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cannibal (KAN-uh-buhl) - n., a person who eats human flesh or organs; an organism that eats others of its own or similar kind.
(Here’s that pin from yesterday.) Okay bear with me, and not just because, yes, this is stretching things as a food word, as it’s also stretching things as a Taíno word. I mean, we did get it (via Spanish caníbal) from Taíno Caniba, their name for the Carib peoples who migrated from the South American coast into the Windward Islands—but Taíno speakers got it from Island Carib name for themselves, Karibna (lit. “person/people”), which had been retained from the Cariban they spoke when they lived on the mainland, before adopting as their main language the Arawakan spoken by those they’d defeated/displaced. Taíno speakers feared the Caribs as fierce fighters, and passed on to Columbus both their name and their reputation as eaters of their defeated foes. [Sidebar: Said rep was greatly exaggerated.] The word Karibna also became Carib itself, and so named the Caribbean, as well as caribe, another name for piranhas. So, yeah, an endonym that became derogatory.
---L.
(Here’s that pin from yesterday.) Okay bear with me, and not just because, yes, this is stretching things as a food word, as it’s also stretching things as a Taíno word. I mean, we did get it (via Spanish caníbal) from Taíno Caniba, their name for the Carib peoples who migrated from the South American coast into the Windward Islands—but Taíno speakers got it from Island Carib name for themselves, Karibna (lit. “person/people”), which had been retained from the Cariban they spoke when they lived on the mainland, before adopting as their main language the Arawakan spoken by those they’d defeated/displaced. Taíno speakers feared the Caribs as fierce fighters, and passed on to Columbus both their name and their reputation as eaters of their defeated foes. [Sidebar: Said rep was greatly exaggerated.] The word Karibna also became Carib itself, and so named the Caribbean, as well as caribe, another name for piranhas. So, yeah, an endonym that became derogatory.
---L.
