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Comment by miyhhbftdx | Hacker News Reader

> The word “curry” originated in India, although it did not have a long history there. Instead, it derived from a Portuguese mispronunciation of a term meaning “spices,” which British colonizers applied to a wide swath of Indian dishes.

Such misinformation that I can't even...

Kari is a Tamil word. I am Tamil. It has been in the vocabulary for thousands of years. Just made some elephant yam kari for lunch. It is always dry. Zero gravy. Something with gravy is kootu.

(Japanese kare is something completely different. It is by definition a thick gravy. It might trace its origins to india. But it is a separate dish now.)

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FWIW online etymologies seem to suggest this description isn't totally off, but I agree the bit about it not having a history is transparently wrong.

Etymonline[1]:

> kind of sauce or relish much used in Indian cookery, from the leaves of a southwest Asian plant related to the lemon, 1680s, from Tamil (Dravidian) kari "sauce, relish for rice," also "a bite, bit, morsel." As "meat or vegetable stew flavored with curry powder," 1747 in British English.

This one implies that கறி can refer to the spice in a dish as well as the dish as a whole--seems likely. That is, for instance, how "masala"[2] works in Hindi, which literally means 'spices' but can help form the name of an entire dish, as in "paneer masala".

Wiktionary[3]:

> 1747 (as currey, first published recipe for the dish in English[1][2]), from Tamil கறி (kaṟi), influenced by existing Middle English cury (“cooking”),[2] from French cuire (“to cook”) (from which also cuisine), from Vulgar Latin cocere, from Latin coquere, present active infinitive of coquō.

> Earlier cury found in 1390 cookbook Forme of Cury (Forms of Cooking) by court chefs of Richard II of England.

To be clear: what happened here is that English already had a word "curry" (this is the one we get in the expression "curry favor"), and it encountered and incorporated the Tamil word which coincidentally had an identical pronunciation and a very related meaning.

[1]: https://www.etymonline.com/word/curry#etymonline_v_491

[2]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%BE%E...

[3]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curry#Etymology_1

> To be clear: what happened here is that English already had a word "curry" (this is the one we get in the expression "curry favor"), and it encountered and incorporated the Tamil word which coincidentally had an identical pronunciation and a very related meaning.

It would be a good candidate to look into the origins of further, perhaps there is a proto-indio-european link and it's not a coincidence.

Tamil is dravidian, not indoeuropean.

Interesting that a synonym for கறி is தேய் which google-tamil translates as either curry or chafe the later meaning to warm by rubbing which then may be an attempt to curry favor with someone :)

If you curry a horse, you are (generally) not cooking it but brushing it with a curry comb (the chafe or rubbing meaning). This would be where 'currying favor' comes from, since horses tend to like being curried.

If Google Translate is machine learned for Tamil->English, I suspect it is just confused.

That was simply an amusing illustration of an English word which lacks a clean etymology or consistent usage

Exactly! There is also a term "kaai-kari" meaning vegetable dry side dish for a main course. Kari as a term is as old as pepper. Any dish that had pepper used to be called as kari (see [1])

[1] https://dsalsrv04.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/tamil-lex_query.p...

There is another etymology that 'Curry': Cury (from French cuire, meaning to cook) appeared in the 1390s in an English cookbook, 'The Forme of Cury'.(From Wikipedia).

On a tangent - there are at least two other instances of "Kari" in Tamil (the words for Meat and Charcoal). The last two are distinct in their Tamil spellings, but it is impossible to render this distinction in Roman script :)

I can imagine that the culinary term is somehow derived from (or related to) the term for Charcoal, since the verb form implies blackening by fire.

May be from Malayalam rather than Tamil. In Malayalam, the dish with gravy is Curry, and dry dishes are never described as curry. Portuguese had at least initially more interaction with the west coast of the Indian peninsula, than the east coast, I suppose.

But even in Malayalam, curry/kari could also be used as an umbrella term for any accompaniments with rice, dry and wet. 'Chorum kariyum' - in this context curry is accepted as all the stuff that you eat with a regular rice meal (including the dry 'thoran'), atleast in where I'm from.

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