英语词汇corn的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

corn; maize. When in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” a home- sick Ruth stands “in tears amid the alien corn” (the phrase is Keats’s own and not from the King James Bible), she is standing in a field of wheat or rye, any grain but New World corn. The English have always used the word corn to describe all grains used for food and never specifically for the grain that built the Mayan and Incan empires. Corn derives from the Old Teutonic kurnom, which is akin to granum, the Latin word for grain. Kurnom eventually became the Old Saxon korn and then corn in Old English. The semantic confusion arose when English settlers in America named corn on the cob “Indian corn” soon after Squanto brought ears to the starving Puritan colony in Massachusetts; the settlers then dropped the cumbrous quali- fying adjective “Indian” over the years.

The British call our “corn” maize, a word that derives from the Spanish maiz, which has its origins in mahiz, a Caribbean Indian tribe’s name for the plant. But while “corn” is the most valuable food plant native to the New World and has a fascinat- ing history and manifold uses (employed in more than 600 products, it may even have been used as a binding for this book), it is still little known in Europe. This is perhaps because most corn loses some 90 percent of its sugar content an hour after harvesting and can’t survive a transatlantic voyage without losing practically all its taste, though today there are new varie- ties that hold their sugar much longer.

词汇	corn
词源	corn; maize. When in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” a home- sick Ruth stands “in tears amid the alien corn” (the phrase is Keats’s own and not from the King James Bible), she is standing in a field of wheat or rye, any grain but New World corn. The English have always used the word corn to describe all grains used for food and never specifically for the grain that built the Mayan and Incan empires. Corn derives from the Old Teutonic kurnom, which is akin to granum, the Latin word for grain. Kurnom eventually became the Old Saxon korn and then corn in Old English. The semantic confusion arose when English settlers in America named corn on the cob “Indian corn” soon after Squanto brought ears to the starving Puritan colony in Massachusetts; the settlers then dropped the cumbrous quali- fying adjective “Indian” over the years. The British call our “corn” maize, a word that derives from the Spanish maiz, which has its origins in mahiz, a Caribbean Indian tribe’s name for the plant. But while “corn” is the most valuable food plant native to the New World and has a fascinat- ing history and manifold uses (employed in more than 600 products, it may even have been used as a binding for this book), it is still little known in Europe. This is perhaps because most corn loses some 90 percent of its sugar content an hour after harvesting and can’t survive a transatlantic voyage without losing practically all its taste, though today there are new varie- ties that hold their sugar much longer.
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