Baumwolle is an Old Word
Cotton is an old word, but people west of India and north of Sudan often call cotton “tree wool.”
iṣe naš šipati “the tree which bears wool” (inscription of Sennacherib of Assyria describing plants in his garden, 705-681 BCE) Chicago Assyrian Dictionary volume “I” p. 217
“This breastplate had been stolen by the Samians in the year before they took the bowl; it was of linen, decked with gold and tree-wool (εἰρίοισι ἀπὸ ξύλου), and embroidered with many figures” Herodotus 3.47.2 (c. 430-420 BCE) tr. A.D. Godley slightly adapted, cp. 3.106.3, 7.65 on tree-wool in India and Theophrastus, On Plants IV. 7, 8 on cotton grown on the island of Bahrain (Akkadian and Sumerian Dilmun, Greek Tylos)
Middle and Modern German Baumwolle “tree wool, cotton” (already appears in Erec by Hartmann von Aue around the year 1185 per https://www.koeblergerhard.de/mhd/mhd_b.html “boumwolle”, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm do not have much to say. The line about a saddle cushion soft as a cotton (ein Paumwol) is line 7703 of the Ambraser Heldenbuch so there is Innsbruck content!)
Do my gentle readers know this calque in other languages?
Further Reading
Javier Álvarez-Mon, “The Introduction of Cotton into The Near East: A View from Elam,” International Journal of the Society of Iranian Archaeologists, Vol. 1, No. 2, Summer-Autumn 2015 pp. 43-54 https://archive.org/details/the-introduction-of-cotton-into-the-near-east-a-view-from-elam
Oppenheim, A. L., 1967. “Essay on Overland Trade in the First Millennium B.C.” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 21, pp. 236-254.
Encyclopedia Iranica, “ARJĀN TOMB” https://iranicaonline.org/articles/arjan-tomb and “COTTON i. Introduction” https://iranicaonline.org/articles/cotton-i
Elsa Yvanez and Magdalena M. Wozniak, “Cotton in ancient Sudan and Nubia”, Revue d’ethnoécologie [Online], 15 | 2019, Online since 30 June 2019, connection on 21 February 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ethnoecologie/4429; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ethnoecologie.4429
Ambraser Heldenbuch: Transcription and Scientific Dataset https://www.uibk.ac.at/projects/ahb/
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(scheduled 21 February 2024)
[…] 65 say that Indians wear garments of tree, but by comparing other passages Herodotus clearly meant tree-wool or cotton, perhaps a word dropped out?” Public-facing research does not do this so often, […]