Pickle is definitely the right word. Achar is a Persian loan word in Hindi. There's no good reason to use that as a standard term when writing in English. Both pickle and achar would sound alien to my great-grandparents, who spoke neither English nor Hindi. They would use the term uppinakaayi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Asian_pickle
Achar is not a Persian loan word in Hindi. Just because it's similar to the Persian word doesn't mean it's a loan word. Ancient Persian (Avestan) and Sanskrit were extremely similar to each other (basically the same language). So there are many old concepts and ideas that have the same words in the two languages. Achar is one of them, it's possibly a much older word.
What is the Indo-Iranian etymology you are proposing?
There is no attested word "achaara" referring to a pickle in any Sanskrit dictionary I know of (I just checked several). The standard Sanskrit words for pickle have very clear analyses, i.e. avaleha ("licked down"). A similar analysis of "achaara" in Sanskrit would lead to a nonsense meaning of "not-moving".
Whereas, there is a clearly related Persian word "achaar" for a similarly preserved food, which apparently doesn't appear in any Indian texts prior to Mughal rule of South Asia.
Even if there were a shared Avestan/Sanskrit antecedent, many words that share a common ancestor in those languages got re-borrowed in their Persian form into Hindi during Mughal rule.
For example, the common Hindi word "garam", meaning hot, is a direct borrowing from Persian "garm". It replaced a related word for hot/heat from Sanskrit: "gharma" (the loss of original aspiration on the "g" is a feature of Persian). Both words share the same origin, but the Persian version is the one used across South Asia today.
Similarly, Hindi "chaador" meaning "blanket", is a Persian borrowing that also has a Sanskrit cognate "chhaadana" meaning "cover".
I am not proposing any etymology. Just wanted to point that achar is not a loan word from Persian. It's not even the primary word for pickle in Persian actually (achar also means pickle but it sounds very odd in Persian, not an everyday word for pickle). That's what ticked me off about OP's comment. Pickle in Farsi is Torshi, especially in the Farsi that Mughals spoke (central Asian dialects). Afghans still call pickles torshi and not achar. On the other hand, my Nepali friends call their traditional pickles achar, and they have near zero Perso-Arabic influence in their vocabulary. In summary, there is no evidence that achar was a word brought in by the Mughals.
I couldn't find the etymology for achar, but I found references to classical Persian (Avestan) and Proto-Indo-Iranian. Apparently Ayurveda mentions achar, so it's possible that at some point there was a distinction between medicinal pickles and popular everyday pickles.
Nobody knows of course, but to me it's likely that achar has ancient origins, possibly in old Indus Valley or Gangetic Plains. In either case, history of pickle in Indian subcontinent and words used to describe isn't as simple as a loan word.
> That's what ticked me off about OP's comment. Pickle in Farsi is Torshi, especially in the Farsi that Mughals spoke (central Asian dialects). Afghans still call pickles torshi and not achar.
Words shift usage all the time. Especially in multi-linguistic scenarios, adaptation of terms is very common. Also, loan words often preserve archaisms. You see this quite clearly in the use of archaic Sanskrit borrowings in languages like Tamil or Malayalam when the same word has been lost in Hindi.
> I couldn't find the etymology for achar, but I found references to classical Persian (Avestan) and Proto-Indo-Iranian. Apparently Ayurveda mentions achar, so it's possible that at some point there was a distinction between medicinal pickles and popular everyday pickles.
Please share the credible original date-attested Ayurveda text sources that unequivocally demonstrate the occurrence of that word prior to the influence of the later Persian language.
Avestan alone is insufficient evidence because despite its similarities to Sanskrit, still has many lexical differences, and the presence of a word in Avestan doesn't immediately imply it's presence in Sanskrit.
Also, The Sanskrit sources contemporary
with Avestan are in Vedic Sanskrit, which lacks that word.
Ayurveda texts are much younger, and are composed in Classical Sanskrit.
Also consider that borrowings occured even in ancient times (i.e. the word "kendra" meaning "center" is a direct borrowing from Greek into Sanskrit). Lateral transmission of vocabulary is as old as humanity.
> In either case, history of pickle in Indian subcontinent and words used to describe isn't as simple as a loan word.
I never questioned the history of the Indian food or the multitude of other words used in contemporary Indian languages. I'm only addressing the claim that the word "achaar" isn't a borrowing.
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.
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
> I think "non-moving" in Sanskrit should be "achara", not "achaara", i.e. a short "a" sound, not a long one, for the second syllable.
Thanks for the correction. Yes, "achaara" is non moving. "achara" simply doesn't exist AFAICT, so my point stands that it's a Persian borrowing, not a Sanskrit derivative.
But you switched them around below in your reply, compared to what I said above:
>Yes, "achaara" is non moving. "achara" simply doesn't exist AFAICT, so my point stands that it's a Persian borrowing, not a Sanskrit derivative.
And regarding words that "don't exist": in Sanskrit, anyone can make up words, by combining other existing words, as I think (but am not sure) is the case in German. Both Sanskrit poets and prose writers often do, but literally anyone can, including you and me, as long as the rules for making words up are followed. I don't have a citation for this, but interested people can look it up somewhere.
> And regarding words that "don't exist": in Sanskrit, anyone can make up words, by combining other existing words, as I think (but am not sure) is the case in German.
You are thinking of compounds.
Compounds are words that are composed (sometimes in realtime) of two or more independent words.
There are several classes of these categorized by their function. English also has such compounds, how it depicts them differently in writing, so we're not used to thinking of them as such.
Nonetheless, the presence of the realtime compounding mechanism does not show that the Hindi word "achaar" was not borrowed from medieval Persian, unless it can somehow be attested at an earlier time in Sanskrit, which it hasn't been. Furthermore, a real-time made-up compound "achaar" wouldn't make any sense by any of the Sanskrit compounding rules.
>Compounds are words that are composed (sometimes in realtime) of two or more independent words.
The procedure (i.e., rules) for joining or combining multiple words into one larger word is collectively called sandhi in Sanskrit, IIRC.
There is also another related word and procedure that I forget right now.
I am not a linguist or a philologist or whatever the right term is, but one other way of generating new words is to add a prefix in front.
Like adding the prefix "a" (which implies negation) in front of a word, such as adding it front of "satya" (truth) to get "asatya" (falsehood / not truth).
There are other such prefixes in Sanskrit, such as "sa", "vi" and "pra", which are used, for example, in the words "savikalpa samadhi", "vijnana", and "prasiddha" or "pralaya", to name just a few.
Sanskrit is a very interesting language, to say the least ...
>any Sanskrit dictionary I know of (I just checked several)
What are those Sanskrit dictionaries you checked? I'm not saying you are wrong, I just want Sanskrit resources, since I know it some and am interested in it.
I grew up (British) with it called pickle, sure we also had pickled onions^ etc. which are quite different, but that doesn't mean it's wrongly translated - for one thing they've both been through the pickling process; for another (perhaps more importantly as a layman term) everyone understands it as pickle.
I don't know what they think would be a better translation (i.e. explicitly not just borrowing achar ourselves too) - salsa maybe? Seems weird to use a loan word from a completely different culture for a different preserve, and anyway I suspect Britain had achar before salsa.
(^Anyway you would never say 'pass the pickle' for pickled onions, maybe something like piccalilli, which is relatively achar like! Although I'm not sure how good an argument that is, it probably was colonially achar-inspired, heavily uses yellow mustard seed which I think isn't/wasn't cultivated here (for harvest of seeds for culinary use I mean).)
Why do you say that? I wrote a longer reply here to someone saying the same, but in brief my guess is that you're thinking of (US) 'dill pickle'?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37725552
Nimbu achar is called lime pickle in the UK. That doesn't seem strange and nobody's surprised at what they get, so why is it 'so wrongly translated'?