Hebrew, pepper, and Columbus

HAARETZ: Word of the Day / Pilpel: How Christopher Columbus' mistake confounded early Israeli cooks. Ask your spouse to pick up 'pepper' and you'd better be specific, thanks to competing explorers giving the same name to very different plants.

The Hebrew word for pepper is pilpel.

The story of a geographical mix-up that wound up confusing two categorically different plants starts in India, the source of black pepper, where it was called pippeli. The spice was brought to the Middle East by Persian merchants in the mid-first century BCE, where Jews encountered it for the first time in its Aramaic form - pilpel. That is the name of the pepper in the Mishnah and the Talmud and that is its name to this very day.

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Meanwhile, their neighbors, the Spanish, were seduced by an unknown Italian named Christopher Columbus into trying to reach India from the other direction – head west, circle the globe and reach the pepper-rich coast from the east.

Remember, they didn't know about the American continent and Columbus sailed right to it. Not that he understood where he was. He didn’t find Indians or pepper, but believing that he had, he called the natives ‘Indians’ and their hot spice - the chili - pepper, though that fruit and the black seeds we know as pepper are totally unrelated.

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And the situation becomes even more complicated in Hebrew. Columbus's mistakes have been disquietingly influential.