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Is “Piiman” pepper?

2020.02.18
  • Tetsuta Komatsubara
  • Food
  • 2020
A dictionary is a helpful tool to automatically transform a word of your language into a word of a foreign language. For example, when you look up the Japanese word piiman in a Japanese-English dictionary, you will find green pepper or bell pepper. According to this result, a piiman is a kind of pepper. Is it correct? There are a few pepper-related words in English. For example, chili pepper, black pepper, and green pepper. They are all pepper. In contrast, Japanese assign different names to these three plants: tougarashi, koshoo, and piiman.
Chili pepper was introduced in the 16th century from Portugal. At that time, European merchants were routed via China to Nagasaki, so it has been called tou-garashi, which means karashi “mustard” of tou “China”. The noun karashi “mustard” comes from the adjective karashi “spicy” in old Japanese. In Japanese, mustard has been representative of spicy things.

The word pepper originally meant black pepper, which was very important trade goods in the 15th century. Christopher Columbus was so eager to find the trade route to India that he misunderstood the spicy vegetable in the new continent as pepper in India. As a consequence, English integrated chili pepper into the category of pepper, so they don't have a word that directly means the red vegetable.
By the way, piiman sounds similar to piment (/pimɑ̃/) in French. It is said that piiman first appeared in the Meiji period when Japan started to import it from the U.S., so it is mysterious why Japanese adopted a French-like sound, not an English-like sound, for the green vegetable then. In French, piment is a general term for chili pepper and green pepper, and black pepper is excluded from the conceptual area the word piment covers. In this sense, assigning the word piiman, which sounds like piment, to the green vegetable is more accurate than the word pepper.

Back to the first question, you might conclude that it is not appropriate to call the green vegetable pepper, and it is better to use the word piment instead. However, the usage was not conventionalized in the history of English. Inconveniently, we cannot use words that the language does not permit us to use. That's language.



Photo Credit: Lisa Fotios@pexels.com

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