Food words have some seriously gnarly roots, but follow them far
back enough, and you can see culinary history all tangled up in a few
short syllables. Welcome to Eat Your Words
Yogurt has become such a ubiquitous part of American
breakfast-and-healthy-snack culture that it's been naturalized as a
plain English word. Like zucchini or pita, it's completed the journey
from utterly alien loan-word to humdrum noun, one that we can throw
around without the italics of foreignness or "according to locals" scare
quotes.
But "yogurt" began in Turkish, as yoghurt (there go the italics!). The Turkish word itself comes from an Old Turkish root, yog,
meaning something like "condense" or "intensify," which is pretty much
what happens to milk when you let it curdle into yogurt. Makes sense!
And the actual dish has been around for thousands of years--not
surprising
for something as simple as "old warm milk"--and was popular in ancient
Egypt, Rome, and Greece (where they called it oxygala, "acid milk").
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