The introduction of tulips are questioned yet the lilac is definitely introduced by Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq.Mavi Boncuk |
Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq was an ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor at the Sublime Porte (the Turkish Sultan's court in Constantinople) from 1555-62. In essence Ogier was a was a writer, herbalist and diplomat.
De Busbecq was the illegitimate son of the Seigneur de Busbecq, Georges Ghiselin, and his mistress Catherine Hespiel. He was born in 1522 and spent his lifetime in the employ of three generations of Austrian monarchs. The majority of what is known of de Busbecq's experiences in the Ottoman lands is as according to his accounts written in letters which he wrote. These letters were part of personal correspondence to his friend, Nicholas Michault, who was also a Hungarian diplomat.
In his first letter de Busbecq says: "As we passed through this district [on the road from Adrianople to Constantinople] we everywhere came across quantities of flowers--narcissi, hyacinths, and tulipans, as the Turks call them. We were surprised to find them flowering in mid-winter, scarcely a favourable season....The tulip has little or no scent, but it is admired for its beauty and the variety of its colours."- Busbecq, Turkish Letters (I, pp.24-25)
Ogier wrote a lot about plants and animals that he saw in the Ottoman lands. It was because of this that he sent some tulip bulbs to his friend Charles de l'Écluse, who breeded and adapted them to life in the European climate. Other than this, de Busbecq is also credited to have been the first European to describe yoghurt and by so doing introduce it to Europe.It was from Istanbul that the Flemish scholar and traveler Ogier Ghiselen… brought back to Vienna in his baggage in 1563 gifts from the Sultan’s gardens. Among them was a plant called the ‘’lilac’’[1]. Planted in Ogier Ghiselen’s garden in Vienna, the Lilak or Turkischer Holler as the Austrians called it, attracted much attention. There the lilac bloomed for the first time in western Europe.
Ogier Ghiselen moved to Paris in 1570 and remained in France until his death in 1592. He brought a shoot of lilac with him to Paris. The lilac began to fill the gardens of Paris.... Besides the wild blue-flowered lilac, two color variants sprang up early on in European gardens; a white-flowered form and a purple-flowered form. Literature does not provide a record of their origins, only the gardens in which they grew.... The deep purple lilac was first grown by James Sutherland in the Edinburgh medicinal gardens in 1683 and was therefore called the Scotch Lilac. The botanic homeland of ‘’Syringa vulgaris’’ was identified in 1828, when naturalist Anton Rocher found truly wild specimens in the Balkans.In the American colonies, lilacs were introduced in the eighteenth century. Peter Collinson, F.R.S., wrote to the Pennsylvania gardener and botanist John Bartram, proposing to send him some, and remarked that John Custis of Virginia had a fine "collection", which Ann Leighton interpreted as signifying common and Persian lilacs, in both purple and white, "the entire range of lilacs possible" at the time.
[1] In modern Turkish the word is spelled ‘’leylak’’ and means Lilac tree and Lilac color. The venerable etymology dictionary by Walter Skeat (1888) derives the English from the Turkish, the spelling of which Skeat has as ‘’leilaq’’. Skeat says the Turkish is from Persian, and he cites the 19th century Richardson’s Persian-Arabic-English Dictionary, wherein are the Persian words ‘’līlaj’’ = ‘’līlang’’ = indigo or blue; and ‘’nīlak’’ = blueish. Richardson’s contains no Arabic word along the lines of ‘’Lilac’’. The closest to Lilac of any word in Arabic in Richardson’s is “nīlaj” = indigo, and also Arabic ‘’nīlīy’’, which is translated as “blue, [or] livid [color], [or] blackish” (and neither of those words are capable of generating ‘’lilak” in Arabic).
Older English spellings for lilac included “laylock”, “lilack” and “lilock”. The generally pretty good etymology dictionary by Ernest Weekly (1921) states that Lilac’s path of descent is “Old French (now only in plural ‘’lilas’’), Spanish, Arabic ‘’lilak’’, Persian ‘’lilak’’,… [et cetera].... Earlier ‘’laylock’’ is via Turkish ‘’leilaq’’.” There, Weekly’s statement is that the deceased English wordform ‘’laylock’’ came via one path while the surviving wordform ‘’lilac’’ came via another path. That makes no sense of the evidence. There are no attestations of the Persian word meaning the bush; only the color word was in Persian. The language that changed the primary meaning from the color to the bush must be on every path of descent. Which language was that? Arabic provides no hard info to answer that question because the word is not attested in Arabic either as a color or as a bush (except at a date too late). But since the bush couldn’t flower in the climate of the Arabic speaking lands, it is safe to say it couldn’t’ve been Arabic that changed the meaning to the bush.
Spanish couldn’t’ve borrowed an oral dialectical Arabic word for the Persian color word because the date, early 17th century, is way too late. Today’s online official dictionary of the Spanish language, the (DRAE), says the Spanish word is from French. It also says the French is from Arabic: “Del fr. lilac, este del ár. līlak, este del persa lila[n]ǧ o lilang....” The official dictionary of the French language, CNRTL, says too that the French is not from Spanish. It says the first attestation in French is in year 1605 spelled ‘’lilac’’ and its meaning was the lilac tree. The color sense is not recorded in French until 1757 and was an extension of the botanical meaning, it says. What was the origin of the 1605 French? The official dictionary of the French language often has detailed word etymologies, but in this case it has a terribly short answer with no supporting citations and no supporting facts: “Empr. à l’ar. līlāk” = “borrowed from Arabic līlāk”. No explanation for how French was borrowing a word for an ornamental flower tree that does not flower in Arabic-speaking lands. A word with no attestations in Arabic writings!
Modern Arabic dictionaries have the word ‘’al-līlak’’ meaning the lilac flower, but NOT the lilac color. My English-Arabic dictionary translates the lilac color as لون أرجواني فاتح ‘’lawn arjawani fatah’’ which translates back as “light purple color” or “light fuchsia color”. Since lilac trees do not thrive in Arabic-speaking lands for the reason mentioned above, and so are not well-known to Arabs, the name ‘’līlak’’ would be too arcane to get circulation as a color name in Arabic. It’s highly likely that the botanical name ‘’al-līlak’’ is a modern import, since it’s absent from older Arabic dictionaries and older Arabic botanical writers.
In what language was the meaning of lilac modified from the Persian “a pale purple-ish blue hue” ("blue, as the fingers with cold”, says Richardson’s Dictionary), to the European “the lilac tree and its lilac-blueish flower”? I expect it was Turkish. My modern English-Turkish dictionary—namely translate.google.com—says English lilac is Turkish “leylak” and is also “leylak rengi” where “rengi” is the Turkish for “color”. I don’t know how for how long the Turkish is attested in Turkish. I know that to get a color name established in a language to the point where it’s in the dictionaries requires lots of supporting practical context in the society.
Asking translate.google.com for the Persian word for Lilac returns two results which I can’t interpret except for the fact that they have no relationship whatsoever to the old Persian ‘’lilak/nilak’’.
The old Persian ‘’lilak/nilak’’ color word had natural linguistic support in Persian because it’s a dimunitive of a common, general Persian word for blue, ‘’nil’’; the diminutive means “blueish”. In Arabic it doesn’t have such support because “nil” is not in common general use for blue, and the Pesian diminitive “ak” is not recognizable as any such thing in Arabic. Arabic does use “nil” for indigo dye, and for the Nile river, but the word we’re talking about Lilak not Nilak, and Arabic would never connect a “nil...” with a “lil...”. For Arabic to adopt the foreign Persian word “lilak” it would need a practical application, a commonly seen visually defining reference, and I’m not aware of any. The same goes for Turkish before the plant got introduced.