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by 19f191ty 985 days ago
Yes, languages chage and all, but words rarely completely disappear. If achar was originally Persian, then it has completely disappeared from modern Persian, which is bizzare.

This is how you spell achar in Persian, اچار. Find me a dictionary that has an entry for this word. You'll find it in Urdu dictionaries (same spelling), but not Persian, even Afghani Persian, which is much closer to Urdu. You know why that is? It's because achar is NOT a modern Persian word. And by modern I mean last 1000 years or so. It couldn't have been a Persian loan word because there are absolutely no references to it in Persian, at least in the last 1000 years. There's no credible evidence at all to that claim. Just some blog articles and non-experts parroting the same claim with zero knowledge of Persian or even most Indian languages.

As to the real etymology. I don't know man, not easy to find. You can Google Ayurveda and achar, that's all I got. Can't find the original Ayurvedic sources either. You sound like you know some vedas and Sanskrit. Would be great if you can lookup what pickles are called in Ayurveda. In the modern lingo, Ayurvedic pickles are also called achar. And Ayurveda products usually keep their original naming. I don't know of any example where they prefer a colloquial word over an Ayurvedic word. So they calling it achar seems to me that the word predates Ayurveda.

You're right, I couldn't find references to achar in Vedic Sanskrit or Avestan. So it's probably not that old. Although, it could be that those texts didn't bother writing about everyday things like pickles. If those texts mention pickles, but use a different word than achar, then one can claim that pickle wasn't called achar.

1 comments

> This is how you spell achar in Persian, اچار. Find me a dictionary that has an entry for this word.

Here you go:

https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/steingass_query.py?qs=...

Well there you go, so it seems there were records of the word's usage around 1820s. Nice job. I can tell you one thing though. In colloquial Persian, achar for pickle is not used. It sounds odd and usually signifies some relation with Indian style pickles