قوقوروز

Ottoman Turkish

قوقوروز

Alternative forms

• قوقوروس (kukurus), قوقروز (kukuruz), قوقروس (kukurus)

Etymology

Unknown, several theories exist.

• From Albanian kokërrëz, from kokërr (“bead, pellet, grain”).
• Alternatively, of Slavic origin, a word used to feed poultry, see Proto-Slavic *kurъ (“cock”) with its many derivatives, in which case the descendants table must be omitted. The Serbo-Croatian word is first attested as kukuruza ‘buckwheat, Fagopyrum’ in 17th-century Ivan Belostenec's Gazophylacium. Compare the coordinate term Serbo-Croatian kikirìki m, Macedonian кикири́ка f (kikiríka), Albanian kikirik m (“peanut”), which, though it be of Italian origin, was surely interpreted as relating to chicken so that an analogical formation could be created, with a consonant added to append declensional endings.
• However, the word kuku used translingually to imitate and attract chicken might have been combined with the Ottoman Turkish رز (rüz), ارز (ürüz, “rice”), which may have had a back vowel since the choice between front and back vowel after Arabic ر (r) was unstable and earlier Ottoman was less palatalized.

Terms like the dialectal Czech turkyň, turkyňa, Czech turkyně, Italian granturco, French blé de Turquie, German türkischer Weizen, Türkischkorn, Hungarian törökbúza originate in New Latin frumentum turcicum mistakenly coined by European botanists in the 1530s, but their survival until present day may indicate that the consumption of maize spread to southeastern and east-central Europe from the Ottoman Empire.

Noun

قوقوروز • (kukuruz)

1. maize

   Synonyms: مصر بوغدایی (mısr buğdayı), مصر داریسی (mısr darısı)

Descendants

• Turkish: kukuruz, kokoroz (dialectal)
• → Armenian: քուքուռիկ (kʻukʻuṙik)
• → Bashkir: кукуруз (kukuruz)
• → Bulgarian: кукуру́з (kukurúz)
• → Czech: kukuřice
• → Polish: kukurydza
• → Romanian: cucuruz
  • → Ukrainian: кукуру́дза (kukurúdza)
• → Russian: кукуру́за (kukurúza)
• → Serbo-Croatian: kukùruz
  • → German: Kukuruz
    • → English: kukuruz
  • → Hungarian: kukorica
• → Slovak: kukurica
• → Slovene: korúza

References

• Kerestedjian, Bedros (1912) “قوقوروز”, in Kerest Haig, editor, Quelques matériaux pour un dictionnaire étymologique de la langue Turque (in French), London: Luzac & Co., page 273
• Nişanyan, Sevan (2002–) “kokoroz”, in Nişanyan Sözlük