[Sca-cooks] A Question of Spit Roasting....

[Robin Carroll-Mann]

On 6 Apr 2003, at 21:57, johnna holloway wrote:

> OED may say 1661 but the word origin is
> Spanish barbacoa, of Arawak //Taino origin.
> The interesting question would be what do the
> Spanish sources say or what and when did the
> term appear in print in Spanish sources?

The Spanish Royal Academy has a database of historical word usage on their
website.  You can search for a word in hundreds of historical documents and literary
works, and you can limit the search by date.  I searched for occurences of
"barbacoa" prior to 1550, and got hits in two different documents.  One is "The
Natural and General History of the Indies" by Gonzalez de Oviedo (1535), and the
other was the memoirs of Fray Toribio de Benavente.  There are references to the
Indians using the "barbacoa" to roast meat.
http://www.rae.es

It's late; I'll see about posting some translations tomorrow.

> John Mariani says that the word was in use
> in the America prior to that and that it first
> appeared in prinmt here in 1655.

Where is "here"?


Brighid ni Chiarain *** mka Robin Carroll-Mann
Barony of Settmour Swamp, East Kingdom
rcmann4 at earthlink.net