بامية

어원

Unknown; this plant is rarely mentioned in medieval cookery, as eating vegetables standalone and this one in particular has not been common but it has complemented stews, and additionally its mucilage made it improper for the tables of the literate.

With respect to this, it could have been formed somewhere in the center of the Abbasid Empire from a dialectal form of إِبْهَام (ʔibhām, “thumb”) + ـِيَّة (-iyya, used for stews with a characteristic ingredient), especially as the cognate Akkadian 𒋗𒅆 (ubānum, “finger”) also has been used for the crop, and the same consideration gave rise to بَان (bān, “moringa”).

However likewise going by its outward appearance, Classical Persian بامیا (bāmiyā) is internally analyzable as suffixed from بام (bâm, “roof”), in the fashion of مومیا (mumiyâ, “mumijo; mummy”) from موم (mum, “wax”), though the Persian term later be reinforced by borrowing from Arabic.

Otherwise, in view of the geographic distribution of the species and the origin of the coordinate term وَيْكَة (wayka, “dried okra”), a substrate in Nubia has to be considered.