

I presume it's something like that, absent any concrete data.