[PW] Chinese Spaghetti

[Hadden, Robert L ERDC-TEC-VA]

Dear Thomas Fuller:
	As Churchill once said, more or less, "I have seldom needed to eat my
own words. But when I've had to, I've found them to be quite tasty, if a
little tart."
	So, I will admit that I may have been wrong about Marco Polo bringing
spaghetti to Italy. My main point was that translating the "Flying Spaghetti
Monster" from English into Chinese, would you use the original Chinese
characters for noodles or spaghetti, or the modern Chinese characters that
mean the Italian pasta dish? How can we untangle this tangled web we weave?
	And if I must eat my words, I certainly plan to eat them with a nice
dinner of spaghetti and meatballs, with a very nice Chianti to wash them down
with, thank you very much. 
	And if the story about Marco Polo bringing spaghetti to Italy isn't
true, well, then it should be. 

Lee

R. Lee Hadden
Geospatial Information Library (GIL)
Topographic Engineering Center
ATTN: CEERD-TO-I (Hadden)
7701 Telegraph Road
Alexandria, VA 22315-3864
(703) 428-9206
Robert.L.Hadden at usace.army.mil

"Curiosity is not a nice virtue- and it never leads to innocence." -Donna
Haraway

See some of my writings, both online and on paper, at my author page at:
http://www.librarything.com/author/haddenrobertlee



Message: 1
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:11:06 -0400
From: "Fuller, Thomas \(US - Washington D.C.\)" <tfuller at DELOITTE.com>
Subject: [PW] Chinese expressions

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)