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savanna or savannah (suh-VAN-uh) - n., a tropical or subtropical grassland with scattered trees.
Thanks, WikiMedia!
These occur where the rainfall is seasonal, so that the plants need to be drought resistant -- this causes the trees to be far enough apart that the canopy doesn't touch, allowing grasses to cover the ground. The earlier form was zavana, from Spanish zavana, which in turn had the earlier form çavana, from Taíno zabana.
And because I have an excess word, a bonus: tobacco (tuh-BAK-oh), any of several plants of genus Nicotiana of the nightshade family, especially N. tabacum, cultivated for its leaves which are prepared for use in smoking or chewing or as snuff. From Spanish tabaco, which has an iffy etymology, as it could be from an Arawakan or Carib language, but one Spanish chronicler recorded Taíno tabago, meaning either a tube for smoking tabacco or a roll of tabacco leaves i.e. a cigar; if this is correct, the consonant shift was probably influenced by atabaca/altabaca, a Mediterranean plant with aromatic leaves widely used in traditional medicine, named from Arabic al-ṭubbāq.
And that wraps up this theme of words from the Caribbean language Taíno. That's the late group of words from indigenous languages of the Americas that I have, but I'm not quite done with this series -- but first a week of random lexicography.
---L.
Thanks, WikiMedia!
These occur where the rainfall is seasonal, so that the plants need to be drought resistant -- this causes the trees to be far enough apart that the canopy doesn't touch, allowing grasses to cover the ground. The earlier form was zavana, from Spanish zavana, which in turn had the earlier form çavana, from Taíno zabana.
And because I have an excess word, a bonus: tobacco (tuh-BAK-oh), any of several plants of genus Nicotiana of the nightshade family, especially N. tabacum, cultivated for its leaves which are prepared for use in smoking or chewing or as snuff. From Spanish tabaco, which has an iffy etymology, as it could be from an Arawakan or Carib language, but one Spanish chronicler recorded Taíno tabago, meaning either a tube for smoking tabacco or a roll of tabacco leaves i.e. a cigar; if this is correct, the consonant shift was probably influenced by atabaca/altabaca, a Mediterranean plant with aromatic leaves widely used in traditional medicine, named from Arabic al-ṭubbāq.
And that wraps up this theme of words from the Caribbean language Taíno. That's the late group of words from indigenous languages of the Americas that I have, but I'm not quite done with this series -- but first a week of random lexicography.
---L.
