Two passages in Mr. Sewell’s A Forgotten Empire (pp. 237, 333) suggest that Indian Corn, or Maize (Zea Mays), was one of the commonest grains in Vijayanagar in the first half of the sixteenth century. This suggestion is rendered highly improbable by facts known to botanical students, which indicate that maize first reached India through Portuguese agency (vide de Candolle, under Maize), since in that case it could scarcely have become a staple crop on the upland within a very few years of the Portuguese settlement at Goa ; the expression translated “ Indian Corn ” is Milho Zaburro (literally, zaburro-millet), and while this render- ing is justified by all the Anglo-Portuguese dictionaries within my reach, further investigation shows that it is not applicable to our period, when the expression meant not maize but the great millet Sorghum, known in India as jowār. A few details of this investigation will be useful to students as indicating the kind of precautions necessary in handling the evidence of sixteenth- century writers.
The word zaburro occurs in the works of various Portuguese writers on botany, while the allied form ceburro is used in Spanish. Regarding the meaning of these expressions, Dr. Stapf of Kew writes that “ all the botanical authorities whom I have been able to consult, from Grisley, 1661, to Coutinho, 1913, connect Zaburro with Sorghum,” while Sir David Prain, to whose kindness I am indebted for this information, has also given me a reference to Dodoens’ Frumentorum . . . Historia, on p. 71 of which it is stated, under the heading Sorghum, that the Portuguese call it zaburro-millet (“ Lusitanis milium saburrũ appellatur ”). The date of this book is 1566, while the narratives translated by Mr. Sewell date from 1525 to 1535, so that we are justified in conclud- ing that, whatever the modern signification may be, Milho Zaburro meant jowār, and not maize, at the time they were compiled.
Before this information reached me, I had tried to ascertain the meaning by tracing the derivation of the word zaburro (which is not explained in any of the modern dictionaries), but had failed to find any probable or even plausible origin in any of the Latin languages or in those of Northern Africa, the sources from which millets might be expected to have reached the Iberian peninsula, while the first records of the discovery of maize in America showed that the word could not have come from there. When these inquiries had yielded no result, Mr. R. Burn, C.S.I., suggested to me that the word might be of Indian origin and represent a corruption of jowār, and this appears to be the truth. The Portuguese had no letter with the sound of the Indian j, and they represented this sound by z; they had no w, and used either b or v in its place, while they commonly added an o in borrowing a substantive; examples of these changes can be easily found in Hobson-Jobson (e.g. Zedoaria from Jadwar, Baçaim from Wasai, Mungo from Mung), and it is clear that jowār might easily become zubāro, or with a natural change of stress, zaburro. At this point the suggestion was referred to Sir George Grierson, who wrote that metathesis of the u and the a need cause no difficulty, and that the word zaburro might be treated as most probably a corruption of jowār.
We thus reach the conclusions that zaburro certainly meant jowār in the sixteenth century, and that it is most probably the same word, transformed in the mouths of the Portuguese. Why it should now be given the sense of maize is a different question. If, as the dictionaries say, maize has assumed a Portuguese name belonging to a millet, the assumption can be paralleled in various other languages: in English, maize is commonly called corn (“Indian Corn”); in French, it is wheat (“blé de Turquie”); in South Africa, it is “mealies,” that is milje, or millet; and in Oudh, it is “great jowār.” It is, however, more probable that the Anglo-Portuguese lexicographers have been misled regarding the word, which is described correctly as a variety of Indian millet in Figueiredo’s dictionary published in 1913, but at this point the interest of the topic becomes purely philological.