cazabe

Forms

cazabe m (plural cazabes)^[1] The variant casabe is the usual form in Cuba and much of the Caribbean.^[2][3][4] Early texts write caçabi, caçaby and caçaui; the Academy long gave the stressed form cazabí as the source.^[5][6][7]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Taíno caçábi (“bread of cassava flour”), a word of the Taíno of Hispaniola.^[7][8][9] Wiktionary writes the Taíno form *kasabi.^[1] The DLE calls the source an Arawakan cazabí “cassava bread”.^[10] Corominas follows Henríquez Ureña: Las Casas clearly shows that the word was stressed on the second syllable, and the stress on the final ⟨-í⟩ given by Friederici and the older Academy dictionaries is only a printers' error.^[7]

Corominas thinks the likeness to cazavi (“long smock”), a word of Mozarabic documents from Latin gausape, is chance; the word may be related to caça, a thin maize gruel that Fernández de Oviedo cites as an Indian word.^[7]

English cassava, recorded from the 1560s, comes from French, from Spanish casabe or from Portuguese, and ultimately from the Taíno word; earlier English had cazabbi.^[11]

Earliest recorded meaning

Corominas's first record is Columbus's diary of the first voyage, on 26 December 1492.^[7] The DHLE notes that the diary presents caçabí as the islanders' own name for the bread, so that the first use clearly as a Spanish word is in Las Casas's Nuevo memorial of 1516.^[9] In Columbus's letter to the Catholic Monarchs of 1494 the islanders think only of pan, a qu' ellos llaman caçaui “bread, which they call caçaui”.^[5]

Semantic evolution

In the first decades the word named the flat bread the islanders baked from grated cassava root, and Spanish settlers ate it too.^[9][12] Las Casas already used it in 1516 for the root itself, and the Hieronymite instructions of 1517 for the plant, with its fields (labranças de caçaby).^[9][5] The 1726 Autoridades described the bread at length, saying that historians commonly call it pan de cazabe.^[13]

Later senses are regional: in the Antilles, from 1832, a sea fish of the jack family; in Cuba, from 1840, the cassava flour; in Ecuador a sweet made of maize boiled with coconut milk and spices.^[9][14] Today the bread is known as cazabe or casabe from Honduras and the Antilles to Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia and rural Peru.^[2]

Timeline

• 1492 – Columbus's diary, 26 December, records the islanders' word.^[7][8][9]
• 1494 – Columbus's letter to the Catholic Monarchs: caçaui.^[5]
• 1513 – first records in Puerto Rico: el cazabe, yuca, ajes y maíz.^[12]
• 1516 – Las Casas's Nuevo memorial, the first clearly Spanish use, also for the root.^[9]
• 1517 – the instructions to the Hieronymite friars use it for the plant.^[9]
• 1519 – Fernández de Enciso's Suma de geografía: bread of roots called caçaui.^[15]
• 1726 – the Diccionario de Autoridades describes the bread.^[13]
• 1832 – first record as the name of a fish, in Puerto Rico.^[9]
• 1884 – the Academy's dictionary derives it from a Haitian cazabí.^[6]

Meanings

Noun

1. cassava bread: a thin round flatbread made in many parts of the Americas from the flour of the mandioca or yuca root: En el mercado vendían cazabe recién tostado.^[10][2][1]
2. (Ecuador) A jelly-like sweet of maize flour cooked with sugar, coconut milk and spices.^[2][14][9]
3. (Antilles) A sea fish of the jack family.^[9]

Related words

• yuca
• mandioca
• English cassava

Usage notes

Henríquez Ureña, followed by Corominas, rejected the form cazabí that the Academy used to give as the etymon; in the Antilles the word is always stressed cazabe or casabe.^[7]

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. cazabe
3. ^ Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. cazabe
4. ^ Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española; Universidad de Puerto Rico, Tesoro lexicográfico del español de Puerto Rico, https://tesoro.pr, p. s.v. cazabe
5. ^ a b c d Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. cazabe
6. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1884), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 12th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando (the first Academy edition with etymologies), p. 228
7. ^ a b c d e f g Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 1, 932
8. ^ a b Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. cazabe
9. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Real Academia Española (2013–), Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (DHLE), https://www.rae.es/dhle, p. s.v. cazabe
10. ^ a b Real Academia Española; Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2014–), Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed., online version 23.8, https://dle.rae.es, p. s.v. cazabe
11. ^ Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
12. ^ a b Boyd-Bowman, Peter (2003), Léxico hispanoamericano 1493–1993, ed. Ray Harris-Northall and John J. Nitti, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, p. s.v. casabe
13. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 2
14. ^ a b Malaret, Augusto (1946), Diccionario de americanismos, 3rd ed., Buenos Aires: Emecé, p. 231
15. ^ Grupo IATEXT, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, AMERLEX: corpus of americanisms in early texts on the Americas (online database), p. s.v. cazabe