Category Archives: Language Learning

Etymology of Sugar and Candy: A Sweet Journey

As we are between the festivals of Diwali and Halloween, I thought it would be appropriate to do a shorter etymology post.

Diwali, the Festival of Lights, celebrates the triumph of good over evil and light over darkness. You’ll find homes lined with diyas and lamps, fireworks and sparklers, and lots of sweets.

Halloween, on the other hand, brings a sense of eerie mystery, with costumes, carved pumpkins, and candy capturing the season’s spookiness rather than light and renewal.

But did you notice what these holidays have in common?

Sugar and candy. But where did these sweet words come from? Hidden in the syrup of gulab jamun and beneath the wrappers of Reese’s pumpkins is a fascinating linguistic journey, one that travels across continents and millennia, from ancient India to medieval Europe, carrying the legacy of trade, language, and humanity’s desire for sweetness.

From Sanskrit to Sugar

Before candy bars or kaju katli, there was śarkarā (शर्करा), the Sanskrit word for “ground or granulated sugar.” Originally, śarkarā referred not to refined sugar but to small, gritty pebbles or crystals. As Indians began refining sugarcane juice into crystalline form (a process perfected in the Indian subcontinent over 2,000 years ago) this miraculous sweet substance took on the name śarkarā.

Through centuries of trade along the Silk Road and maritime spice routes, the word śarkarā took on new forms in new languages. In Prakrit, an ancient vernacular in North India, it became sakkarā, which Persian traders adopted as šakar (شکر). The Arabs carried it onward as sukkar (سكر), and medieval Latin scribes recorded it as succarum or zucarum.

By the time it reached medieval Europe, the word had solidified into Old French sucre and Italian zucchero. From there, English borrowed it as sugar in the 13th century.

So the next time you sprinkle sugar into your pumpkin spice latte or stir it into your kheer, remember you’re using a word that began in Sanskrit and traveled the world through trade and culinary innovation. Every grain of sugar is a speck of history, carrying both the memory of ancient India’s language and its ingenuity.

A tldr version of the history of “sugar”

śarkarā -> sakkarā -> šakar (شکر) -> sukkar (سكر) -> succarum -> sucre/zucchero -> sugar

The Story of “Candy”

If sugar is the mother of sweetness, then candy is its offspring. This word also has roots in India, from khaṇḍa (खण्ड), meaning “piece” or “fragment.” When sugar was first crystallized, it often formed into large blocks or shards, which were broken into khaṇḍas, pieces of sweetness.

Persian merchants, who became experts in the sugar trade, adopted the word as qand (قند), meaning sugar or sweet substance. Arabic then transformed it into qandī, meaning “made of sugar.”

This Arabic form found its way into European tongues through the bustling trade of the Middle Ages, first appearing as Italian candito and French candi (as in sucre candi, “crystallized sugar”). By the 14th century, English had adopted the word as candy.

The original “candied” goods were fruits or nuts preserved in sugar, luxury items fit for nobles and festivals. Over time, as sugar became more widely available, candy came to mean any sweet confection. And by the 20th century, it had taken on its modern association: the sugary bounty of Halloween night.

A tldr of “candy”

khaṇḍa (खण्ड) -> khaṇḍas -> qand (قند) -> qandī -> candito/candi -> candy

A Trick and a Treat for the Mind

So when a costumed zombie knocks on your door shouting “Trick or treat!” or your aunty sends you a package of soan papdi, remember that even the word “treat” shares roots with trade and exchange. Sugar and candy are just two of the words (and wonders) we’ve borrowed from India.

Each piece you unwrap or spoonful you dissolve in your tea carries a soft echo of its past: fragments of Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic melted together through centuries of travel and taste. Like sugar, language preserves what it touches, crystallizing memory, meaning, and migration into something still on our tongues. Sweet, isn’t it?

Tadka: Learning to Name the World

Opening Note:
One of the first things I learned in Kerala was that food speaks to you. When mustard seeds splutter in hot oil, it’s a signal: add the curry leaves, the shallots, the chillies. Over time, I realized language works the same way. It teaches me when to pause, when to listen, and how to name the world with new words.

Tadka (To My Younger Self)

When the mustard seeds splutter,
that’s when you add the curry leaves, shallots, and chillies.
Call them by their names: kaduk, kariveppila, ulli, mulak.
Repeat them, ketto?
They will be your anchors later.

You will learn the names of vegetables, fruits, grains first,
by accident.
Your ears will be covered in scales until they aren’t,
and rice, fish, turmeric will become chor, meen, manjalpodi.

Hold on to the astonishment of learning them,
tracing the seas they’ve crossed,
the shores they’ve touched.
Remember, Babel wasn’t a punishment.
It was a gift:
a doubling, trebling of names
for tomato, onion, wheat.

You will want to tell someone about this wonder,
but you will feel alone.
In India, they will shrug,
we know these things only.
At home, eyes will glaze over.
You’re allowed to marvel anyway,
maanasilaayo?

You will still want to shrink into a corner,
fear and self-doubt strangling you.
But you’ll press forward anyway,
shoulders tight, breath shallow, heart pounding.

It’s the same acceptance of terror that gets you
through airports, onto planes
to your mother, father, and brother,
not to relive the old days, but to
build new ones–
good times, now,
with their granddaughter.
You learn to do what must be done. 

On these visits, you will pass your grandparents’ house.
You’ll see black trash bags slumped on the porch,
weeds swallowing the yard.
Look away if you must.

When you walk inside for the last time,
you’ll search for their scent in the damp,
unheated walls of late winter.
It won’t be there.
You will realize:
loss doesn’t wait for your return. 

And still, the seeds will pop
when oil meets flame.
The crackle is now, never then.
It will not pause for a house
that now belongs to someone else.

Fragrance will rise, sharp, insistent.
The present will announce itself
in smoke and spice.

So listen, mol:
you don’t need to live inside what is gone.
Stir the heat into what is here.
Add the zest.
Name things as they are.
Find beauty in words for what’s to come.
Eat while it’s hot.

Memory will cool soon enough
on your tongue.

Closing Note:
The crackle of mustard seeds hasn’t stopped surprising me. It’s a small sound, but it reminds me that life is always beginning again, in kitchens, in words, in the ways we honor our pasts.

Image from Pexels.

5 Tips For Loving Your New Country

Well, you did it. You packed up and shipped off to another country; your dreams of wanderlust coming true. Soon enough, weeks or months have passed, and you’ve settled into a routine. But things aren’t as fun as you’d hoped.

Your bathroom looks weird, beds and pillows are too hard or soft, and the grocery store doesn’t carry anything you like. The climate is too hot or cold. It’s exhausting trying to do anything official where no one speaks your language. Everyone else’s concept of time is different from yours.

These are small problems, but small seems huge when you’re away from what’s familiar. Before you know it, homesickness creeps into your stomach.

A lot of blood, sweat, and tears goes into living overseas. You need to break down your beliefs and values, maintain your boundaries, cry a lot, and laugh more than you cry.

Believe me, I know. I’m going on a decade here in Kerala, and my physical and emotional changes careened through ups and downs. I never had any desire to live in another country. I was content to live in or near Pennsylvania for the rest of my life. Well, life had something else planned for me.

When I arrived in Calicut, I was a starry-eyed newlywed, thrilled to live with my husband. Not one thing about India bothered me. Giant cockroaches? Fine. All-day powercuts? Bring it on.

Then our daughter was born, and I ran face-first into a cultural wall. Everything I found endearing became an imposition, and I went into an “I’m here on a long vacation” mindset. Over time, I pulled away from that thought and grew to love my life. Now, I can’t imagine living anywhere else but Kerala. No matter where I am, I’ll leave a piece of my heart here. It’s my home.

But it wasn’t until recently that I figured out how I fell in love with Kerala. There are a few definitive things I did that made me feel like I now belong here. So, for the sake of anyone plunging into a new culture, I’m giving the few tips that helped me the most.

1.) Be observant.

When moving to a new country, this is the best piece of advice. Observe people. Check out their behaviors. Watch what they’re doing, but even more importantly, watch what they’re not doing. I learned so much about how to behave in India by shutting my mouth and observing.

Some things I learned: eating with my right hand and without utensils, not crossing my legs when I’m visiting someone’s home, replacing handshakes with head nods when meeting someone. These are small things, but people notice when you do them differently.

2.) Learn the language.

You knew this was coming. I’m not telling you to only learn to communicate with people. That is, of course, the biggest benefit to studying a new language. You create and deepen new connections with native speakers.

Learning the language blows your world wide-open. You can understand a new slew of music, movies, jokes, and idioms. For me, few things have been more satisfying than finally understanding Malayalam memes.

Learning a new language has a host of benefits. It stimulates the brain, stalls cognitive decline, and boosts creativity! So get signed up for a class and start your language journey!

3.) Throw yourself headfirst into the local culture.

Throwing yourself into anything when you’ve moved to a new country seems like the last thing you want to do. But please trust me on this one. It gives you an enormous appreciation for your new home. Take a dance class, a singing class, an art class. Pick something and try it, even if you’re terrible forever.

Learn the history of the art form. Attend a local performance or exhibition. You won’t regret it.

As for me, I’ve written before that I learned (and am still learning) mehndi. And right before the pandemic, I started Bharatanatyam lessons, which I love, love, love. Both have rich histories, and I gained new admiration for all mehndi artists and Bharatanatyam dancers.

4.) Cook the food. This, my friends, is what pulled me out of my cultural adjustment funk. When you cook the local cuisine, you tie yourself to much more than the food itself. You become connected to history, language, and relationships.

Recipe by recipe, I restored my self-esteem by perfecting a huge part of Malayalee culture – their food. Pride wells inside when I hear a Malayalee say, “Brittany is an expert in making biryani.”

5.) Stay humble. Over the years, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve culturally screwed up. It’s fine to make mistakes! But when Zac would explain how to avoid issues in the future, I’d rear up and demand why I had to change my behavior. The answer is rather dissatisfying: Because I had to.

Remaining culturally humble isn’t easy. It requires daily self-reflection: wondering how I can better communicate with and listen to people, and how I can better show my respect. It’s understanding the history and dynamics of where you’re living.

There is no sensitive way to say this, but it is neither your job nor your place to change the society where you live. Instead, amplify the voices of locals and citizens who are already changing things. They have done the hard work and deserve recognition.

I hope no one has read through this and now believes I sit stiff as a board and don’t speak so that I don’t offend anyone. If that was true, I wouldn’t have written this. Around friends and family here, I am totally myself. Frankly speaking, though, I am not the same person as the one who existed a decade ago, and that’s a good thing.

And there you have it. My five main tips for adjusting to a new country. While these won’t solve many other daily frustrations (a whole other ballgame), I hope they help people appreciate their new homes.

Namukku Pokaam! Let’s Go!

Long time, huh? I’ve been MIA on here for four years.

No excuse for it other than life happened, and I found it difficult to sit down to write.

I’ve been working on resurrecting this blog for a while, but couldn’t find the “right thing” to post about. All the Google results for “restarting my defunct blog” said to make a big comeback post! Tell everyone what you’ve been up to! I’m uncomfortable with rehashing the past two years and, before that, we weren’t even in India for an entire year (Cleveland is a lovely place to live, by the way).

Instead, I’ll go down a different path – a language path, more precisely. For the past two years, my daughter, like many, was stuck in online classes. Getting her to do schoolwork was like pulling teeth. Especially for her least favorite subject – Malayalam. I’m not going to lie, it was my least favorite too. The texts used in Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) schools here are like trudging through waist-high mud. Walls of Malayalam text, preachy stories, and absolutely zero translations for those of us who are not native speakers. Evelyn suffered through, writing page after page of words she didn’t understand. By the end of her first and second grades, Malayalam had us burnt out. I had no idea how to make it fun or interesting when her school text was trying its best to be neither of those things.

Enter BhashaKids – a small business that curates and creates bilingual learning products in South Asian languages, including Malayalam, Tamil, and Hindi. BhashaKids is run by Anitha, a US-born Malayalee, who didn’t want her children to lose out on learning their heritage language like she did. She runs a super engaging Instagram page, promotes new authors who write bilingual books, and coaches families and language schools on bilingualism. Her goal is to make learning Malayalam FUN. This was how I learned about the book “Namukku Pokaam,” a Malayalam/English book. Desperate to show my daughter learning a new language can be fun and painless, I ordered it right away.

“Namukku Pokaam,” written by Supriya Cherian and illustrated by Mili Eugine, tells us a charming story of Rosy, a young girl, and Rocky, her dog, as they journey through some common backdrops of Kerala. Together, they explore everything from mango trees to oru vazhathoppu (a banana farm). Rosy, her hair adorned with mullappu (jasmine flowers) and in her cheripukkal (slippers), runs with Rocky through a hill station, and then they chase poombatta (butterflies) through a field. Finally, ending their day with a ball game and feeling the breeze on the oonjaal (swing), Rosy and Rocky go to bed and sleep under the starry sky.

I love the story. It’s simple and innocent, and the illustrations remind me of the stories my husband narrates about his childhood visits to Kerala. Spending all day outside, in nature, with animals, and then collapsing into bed at night, exhausted from the day’s activities.

My daughter loved the book because she could relate it to it far more than any other Malayalam story she has read. Rosy looks about the same age as my daughter, and she has a dog just like we do. This did exactly what I hoped for her – she wants to read it, and she wants to learn the words and phrases.

The book’s focus is on teaching some basic Malayalam vocabulary and phrases to beginners, and it does a great job of that. Short, complete sentences are at the top of each page, showing the reader the fundamental building blocks of Malayalam sentences – “Let’s go to the pond” is “Namukku pokaam kulakkarayil.”

I love that Cherian wrote everything in this book in proper Malayalam script, Manglish (Malayalam using the English alphabet), and English. I think it’s vital to have Malayalam script because it helps not only with learning the Malayalam alphabet, but it assists in proper pronunciation of words. Believe me when I say, if you only learn to read or speak the Manglish words, you’re probably not pronouncing them correctly. Malayalam and English are worlds apart in some ways, and it’s why so many of us English-only speakers royally decimate pronunciation…and vice versa, let’s be honest.

Cherian wrote a delightful and educational book, and I recommend it to everyone who wishes to start their Malayalam journey. Yes, even if you’re a grown-up! It’s a great way to start learning how to create simple sentences in Malayalam and to add some words to your vocabulary. If you wish to buy a copy, visit BhashaKids or Gaps & Letters.

If you’re interested in finding out more about bilingual merchandise in Malayalam, Tamil, or Hindi, do visit BhashaKids and see all the fun products available.