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Tuxera: An Etymology

Language · Work

This post is adapted from a presentation that I planned to give at Tuxera while I still worked there, but unfortunately I was not able to finish it before moving on. I didn’t want all the preparation and existing material to go to waste, so I have shaped it into this blog post and somewhat extended it.

Enjoy.

The Company

Tuxera, Inc. is a company headquartered in Espoo, Finland, where I worked for about two and a half years as a software engineer. The company’s core products are proprietary filesystem drivers, mainly ones providing Linux compatibility and power fail safety for Microsoft file systems such as FAT and NTFS, plus a few others for specialty deeply embedded needs. There are other product categories as well, such as a proprietary high-performance SMB server.

The company was founded in 2008 by Szabolcs Szakácsits, a Hungarian-born software developer and early adopter of Linux. Its original name was NTFS-3G Technologies, referencing the FUSE-based open source NTFS driver project started by Szakácsits.

Soon after, the company was renamed to Tuxera, a compound word signifying the company’s mission of issuing an era of Tux, i.e. a new age of Linux. The name was coined by Szakácsits himself, and the company features its significance prominently on their website.

This blog post is an unmitigated ADHD deep dive into what else is behind the name.

Era

As a warm-up, let’s start with the easier part first. In English, according to Wiktionary, an era is:

  1. A time period of indeterminate length, generally more than one year.
  2. (geology) A geochronologic unit of tens to hundreds of millions of years; a subdivision of an eon, and subdivided into periods.
  3. (Internet slang) A person’s current interests.
    • I’m in my fitness era.

(I am particularly fond of the third one.)

Era is a loan from Late Latin aera, attested first in English in the 1610s, meaning ‘an era or epoch from which time is reckoned’. The Latin word means ‘counters’ and is actually a plural of aes ‘piece of metal, money, brass’. This is also cognate with the English word ore.

Etymonline.com says:

The Latin word’s use in chronology said to have begun in 5c. Spain (where the local era, aera Hispanica, began 38 B.C.E.; some say because of a tax levied that year). Other ancient eras included the Chaldean (autumn of 311 B.C.E.), the Era of Actium (31 B.C.E.), of Antioch (49 B.C.E.), of Tyre (126 B.C.E.), the Olympiadic (July 1, 776 B.C.E.) and the Seleucidan (autumn 312 B.C.E.). In English it originally meant “the starting point of an age” (compare epoch); meaning “system of chronological notation” is from 1640s

“B.C.E.” of course means Before Common Era, the secular alternative to BC or Before Christ. We are currently living in 2024 CE or the year 2024 of the Common Era, otherwise known as 2024 Anno Domini, year of the Lord.

Era is a rigidly defined concept in some disciplines. In chronology, for example, a calendar era is “the period of time elapsed since one epoch of a calendar and, if it exists, before the next one.”

The Hebrew calendar, for instance, currently observes the year 5785 Anno Mundi, an attempted calculation of the number of years since the creation of the world according to Genesis and other Biblical stories.

Eras are also closely related to dynasties in the historiographies of monarchic societies like the United Kingdom, China and Japan.

Etymologically speaking, to Latin users in the fifth century, an aera was a count of years starting from some epoch. I tried to understand if the connection to brass and money had something to do with the reign of kings or emperors, considering the common practice of minting their names and likenesses on coins. However, the sources I was able to easily reach online did not discuss this as a possible connection at all, but were rather content with merely stating the connection to the metal and currency, so I moved on. After all, I was much more interested in the other half.

Tux

The logo, mascot and official brand character of the Linux kernel is Tux the penguin. The canonical image of him was originally drawn by Larry Ewing in 1996, while he was a student at Texas A&M University. The character is extensively documented on Wikipedia.

While looking into this, I was surprised to learn that neither Tux the character nor its name seems to be a trademark of the Linux Foundation. The foundation does own and oversee e.g. “Linux®” and several other trademarks, but “Tux” is not among them.

Tux features prominently on my favourite mug.

Tuxera’s mission of beginning an “era of Linux” uses Tux as a metonym—it refers to Linux through another concept closely associated with Linux. Metonymy is a very common figure of speech; consider, for example, how often the office of the prime minister of the UK is referred to as “Downing Street” or the government of the USA as just “Washington”. Metonymy is also subdivided into many subcategories with different semantic nuancies, but it is not necessary to delve deeper into those here.

One thing to consider is the fact that naming eras or ages after proper nouns such as people is indeed a very proliferous practice; Victorian Britain, Ptolemaic Egypt, Pre-Columbian America. Against this backdrop, declaring a startup company the beginning of an era could be seen as a bit quaint, but that is perhaps beside the point.

Considering what we learned earlier about the word era and its Latin connection to coins and brass, I wondered: “Has anyone ever made novelty coins with the image of Tux the penguin on them?”

I am happy to report that the answer is YES! You can buy one online at the Open Source Coin Store.

A silver-plated bronze GNU/Linux coin for sale at the Open Source Coin Store.

Curiously, the Linux mascot is not the only cartoon penguin called Tux. There is at least one other “Tux the penguin” in the 2007 Cartoon Network animated series “Out of Jimmy’s Head”. It only ran for one season before being cancelled.

Why Is It Called Tux?

All species of penguins (family Spheniscidae) have adult plumage that is dark on the dorsal side and light on the ventral side of the body. In combination with the flightlessness and bipedal locomotion of the animal on land, to the eye of a western observer, the appearance of a penguin resembles a person wearing formal male dress, for example a tuxedo suit.

An Australian little penguin (Eudyptula novaehollandiae), the species which reportedly bit Linus Torvalds at the Canberra Zoo. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Tux is a common abbreviation of tuxedo, an American English term for a semi-formal men’s evening jacket in adherence to a black tie dress code, a notch down in formality from white tie. In British English, this kind of suit is often called a “dinner suit” or “dinner jacket”. The tuxedo is more relaxed and practical than the earlier and more formal frock coat, which has a knee-length skirt, and the tailcoat, which features two long tails at the back.

There are many slight variations and styles of these men’s formal and semi-formal suits. Interestingly, their names tend to cross and mean different things in different languages as well. For example, the Finnish name for the tuxedo or dinner suit is smokki. This word comes from the English term smoking jacket, which is an earlier style of 19th century men’s informal jacket, originally intended for tobacco smoking, which predates the dinner jacket. However, this name referring to smoking lives on in many non-English languages to this day; words deriving from the term smoking mean ‘dinner jacket; tuxedo’ in e.g. French, German, Hungarian, Russian and Swedish.

The tailless dinner or lounge jacket was introduced in the French revolution, whereafter it became popular as a work jacket and also among sailors.

Illustration of two men wearing dinner jackets, 1898. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

To recap: penguins have the appearance of a waddling little person wearing a formal or semi-formal men’s suit, and the Linux brand character is called Tux as a nod to this.

But we can go deeper.

Why Do Americans Call the Dinner Jacket a Tuxedo?

What even is this word tuxedo? To me, at first glance, the word looked vaguely Spanish, but this is very much not the case, as we will see shortly.

Tuxedo is an interesting word. To a linguist’s eye, it is most notably a North American place name, a toponym.

Wikipedia lists these places called Tuxedo:

The Tuxedo we are concerned with is a small town in the state of New York. It is located along the Ramapo river, which shares a name with the Ramapough Mountain Indians.

Most notably, however, for our journey through penguins and men’s evening wear, in the town of Tuxedo there is a village called Tuxedo Park, and in that village, a private country club called the Tuxedo Club. The hasty construction of the park and the nature of its founding blur the lines significantly, so at least in the early days the park and the club seem to have been virtually synonymous. In fact, the park is still a private, gated, residential community with its own police force et cetera.

You can read the village “welcome packet” online (pdf), if you are thinking of moving there. Be sure to also appreciate the tasteful, timeless elegance of the Tuxedo Fire Department’s web site.

The less formal tailless dinner jacket was first introduced to the United States at the Tuxedo Club, following a British example. Hence, the name of the club followed the jacket to the rest of country. The term was even capitalised as “Tuxedo jacket” until the 1930s.

This article titled “Late Victorian Dinner Jacket Debut - 1880s” on the Gentleman’s Gazette website is the best I have been able to find online on how the new dinner jacket made its way from Britain to Tuxedo and the United States in general.

I quote a few excerpts:

The new dining jacket’s legitimacy was assured when it was adopted by Queen Victoria’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales, who had a penchant for elegant but comfortable clothes. In 1865, legendary Savile Row tailors Henry Poole & Co. provided the 24-year-old future Edward VII with an early prototype which their Web site explains was worn for informal dinner parties at his Sandringham country estate.

The only known record of the jacket’s export from England is an essay from the Tuxedo Park archives about an 1886 summer visit to that country by two of its residents, millionaire coffee broker James Brown Potter and his actress wife Cora. Upon being introduced to the couple at a court ball, the womanizing Prince of Wales was apparently taken with Cora’s renowned beauty and invited the couple to dinner at Sandringham. When Mr. Potter asked his host for advice on what to wear for such an occasion, the Prince referred him to his tailors Henry Poole & Co to be fitted for a short evening jacket. Mr. Potter then brought the innovation back home to Tuxedo Park, a private residential country club established a year prior by a group of prominent New Yorkers.

The Tuxedo Historical Society keeps an online database of various records and photos they have collected over the years.

A thorough, if starkly uncritical, treatment of Tuxedo Park’s history can be found in a 1978 article by Frank Kintrea in American Heritage, reproduced online here. Note that it contains an account of the jacket’s introduction which the above Gentleman’s Gazette article claims is incorrect.

Another good source to learn about the historical significance of Tuxedo Park is its listing in the National Register of Historic Places. You can read the original listing document from 1980 digitally on the National Archive’s website. It goes over the histories and descriptions of individual buildings and features of the park in great detail.

Other corporate references

But What Does Tuxedo Mean?

Tuxedo Lake, Orange County, New York on OpenStreetMap. Show on larger map.

Ultimately, Tuxedo is a lake, and that makes it a hydronym—a proper name for a body of water.

Hydronyms and other such names for physical features of landscapes tend to be very stable and conservative. They can be reliable clues into various geographic and demographic histories. For example, the study of place names has been used in Finland:

  • to judge the original range of maple trees predating humans planting them in settlements
    • Erkamo, V. 1982: Paikannimet metsävaahteramme levinneisyyden selvittäjinä (The distribution of Norway Maple as elucidated by locality names). Sorbifolia vol. 13. Dendrologian Seura. Helsinki.
  • to analyse the migration patterns and (pre-)historic settlements of various ethnic and linguistic groups, such as the various Finnic tribes, the Sámi people and Swedish colonists along the coast
  • to hypothesise a now-extinct “Paleo-Scandinavian” language in the far north of Finland and Scandinavia, which now only survives in otherwise unexplained place names and terms for flora and fauna in the Sámi languages

Tuxedo Lake is located about 50 kilometres North-North West from Manhattan. It is an oblong, slightly crooked depression in the hilly terrain of the Ramapough Mountains. On its sloped shores, there are small, winding roads amidst the trees, and the highly prestigious, secluded premises of Tuxedo Park.

About a kilometre and a half to the east runs the Ramapo River and the Interstate 87 highway alongside it.

Tuxedo Lake lies 50 km North West of Central Park, Manhattan.

Lenape and Munsee

The name Tuxedo is very old, predating English settlements in what is today the North-Eastern United States. The word comes from the indigenous Lenape people, also known as Delaware people.

The Lenape language group belongs to the Algonquian family and comprises two languages: Munsee and Unami. Munsee was spoken more towards the north, in mainland New York, Manhattan and Long Island; Unami further south in New Jersey and the Delaware river delta.

The Munsee language has contributed two well-known words to the world: Tuxedo and Manhattan. The Lenape happen to be the same people who sold Manhattan to the Dutch West India Company in 1626.

(It’s worth keeping in mind that although this is commonly talked of as a “sale”, the Dutch and the Lenape probably didn’t think of land ownership in the same ways, and the true nature of this transaction and the perceptions thereof by either party is a whole thing that I won’t go into here.)

The etymology of Manhattan is likely *manaháhtaan, which loosely means ‘place for getting material for making bows’.

It is hard to say at a glance whether Munsee is still a living language. According to Ethnologue, its population is “none”. Wikipedia says that as of 2018, it had two elderly speakers in a reservation in Ontario, Canada.

As an ethnic and heritage identifier, Munsee and Lenape are still very much living concepts, and there seem to be some limited revitalisation efforts in progress for the languages. See for example here.

What Does Tuxedo Mean?

When it comes to scarcely documented, moribund and historically oppressed languages, we often have to live with very incomplete facts. Tuxedo does come from the Munsee language, that much is clear. But it is much harder to definitively answer what the original word sounded like and what it meant specifically.

There are a couple of alternative candidates for the origin and meaning of Tuxedo given by the sources I could find.

“The round-footed ones?”

I started by reading Wikipedia, which cites Native New Yorkers. The Legacy of the Algonquian People of New York by Evan T. Pritchard (2002, ISBN 1-57178-107-2). I was able to buy an e-book version on Google Play. Searching it for “Tuxedo” reveals:

To the immediate west of the Ramapo mountains is Tuxedo, New York, the name of which is derived from P’tuxito, which means “they are the round-footed ones”, a nickname for the Munsees.

The same paragraph goes on:

It was here that the first tuxedo suit was invented and marketed, with great success, by a local tailor. Hence, the plain and simple Munsee gave the world one of its most elegant terms, the tuxedo, or “tux”, as most people refer to it. When Munsee gentlemen did “step out” for an event, they wore the Munsee iridescent turkey feather cloak, yet to be surpassed in elegance by any tux.

This account of the tuxedo’s origin is false, as we covered above. It was not invented in Tuxedo, but rather in Europe, gradually over decades, and imported to the US via Tuxedo by happenstance.

(I won’t go into the weird noble savage vibes here…)

“Crooked water?”

Pritchard’s paragraph above references a footnote which contains more salient information:

Tuxedo, or p’tuxseepu, is translated as “crooked water” by J. H. Salomon in Indians of the Lower Hudson Region: The Munsee, p. 85, but the local white “settlers” of today still preserve the oral tradition of “round-footed ones.” P’tuxito means “they are the round-footed ones, the Munsee!” (The ayoo ending meaning “they are” was replaced by the sound oh later in Munsee, according to Ives Goddard.) See Julian Harris Salomon, Indians of the Lower Hudson Region: The Munsee (Suffern, NY: Rockland County Historical Society, 1982), and Ives Goddard, “Nasalization in PA (Proto-Algonquin) in Eastern Algonquin, International Journal of American Linguistics, part 1, vol. 37, #3 (July 1971): pp. 139–151.

I couldn’t find Salomon’s 1982 book (ISBN 0-89062-134-9) as an e-book, and the closest library copy I was able to locate online was in Germany, so I bought a used physical copy. Page 85:

TUXEDO A village and lake in Orange County, N.Y. Said to be derived from p'tupsepo, meaning "crooked river."

This is an entry in the appendix “Names on the Land”, a list of native place names in the lower Hudson region of New York and New Jersey. The appendix comes with an extensive foreword that explains its purpose and limitations (p. 79).

These names first appear in Indian deeds and old maps, many in different forms from today’s spellings, for there were few fixed spellings before 1800. Also appearing in the old records are other names whose meanings and locations are no longer known. The translations given here are traditional rather than literal. Most appear in Edward M. Ruttenber’s Indian Geographical Names, which is the most complete collection for the region. It was made long ago and has since been found to contain mistakes and outdated interpretations. Other meanings may be nothing more than fanciful guesses. But as the last speakers of Munsee are a few elderly persons living in Ontario and Oklahoma, who have no familiarity with names in the region, it is not likely that we will soon have better ones.

Salomon goes on to quote Ruttenber:

“There simply was not enough information recorded when the Indian languages were still spoken in their original areas to establish the origin, derivation and interpretation of most Indian place names in the eastern United States. Since the correct pronunciation of such names is almost always unknown and primary information on the meaning or circumstances of naming is almost universally lacking, even knowledgeable guesses as to their interpretation are impossible in all but a handful of exceptionally clearcut cases.”

Cogent points all around. These days, of course, field linguists and anthropologists have modern tools like video cameras and audio recorders at their disposal, but much of this indigenous vocabulary had already been lost to time by the time even the earliest precursors to these became available.

Heck, even the international phonetic alphabet and phonetics as a discipline weren’t around until the late 19th century. The International Phonetic Association was formed in France in 1886 (fun coincidence), and the international phonetic alphabet (IPA for us nerds) soon thereafter. Even if we assume IPA’s use became popular in North America in short order, it is probably safe to assume that there weren’t immediately hordes of phoneticists rushing to write down authentic pronunciations of all the indigenous names of lakes and rivers in the countryside.

Even more books

Some of the books I read.

Just to see how much sense I could make of the situation, I bought a third book: John O’Meara’s Delaware-English English-Delaware Dictionary (University of Toronto Press 1996, reprinted 2014, ISBN 978-1-4426-2710-9).

Here, too, my advice from my previous blog post about dictionaries (in Finnish) holds true: it’s worth checking out the preface or foreword of a dictionary. In this one, O’Meara specifies what his sources and methods were in compiling the dictionary, which branch of the Delaware languages the book concerns, and why he calls the language Delaware rather than Lenape or Munsee. Apparently this dictionary is for the language spoken in Moraviantown, Ontario, where the speakers themselves prefer(red) to call their language Delaware. The material for the dictionary was collected during the 1980s and ’90s.

The preface also explains who the book is for:

This dictionary will, I hope, be of interest to multiple audiences: Delawares who wish to know something of their tribal language, students of Algonquian languages, and more generally anyone who wishes to find information about words and their usage in this interesting language.

Armed with this, and the description of the orthography in the section “Guide to Using the Dictionary”, I looked around at various words relating to what we have seen above. I did find that there are a lot of verbs revolving around the stem tùp- with meanings like ’turn; wind; wrap; spin; roll; be tied up’ and so on. Coupled with sìipuw ‘river’, the earlier interpretation of Tuxedo as something like *?-tùp-?-sìipuw ‘crooked river’ seems plausible to me.

If we assume the <x> stands for a German-style velar fricative /x/ in the old inexact transcriptions we saw in other sources, as it does in this dictionary’s pronunciation guide, I think we could comfortably imagine that in some dialects the /p/ in *tùp- might assimilate into /x/ when preceding an /s/. I think a /ks/ would be equally possible.

So What Is the Point?

I studied linguistics, the Finnish language, and Finno-Ugric studies at university in the 2000s and 2010s. The University of Helsinki programme on Finno-Ugrics has a heavy emphasis on the historical-comparative method and top notch researchers who practice it. Students from general linguistics and the various Germanic, Slavic, Romance and Asian philologies came to our courses to learn the method.

Although I have long since abandoned that path and given up on finishing my master’s thesis, etymology—and the deep diachronic connections between languages, peoples and nations represented by etymology—remain a central lens through which I experience the world.

Tuxera is fun to think about as a product and projection of 21st century globalisation. It is a company headquartered and founded in Finland by a Hungarian and a Bulgarian who soon hired their third employee from Sweden. Its name invokes the name of the Linux mascot, Tux, which gets its name from an anecdote of an Australian penguin biting a Finnish software engineer and was designed by an American illustrator. The mascot is named after a New York country club, which in turn is named after a lake, where the indigenous Lenape people once made their homes, fished and lived their lives.

We take the interconnectedness of our world as we know it as a given, even though it has only become so very recently and through no one’s design in particular. I think it is worth thinking about every now and then.

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