Linguistic Wonders Series

How "Cotton" Came to Harlem
(and All the Other Places English Is Spoken)*
Christopher Ehret
Professor of African Historical Linguistics
University of California, Los Angeles

Words often have quite surprising histories. They can begin with one meaning and end up with quite different connotations because of the vagaries of human history. The English word cotton is a prime example.

When human beings learn of something new, as cotton once was for the English, they need a word to describe the new thing. Where do they get the word? If they learn of the new item from another society, they may adopt that society's word as their own. Linguists call this word borrowing. Alternatively, they may take an older word in their language and reapply it to the new thing. The English-speaking settlers of New England in the seventeenth century, for example, used their old word corn, which previously meant any kind of grain, for the native American grain maize, calling it Indian corn and, later on, just corn.

What does this have to do with cotton? All the dictionaries tell us that this word was borrowed into English via French cotone, from Spanish coton. The Spanish adopted their word still earlier from Arabic qutun during the period of Muslim (Moorish) rule in Spain in the Middle Ages. What the dictionaries do not say is that the Arabic term itself derives from a far more ancient root word of the Afroasiatic language family, to which Arabic belongs, with a rather different meaning. Pronounced something like *kw'it'-, this original root referred to wool or a clump of very curly hair. Arabic, in fact, retains this sense in its related word qatat "curly head of hair."

Now, Arabic (together with Hebrew) belongs to the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. The other major branch of the Afroasiatic languages is Cushitic. The speakers of the ancestral language of the Cushitic branch of Afroasiatic languages extended this root to *kw'it'al- by adding a noun suffix *-al and gave it the more specific meaning "pubic hair."

The most interesting upshot of this change in meaning was that several Cushitic languages in recent centuries drafted the word into use as a euphemism (an acceptable word that replaces an unacceptable one) for the genitals. For instance, in Kw'adza, a Southern Cushitic language spoken in Tanzania that recently became extinct, "k'utsalu" referred to the female genitalia while the Xamir language of northern Ethiopia calls the scrotum "qwacel." Only in the Semitic branch of Afroasiatic was this root word reapplied to the fluffy fibers of the cotton boll, and with that meaning, of course, it spread to the western European languages, such as English.

Once we know the intermediate stages of this word history, the wide range of meanings all begin to make sense. Cotton fibers form a woolly boll on the plant; in German, in fact, the word for cotton is Baumwolle, literally "tree wool." So it is easy to understand how the early speakers of the Semitic languages similarly analogized cotton to woolly hair. And it is even easier to see how the Cushitic peoples came up with their own quite different meanings for the very same ancient root word.
*With apologies to the Shaft movies.