When Columbus first visited the West Indies he encountered a nation of people who called themselves the Galibi, a name meaning brave people. Because the pronunciation of Galibi varied slightly from dialect to dialect, European explorers sometimes heard the name pronounced as Carib and sometimes as Caniba, prompting different words to arise from each variant. From Carib, the word Caribbean evolved, while from Caniba, the word cannibal developed, thanks to reports that the people of these islands ate one another (but after Columbus enslaved the Caribs and forced them to dig the gold out of their islands, it became more apparent who was devouring whom). After the word cannibal appeared in English in the mid sixteenth century, it soon became a familiar word: in the early seventeenth century, Shakespeare even punned on cannibal in The Tempest when he invented Caliban, the name of an enslaved brute who gathers wood for Prospero. A little known synonym for cannibal is anthropopha-gus, deriving from the Greek anthropos, meaning human being, and the Greek phagein, meaning to eat. In English, the word anthropophagus appeared at almost exactly the same time as cannibal, the mid sixteenth century.<\/p>\n
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When Columbus first visited the West Indies he encountered a nation of people who called themselves the Galibi, a name meaning brave people. Because the pronunciation of Galibi varied slightly from dialect to dialect, European explorers sometimes heard the name pronounced as Carib and sometimes as Caniba, prompting different words to arise from each variant. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c"],"yoast_head":"\n