English
Hottentot
Hottentot comes from Dutch Hottentot ‘a Khoekhoe person, a member of the native…’.
- Dutchc. 1500–presentHottentot‘a Khoekhoe person, a member of the native people of southwestern Africa’
- Englishearliest quotation 1912same form
attested reconstructed ? uncertain or disputed
Lineage
- Dutchc. 1500–presentHottentot‘a Khoekhoe person, a member of the native people of southwestern Africa’
- Englishearliest quotation 1912same form
Earliest quotation: 1912, George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion: “Ive tried her with every […] possible sort of…”
first attested Borrowed from Dutch Hottentot, its first known use in Dutch being in the 1650s (as stated in the etymology)
The story
A very large number of different etymologies for the name have been suggested ... The most frequently repeated suggestion ... is that the word was a spec. use of a formally identical Dutch word meaning ‘stammerer, stutterer’, which came to be applied to the Khoekhoe and San people on account of the clicks characteristic of their languages. However, evidence for the earlier general use appears to be lacking. Another frequent suggestion is that the people were so named after one or more words which early European visitors to southern Africa heard in chants accompanying dances of the Khoekhoe or San ... but the alleged chant is rendered in different ways in different 17th-cent. sources, and some of the accounts may be based on hearsay rather than first-hand knowledge.
Every English word from Dutch Hottentot
Today it means
noun A member of the Khoekhoe group of peoples.
Language periods are conventional ranges, not dates for this word.
Etymograph / Dutch Hottentot / Hottentot