A linguistic journey in the Levant
Back from a two-week trip to Turkey, Philipp and I were reminiscing once at dinnertime over all the different kinds of glorious food that we had in each of our stops – Istanbul, Çanakkale, Ayvalık and Izmir. In spite of the deliciousness with which we came across, we observed how limited the variety of food can be in urban settings; at some point, it all comes down to kebap. Adana kebap, şiş kebap, Urfa kebap, İskender kebap, you-name-it kebap. A great holiday treat for two otherwise almost vegetarians, kebap is only one tiny piece of the immense world which is Turkish cuisine (which I am exploring through this book by Turkish chef Musa Dağdeviren).

It is not perchance that my first post on this blog is about food. In fact, whenever we eat or cook something – both of which we do with great enthusiasm -, we end up debating about the etymology of food terms and their possible cognates in languages spoken in the places which we have or haven’t yet explored. Food is a phenomenon quintessential to languages, landscapes and people both in terms of the topics central to this website project and in the sense that it is a fundamental element of human societies. Food is talked about and carried around by people on the move; this has been the case throughout human history.
Our debating session at dinnertime started from Levantine cuisine, more specifically with the question whether köfte, qubbah (also kubbeh, kibbeh) and kebap (also kebab, kabab) are etymologically related. It is easy to notice that the three words, in their manifold spellings depending on the specific language or dialect variety, have a similar sound structure. Those familiar with phonetics will see that all of these words begin with a velar, uvular or palatal plosive sound – respectively, [k] [q] or [c] -, and involve a bilabial plosive [b] – [p] or labiodental fricative [f] sound in central position.To be more obnoxious, I will briefly list the words mentioned above and add a transliteration in round brackets if needed, as well as phonetic transcription by the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) conventions in between slashes:
- Turkish köfte: /cœfte/
- Arabic كبة (kubbah): /kubba/
- Türkisch kebap: /ce.bɑp/
These words all indicate heaps of meat formed in a round or rounded form: kubbah and köfte, whether made out of just meat or coated in a semolina dough, whether grilled, fried or boiled in beetroot soup, generally resemble meatballs. As for kebab, whether eaten on single tiny skewers or grated down onto a plate from the big skewer used for döner kebap , in both cases it consists in a mass of meat pressed into a form with rounded edges. The same applies for ćevapi and ćevapčići, closely related to the Turkish word and used in Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian and other languages spoken in the Balkans to describe tiny grilled sausages usually eaten with a side of onion, ajvar and kajmak cheese.

From the gastronomic domain, the discussion expanded onto other words in modern Hebrew and Arabic which we stumbled upon through our etymological rabbit hole. The first word with a similar sound structure which came to my mind was כיפה kippah, the cap worn by Jewish males. Next to indicating the traditional Jewish cap, kippah in Hebrew means dome. In fact, the Dome of the Rock, one of the oldest surviving examples of Islamic architecture, situated in Jerusalem, is called in Hebrew כיפת הסלע Kippat haSela.


The word kippah also appears in כיפת ברזל kippat barzel, i.e. Iron Dome, the air defense system used by the Israel Defense Forces. The Arabic equivalent of kippah is قبة qubba, which by the way also lead to Spanish alcoba and English alcove, among others. An alcove is a sort of a refuge, a secluded retreat which might be found in some cavity. The English word cove and its equivalents in other European languages might also seem to be etymologically related to alcove and hence qubba, but several queries suggest a Germanic or Latin origin of the word. Interestingly, Latin adjective căvus, meaning hollow, can also be used to refer to the palm of the hand, which can be thought of as a rounded cavity used to contain something – or to form meatballs, if this chain of associations is not leading us too far along the rabbit hole.

As is generally known, Arabic and Hebrew belong to the linguistic family of Semitic languages. This means that the Arabic and Hebrew words cited in this article would generally not be considered phylogenetically related to words with Indo-European or other etymology, except in the case of borrowings, of course. Interestingly, as my graduate school colleague in Munich and linguist Dr. Yossi Pinhas brilliantly argues in this book, there has likely been intense language contact between Semitic and Indo-Germanic resulting in striking lexical and structural similarities between the two language families.
The point of time at which the linguistic and cultural contacts between the two have taken place remains difficult to determine. However, the arguments presented by Yossi Pinhas are especially appealing for the linguistic excursus through the Levant presented in this article. In fact, coming back to cove, alcove and căvus, I immediately associate them with Hebrew כף kaf as in כף יד kaf yad, i.e. (palm of the) hand. Kaf and the diminutive כפית kapit also mean spoon, an object which evidently involves a cavity as its main characteristic. By the way, kaf also is the name of the letter used to write the Hebrew word for palm of the hand, i.e. this letter here: כ which coincidentally looks very much like a rounded cavity…

Let’s go back to kebap, köfte and kubbeh. Scrolling through etymological dictionaries of Arabic, Turkish and Persian, it remains difficult to understand clearly what the root k-b-b designates. As is mostly the case when dealing with the origin of words, the queries do not yield unequivocal results. While k-b-b seems to be associated with the meaning of rolling, indeed as the gesture one performs when making meatballs, there also are hints to a meaning of burning and roasting, which would have nothing in common with the meaning of words such as kaf, kippah, căvus etc.
This discussion leaves me with yet more questions about the relations between Semitic and Indo-Germanic languages, and perhaps with even more hunger. I think I’m going to get a (vegan) kebap.
See you in the next one!

Eine Antwort zu „What do a kippah, a kebap and a köfte have in common?“
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