Plums, prunes and tuica

Now for a lovely example about words expanding or compressing their meaning when introduced into a foreign language. Linguistically, the origins of the word ‘prune’ are to be found in the Middle English period, from Old French, via Latin from Greek prou(m)non. In Latin ‘pruna’ denotes the genus of the actual plum tree, but today, in English, prune merely denotes the plum ‘preserved by drying, having a black, wrinkled appearance’. Further, it has the secondary, metaphorical meaning of an ‘unpleasant or disagreeable person’. Plum, on the other hand, signifies the fruit, the tree, the colour, and, informally, as an adjective, ‘a highly desirable attainment, accomplishment, or acquisition, typically a job’. This word is recorded in the dictionary as coming from Old English plume (with a line on the u), from medieval Latin, pruna. So this word existed earlier in the English language. In Romanian, which is the Romance language that has kept the most Latin forms, the word is, unsurprisingly, pruna, plural prune. How about for a historically unverifiable (? I put my faith in you historians out there) question: since when have people made brandy and jams and what not? What was on a medieval food table – of the wealthy, let us say, to leave more scope? All answers, albeit speculative, welcome.
People here are picking plums at the moment. They go for days and days, because it is a year with a lot of plums. There are more than 100,000 plum trees in this valley, mostly planted during communism, and not a penny has been invested in the orchards since the revolution at least... Part of the neighbouring comuna’s territory was a state farm of fruit trees, mainly functioning by unpaid labour, recruiting students into so-called Praktika, and the army into agricultural labour. People were considered chiaburi if they owned a still, because they could apply the custom of asking for a tax amounting to a tenth of the production of people who would use the still in the village. The plums are delicious, and will be mostly end as the traditional brandy, tuica (pronounce: tzuica, because of the , below the t that I cannot reproduce on the internet). For this end, they are kept in wooden casks for a while until they have fermented. Then, through a distillation process, the alcohol is separated from the fruit, and the wash remains for fodder purposes. The first bit that seeps out of the still is very strong and I recommend waiting… (one coughing, cursing anthropologist-wimp will result otherwise, in my own experience). I am very curious whether and how the new EU regulations will be applied in this regard, and whether a new return to secret brandy making will happen, just like in communist times (for the Aberdonians: Illicit Stills will multiply in the village…). In the spring, when there was some distilling going on in the other valley, people were arguing that, in fact, the legislation of last year needed to be applied to these plums (and apples) because the harvest was from 2006. I feel this discourse is on the brink of changing (it don’t take no clairvoyant to predict this… ;-P). Noroc!