[PW] Chinese expressions

[Fuller, Thomas (US - Washington D.C.)]

I've been on the road a lot and have also not felt particularly smart
about recent postings, so I have been (some might say mercifully) silent
lately.

But in the interests of lively scholarly discourse, and keeping the
Archives up-to-date, I can't let pass unchallenged the recent tangential
remarks about Marco Polo and spaghetti.  The notion that Mr. Polo
introduced pasta to the Italians from his travels in China is of long
vintage and is, at the very least, open to question.  Leaving aside the
question of the exact meaning of pre-Polo European references to
pasta-like products, the plain fact is that people all over the world
have for millenia been mixing ground grains of many sorts with water,
drying them, and later cooking with them;  call it noodles, pasta,
dumplings, or any of countless other synonyms in many languages and
cultures, ascribing the "invention" of such foods to anyone is in my
view tantamount to ascribing the invention of, say, cooked meat to any
particular person or culture.  It something we've all been doing since
before we wrote anything down.  The Marco Polo story is perhaps fun to
tell, but that's about as far as it goes in my view.

The argument that "spaghetti" is a word of Chinese origin seems to me
not even much fun to tell.  The earliest written reference per M-W is
1888 (earlier attributions invited), and its derivation from the
Italian, and ultmately Latin (that is, also pre-Polo) roots meaning
"string" seem incontrovertible.

Other views are welcome, particularly those of the learned Professor
Dyson, so steeped in both food history and Romance languages is he.
Interested readers might also take a gander at Serventi and Sabban,
Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food (translated by Antony Shugaar)
(2002) -- or, if your Italian is up to it, the 2000 original:   Pasta :
storia e cultura di un cibo universale.

-- Tom (not, we hope, totally off his noodle) 

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