Yes, we have ginger, and catamaran, and mulligatawney soup -- do people know what that is? I think they do in England. It's from meligu = pepper; tani = water. Yay Tamil!

You can buy it in tins in UK supermarkets - a Sunday night supper staple during my childhood. How excellent to discover the name is from Tamil - thanks!

be on the lookout for ginger Altoids!

I can't contribute much to the Indo-Dravidian discussion but I do know that the Cantonese for it is something like: geong.

I learnt this word during my wife's confinement period after the birth of our second child (a one month rest after giving birth is a standard practice in east Asia and very sensible one too). Her mum had flown over especially to cook her the special foods needed to help a new mother recover from the birth. Ginger is very "yang" and is a chief ingredient.

After a few weeks on a diet of this stuff, I got used hearing the cry "Geong!" which was the exasperated sound of my wife spitting it out onto the side of her plate.

Also:

First Traffic Pileup Blamed on Ginger

A really weird side note is that the Finnish word for ginger is inkivaari, which looks a lot more like the Tamil word than any of the Indo-European words, or even the proto-Dravidian root, do. How about that?

I guess it probably came from the German Ingwer. Does Finnish replace G sounds with K sounds in cognates?

That reminds of another interesting thing: the Estonian word for Bank is Pank, but the words for Bus and Bar are Bus and Baar. I guess Pank was borrowed before the Estonian phoneme inventory loosened enough to allow B's to appear.

Oh yeah, Xhenxhefil is the Albanian word for ginger. It's pronounced Jen-je-feel, with the tongue tip pretty far forward on the J sounds (if the tongue tip was far back it would be Gjengjefil).

I started reading "The Ginger Man" this weekend, and noted that there is a Malaysian (IIRC) bar and grill in midtown called The Ginger Man -- no idea if the name is Donleavy-influenced or no.

I looked up Tamil iñci in Burrow & Emeneau's Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (429) and they list other cognates, along the Skt and Pali terms. There's also a cross-reference to (5535) Tamil vêr 'root, anything rootlike; foundation'. No mention of Skt vera 'body' which is not a very common word according to Monier-Williams. I think s'rngaveram is a folk etymology from the Dravidian.

Ah, well so much for my *c- theory then. The folk etymology idea certainly sounds likely.

For more languages, see http://www-ang.kfunigraz.ac.at/~katzer/engl/generic_noframe.html?Zing_off.html

Wow -- the mother lode! For Chinese, Jeung, Chiang, Jiang, Keong are clearly dialect or spelling variants of one word, as are Sang keong, San geung, Shengjiang, and Shen jiang; I wonder how Gan jinang fits in? Anyway, here's the direct link. Many thanks.

Yeah, that site's a favorite of mine. I pointed the guy who runs it to this discussion, and he gave me this additional link ( http://www.hum.ku.dk/ami/ginger.html ), which is pretty interesting. It does, however, contain some untranslated Icelandic you reading this, Renee?)