Talk:Okra stew

How you can forget the Origin Region of Bamia? You don’t mentioned Eritrea and Ethiopia? 2003:EC:8F16:B200:D033:3F33:D561:6113 (talk) 13:28, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

Removing Turkish etymology

@2kbfloppadisk: I removed this:

According to Sevan Nişanyan, it was loaned into Turkish from Arabic, with the ultimate origin of the word being unknown.

for two reasons:

1. The etymology of the dish bamia is the same as that of the vegetable. There is no reason to repeat it here.
2. "Bamia" is the name for this dish in many cuisines, and there is no particular reason to mention its Turkish etymology or Persian or Kurdish.... Apparently they all ultimately come from Arabic. Presumably the Balkan names are borred

There are a couple of other issues with this statement:

1. There is no reason to mention the author of the dictionary in the main text -- that is what footnotes are for.
2. Linking to loanword is overlinking.

The article has other serious issues, but let's start with fixing this. --Macrakis (talk) 23:18, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying. You can revert my edit if you want, I can't think of an obvious fix to these issues, though, I think that we should include the statement "the ultimate origin of the word 'bamia' is unknown", I believe its relevant context in this case. 2kbfloppadisk (talk) 10:25, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Name of dish

@Polly Tunnel, 2kbfloppadisk, PigeonChickenFish, Northamerica1000, and Christophkats 12345b: This article is about various okra stews in the Middle East and surrounding areas. In most languages of the region, okra stews are not called just "bamia". In fact, the article already calls the various dish al-bāmiya bil-laḥm, šūrba al-bāmiya, bamyeh bil-zeyt (Arabic) and khoresh-e bâmiyeh (Persian). Other sources give bamya yemeği , etli bamya , zeytinyağlı bamya (Turkish); μπάμιες λαδερές , μπάμιες με κοτόπουλο/κρέας [argiro.gr/recipe/kotopoulo-me-mpamies-sto-fourno/] (Greek); bamia con domates (Sephardic Ladino).

But "bamia" by itself just means okra in these languages. Apparently in a few languages (South Slavic, Romanian, and maybe Ladino), the word is used alone to mean an okra stew, although these languages generally also have more complete names like mâncare de bame .

It also starts by defining the dish as being made of "okra, lamb, and tomatoes". But in fact there is considerable variety. Many okra stews include meat; others are vegetarian/fasting. Some are made with dried okra. The article needs to reflect this variety more clearly.

I propose that this article be renamed to Okra stew, which is what most sources seem to use to translate the various local names.

I'll wait for comments before incorporating these observations into the article. --Macrakis (talk) 17:11, 3 August 2026 (UTC)

I'm no expert on this subject, but in general per WP:ENGLISHTITLE the test should be whether the dish is normally referred to in English as "okra stew". A basic Google search for "bamia" often brings up "okra stew" in brackets, indicating that it may be a popular English name for the dish. Not all of the foreign names for the dish include a word for stew, but this should not matter if they actually are stews (because of course articles are about subjects, not words). Hence I am broadly supportive of the proposed move. As regards the ingredients, tomatoes are clearly a New World plant, and it seems unlikely that no okra stews were made before the early modern period. Hence it would make sense to list all the non-okra ingredients as possible rather than part of the definition. -- Polly Tunnel (talk) 10:40, 5 August 2026 (UTC)