A rosy story

This morning, BH retailed a story about roses she had picked up from somewhere, to the effect that in the beginning all flowers were called roses and primroses were so called because they were the first roses of the year, that is to say the first flowers. A plausible enough story, but with the morning newspaper being yet to arrive, I thought to check.

OED devotes around a page to primroses and starts by confirming that the word does indeed come from the Medieval Latin 'prima rosa', literally the first rose. There is also talk of primula, primerole, primerolle and primorose. With the primose being a sort of primula and with primula being a diminutive form of the Latin for first.

It devotes rather more than three pages to roses and starts by reporting that much the same word is used in most European and Scandinavian languages. So presumably a word from our  past, perhaps from some extinct common ancestor of the top two fifths of the language diagram at reference 1, the part in yellow, Irish down of Old High German Gothic. Maybe lob in the green section on the grounds that the Russian for rose seems to be rose flavoured. But not the purple section as Sanskrit does not know about roses. Which just leaves the blue section hanging on for another day. Sadly, the word 'rose' does not appear in reference 2, the source of the diagram, at all.

Nothing in OED about it ever having been a term for flowers more generally - although there is plenty about various flowers with rosy names which are not roses, like the Christmas rose, the rose of Sharon and the rose of Jericho. Not the same thing at all.

Much the same story in Larousse, but I do learn that the stripey rosewood is from a tree of tropical America, again nothing to do with roses. As it happens, I have long owned various carpentry tools substantially made of rosewood, but I have never bothered to enquire how such stuff came to come from the roses in the garden. I was also reminded that while 'rose' is the regular word for pink in French (with pink being the name of another sort of flower in English), we tend to use 'rosy' when we are not using 'pink'.

Littré, as one would expect, is rather stronger on literary and poetic uses of the word.

Nothing further added by my elementary Latin dictionary, first published in 1891, from the pen of that eminent classicist, C. T. Lewis, of the famous Lewis & Short family of dictionaries. Google knows all about them. Perhaps Bullingdon Boris has one on a shelf somewhere.

So the part of the BH story about the derivation of the word primrose is confirmed. But the rest of it is unproven. We don't know the circumstances in which the primrose came to be known as the first rose and there is no evidence supporting roses starting out as flowers more generally.

Reference 1: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/08/aryans.html.

Reference 2: Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis - Will Chang, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall, Andrew Garrett - 2015. Open access.