The Names of Meerschaum: Meerschaum, Écume de Mer, Sepiolite

The names of meerschaum illustrate a single mineral named four different ways in four different languages, each by a different logic. This hydrated magnesium silicate, with the formula Mg4Si6O15(OH)2·6H2O, is called sepiolite in mineralogical literature, Meerschaum in German, écume de mer in French, and lüle taşı in Turkish. One name describes what the stone looks like, another what it resembles, and a third what it is used for; the only direct translation relationship among them is between the German and French terms.

The Sea-Foam Comparison

The literal meaning of the German Meerschaum is "sea foam." The word entered English as-is in 1784, at first describing a soft white type of clay, and from 1789 also the bowled pipe made from that clay. The French écume de mer is a direct translation of the German. The physical basis of the comparison is plain: the stone is porous, soft, and white, and pieces of its low density do not sink in water. One etymological dictionary notes that the description was not unique to German, and traces it through the Latin spuma maris and the Greek halos akhne to the Persian kef-i deryâ; not every source accepts this chain.

As the comparison took hold, some began to take it literally. Popular publications of the nineteenth century circulated explanations claiming the stone was solidified sea foam washed ashore, or formed from the shells of marine creatures; though experts of the time repeatedly corrected these, the belief lingered on in print for a long while. In fact the earliest record of the stone being used in pipe making dates to around 1723: by the time the word had settled into European languages, the material was already well known.

The Scientific Name: Sepiolite and Its Predecessors

The mineral's scientific name in use today was proposed by the German mineralogist Ernst Friedrich Glocker in 1847. Sepiolite is built from the Greek sepion, describing the porous inner shell of the cuttlefish, and lithos, meaning "stone"; the reasoning behind the choice is that the stone's texture resembles this shell. Other names circulated in the literature before this one. The Swedish mineralogist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt's compendium, which classified minerals by chemical composition, was published in 1758; it is reported that he recorded the substance corresponding to sepiolite there under the name "keffekil." According to the same literature, Richard Kirwan used the name "myrsen" in 1794, and R. J. Haüy adopted the French écume de mer in 1801; neither of these two attributions has been confirmed in independent sources. Keffekil is said to derive from Tatar and to have changed form in Turkish, while the origin of myrsen is unclear.

The Kummer Claim

In French, an altogether different account of the name's origin held on for a long time: the claim that écume de mer was actually a corruption of the surname of a manufacturer named Kummer. The only support for this claim is that the two phrases sound alike. Texts of the period cannot agree at all on who Kummer was; the same person is described in one source as a master craftsman from Strasbourg, in another as a manufacturer working along the Danube, and in yet another as a fictional name who never existed at all. A nineteenth-century French dictionary entry cited by Pipedia claims the writer Alphonse Karr invented this name; the claim has not been confirmed elsewhere. Serious sources today reject the derivation, since écume de mer is simply a translation of the German Meerschaum. The popular account tying the material's arrival in Europe to the 1683 Siege of Vienna and a Hungarian shoemaker is similarly considered questionable.

The Turkish Name

In Turkish, the name rests neither on comparison nor on mineralogy; it describes the object's function directly. Lüle is the name given to the bowl in which tobacco is lit in a pipe or çubuk, and lüle taşı means literally "the stone from which the bowl is made." The word emerged from the vocabulary of a craft built around bowl-making itself, such as Tophane pipe-bowl making. Since nearly all deposits suitable for carving are found around Eskişehir, the name became established together with the tradition of Eskişehir meerschaum carving, and has occasionally been used as-is in European sources too. That four names continue to live side by side is the natural result of cultures unaware of each other independently naming the same substance throughout the world history of the pipe.