8 DECEMBER 2001, Page 14

Mind your language

WAS standing in the kitchen the other day discussing Christmas cake icing with a friend while the menfolk were sitting down in the next room rambling on about the best way of avoiding Andover or of defeating the Taleban. My friend Maggie had bought some horrible yellow marzipan from Tesco and I was trying to justify my contention that this had little to do with the delicious Spanish kind of marzipan. I attributed the Spanish superiority to Arabian influences and instanced the Arabic origin of the Spanish word almendra, 'almond', from which the paste is made.

Now I have discovered that almendra does not come from Arabic at all. The prefix algenerally represents the Arabic definite article. Here it is a false friend. Almond comes from the ancient Greek amugdale by a pretty cascade of descent. Its Latin derivative, amygdala, in later forms acquired an 'n' in the middle: amingdala. The Italian side of the developing Romance languages disregarded the initial vowel, making it mentfola and now mandola. The Spaniards, being used to words truly derived from Arabic, tacked an alon the front, and then in the last syllable mutated the 'I' to an 'r': al'mendala, now almendra. The French took alamendala and via alamandre came to say amande. The English once pronounced our own word as almaund or almond, but have now dropped the '1' sound. I think those who retain the are merely using an erroneous spellingpronunciation.

This fluid variation of forms has nothing on the etymology of marzipan, which may well have a genuine Arabic origin. The old-fashioned English form is marchpane, and the variant marzipan is influenced by German. But a mediaeval Latin form of the word apparently meant a 'little box' or 'a kind of coin' (not the same thing). The clever philologist Kluyver in the July 1904 number of Zeitschrift fur deutsche Wortforschung claimed that the mediaeval Latin word matapanus referred to a Venetian coin showing Christ enthroned, and that the word derived from Arabic mauthaban, meaning 'the king that sits still'.

This etymology seems almost too good to be true. In any case, I have rejected nasty English marzipan as a means of preventing my Christmas cake from leaching its brownness through my pearly royal icing, preferring an even smear of apricot jam. Apricot — there's another word of oriental glamour.

Dot Wordsworth