It’s the genius of any language, we suppose, to alter an adoption from another language into familiar syllables.
It was the famous grapes of Shiraz in Iran, or rather, the wine from those grapes, to which we owe the word carboy.
The wine was put up in large bottles of green or blue glass, which, for protection, were encased in basketwork. The native name for such a globular bottle was, by transliteration, qaraba, a term difficult to English tongues.
But merchants and traders speedily surmounted that difficulty by resolving it into the convenient syllables, carboy.
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