It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple?
The English for "ananas" is "pineapple", did the English really think they grew on pine trees?
Fun fact: no one knows why us squid are called that in English and no other language calls us anything like that.
"Apple" is Old English for "fruit", not specifically apple.
And apparently "pineapple" for the tropical fruit predates "pine cone", OE used "pine nut".
Earliest use of "pineapple" is 14th century translation for "pomegranate".
Pineapples are a freak fruit though.They grow on some kind of weird weed like some kind of joke.
"apple" used to be a generic term for fruit. So it's actually "fruit of the earth", the French are poetic like that
“apple” used to be a generic term for fruit.
Oh, that explains the myth that Adam and Eve at an apple, when a specific fruit is never mentioned.
That's a bingo.
Also apples used to be small, tart, and acidic.
You wouldn't eat them as a dessert but as a basis for brewing alcohol.
It's wild how much fruits changed in recent times.
So much so that most zoo are stoppimg giving them to animals and switched to more leafy greens. They have gotten so sugary that they promoted tooth decay and obesity.
Than you, I was going to say modern apples have a taste and texture nothing like apples when this name was created.
So this means moonshine is apple juice?
Look, we're talking people who call ninety-nine “four twenty ten nine”; you can't expect them to name things properly.
To be fair, English has a bit of that too if you look at the first 20 digits
One, two, three... Eleven, twelve, thirteen... Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three... Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three...
If English was fully decimal the teens would simply be "Onety-one, onety-two, onety-three" but it's not because fuck following conventions!
If you say onety one again we’re gonna have problems
Winner. I'd forgotten about that.
Yeah, numbers in French are really weird.
Look, I'm not criticizing French, or the French. It was just one of those things that struck me when I was learning it, and it pops up at odd times.
Some German speakers say "Erdapfel" which is literally "earth apple."
In Dutch, a potato is called aardappel, which literally translates to "earth apple" (aarde meaning "earth" and appel meaning "apple").
Unsurprisingly, similar for us in Afrikaans.
"Aartappel"
The Swabian word Grombira comes from literally "ground pear"
"Grumbern" is the same in parts of Frankonia.
It's probably the Germans living near French, who've had bad influences.
Counter point:
In Castellano (Spanish from Spain), it's called piña.
Spanish in other places, too—piña colada, anyone?
The takeaway here is, the rest of the world uses different words than the continents where it comes from
Also what I was taught in US Spanish classes.
Ananas
Bananas
:-/
You can't include English in any rational discussion about languages. It breaks every rule, and isn't one language, but a pidgin of three or four. It's a bastard of a language, and what-about-ism involving English is so trivial it's not worth debating. You can always find a worse example of any language linguistic stupidity in English.
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse removed. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
Writer James D. Nicoll
There was a time when "pomme" was used to name any fruit.
Now we just use fruit.
Unless, incident, you're talking of a Chinese Grapefruit, also know as Pomelo.
I love grapefruiting
I didn't know that. Still a little odd to consider a potato "fruit," but then avocados and tomatoes are considered vegetables, when one's a berry and the other's a fruit.
Recently I watched an press event with a Canadian politician, who was switching between French and English as we must sometimes. He was talking about a bag of apples (which his colleague was holding) costing a stupid amount of money. He made the mistake of saying a bag of potatoes, which i found fucking hilarious as I speak both languages and understand the mistake. Unfortunately for him, the people criticising him were morons and were like WHY WOULD HE SAY POTATOES IS HE STUPID.
In a lot of languages the word for apple used to refer to all kinds of fruits, particularly new ones from more or less exotic lands. Pineapples also don't look much like apples, do they?
Pomme de terre (IIRC) is a sad version of a underground apple.
Pineapples look like a pinecone but with a sweet fruit inside. Makes sense to me.
Then again horse apples, i.e., horse shit doesn't taste great at all. Then again, again: horse apples, the Osage Orange fruit, are inedible. Osage Orange is neither an apple or orange tree.
English 'tis a silly language.
I pronounce is Pin-eap-ples, just to avoid this very thing.
But, at least they're fruit.
Let the language which is without sin cast the first stone.
::: lanzars una piedra :::
isn't apple used in many languages as a generic term for fruit?... it's not like pineapple has anything to do with apples either.
Case in point: Pomegranate. pomme = apple or more generically fruit, granate = grenade. It's a shrapnel apple. Apt description if you've ever eaten one.
I thought it was more "apples of the Earth", n'est-ce pas?
Yup, pommes de terre. In Dutch is "aardappel", which is more literally earthapple. But I will add, the apple part isn't referring to the fruit, but means more like "a spherical object".
Also the French used aardappel to create the word pomme de terre for it in 1716, as they couldn't pronounce the Dutch word.
No, it's like how apple juice is jus de pomme.
Yeah, I wasn't going for transliteration. "Apples of Earth" doesn't convey the same concept.
Not really cause then it would be "pommes de la terre".
For the record, some of us also use the word "patate" which is straight up the equivalent of potato.
I guess it's because pineapple resembles pine cone a little?
Have a look at how some early apple varieties looked like, before they were cultivated:
https://birdsongorchards.com/pages/welcome-to-wondrous-diversity-of-heirloom-apples
Tree-potatoes!
Thank you. Now does make more sense to call potatoes ground apples. Going start calling them that and confuse the kids.
They looks identifical to nowday apple from a non-profesional perspective. Except the Hawaïan ones, I never saw a apple with pink flesh.
Wait until you hear about pomegranates.
💣
I recently learned grenadine is called that because it used to be made from pomegranate juice, NOT because it was from Grenada.
Wait until you hear about 90 pomegranates
99 luftpomegranates go by
Well are you going to tell us?
Oh? Juicy gossip, is it?
good tasting apples are a relatively recent thing. They are one of the fruits where a good tasting one is rare and then has to propagated with grafts. Apples that grow from seed are not that great and before a certain point was mainly turned into cider and vinegar and such.
if you think ground apples isn't an apt description, you've never eaten potatoes raw.
Here's something else to gnaw at your brain: "corn" used to be a generic term for any cereal grain, and now only refers to the one group of crops. Also we now (mostly) only use "cereal" to describe the stuff you have for breakfast with milk. Which used to be just shitty puffed grains but now also includes all kinds of flakes and processed nonsense.
Have you ever bitten into a road apple?
People come up with funny names for things sometimes.
OMG I love road apple pie!
That one's a euphemism, though. I don't think it counts. That's not the real name that normal (non-horse-people, all horse people are abnormal; I know, because I married one) use.
Why is this weird? "Apple" used to be the generic word for fruit in many different languages, it wasn't until recently that it took on the meaning of a specific type of fruit. I don't think calling potatoes "fruit of the earth" is at all strange. The English equivalent to this is the word "pineapple" -- a fruit that kind of looks like a pine cone.
italian tomatoes have entered the chat and agree with their golden apples.
In Germany they are called Kartoffeln (which is also a slur for the Germans itself).
But potatoes are also called Erdäpfel (ground apples) or in southern dialect Krombire (bent pear).
More variants here:
So calling someone a potato in German is a slur?
Semi.
Another kind of slur is calling "spießig" (dunno the english word. Google suggests stuffy or bourgeois) Germans "Almans" which is essentially the french word for german people but if you call a german "Alman" it's kinda an insult (unless you own it).
Edit: I just noticed what a grammatical nonsense I wrote. :p
Nudel?? NUDEL???
And french fries are Pommes Frites. Fried apples
I'm not sure this map is accurate. I have never heard any of the terms that this maps claims to be used in the region I come from.
eighty potatoes ..... french translation -> ... "quatre-vingts pommes de terre" (four twenties of earth apples)
four twentie
Ayy lmao.
And that's terrible...
They do make an apple sound when you crunch or slice them so i can see the link
American: "Have french people never eaten a good apple?"
Frenchman: "Have Americans never enjoyed a tasty potato?"
Potatoes are indeed tasty. Some varieties are even sweet-ish. I can't say I've had potatoes that were as sweet as apples, without the addition of a lot of sugar.
Considering potatoes come from America... they didn't have the potatoes. And really didn't care how they name this new commodity, apparently
Well now "freedom fries" makes more sense. You know, like how apple pie is assosiated with the usa? So now it's freedom fries......anyone remember freedom fries?
......ok, no. It was always just stupid.
I think that was the shark-jumping Republican moment, when a bad trend suddenly became a free-fall into the idiocy the party is now.
Not just French
Meanwhile in Quebec, they call them patates
And orange is a Chinese apple
I refer to my skillet as my “fire apple”
Well Italians call tomatoes golden apples
While having two words for blue because "they look different"
We also have a potato-like : word "patate". "Pomme de terre" is déformation of "parmetière" from the name of M.Parmentier who introduce potatoes to the french population.
People seem to believe this so let me clarify:
Literally, “apple of [the] earth”. The word pomme used to mean "fruit" in Old French. The French construction originated, as calques, Dutch aardappel, Icelandic jarðepli, Persian سیبزمینی (sib-zamini), Modern Hebrew תפוח אדמה (tapúakh adamá), the rare English earthapple, German Erdapfel, etc.
In fact, apple was a catch all term for fruits in many languages from time to time, hence pineapple (originally meaning pinecone, later used for the exotic fruit because of similarity) or German Apfelsine (orange, literally apple from China), ...
That's actually not true, 'ground apple' is a common name for different sorts of tubers in a number of different languages, going back to the latin 'malum terrae'.
That is news to me. Never thought to dig too deeply into my French studies in middle and high school (two decades ago), and so "apple of the earth" was just appropriate. Like, yeah, why wouldn't it be apple of the earth?
Really? That's fantastic! I didn't know that. How awesome!
I've been telling you for 30 years to get over it, maybe in 31 years 😢
Herdöpfel (stove/cooking apple) in Swiss german. Kartoffel in germany. Guess there's some variety, since it's a relatively new crop.
Have you ever had an apple of the sort they had when the word got its meaning?
They were closer to potatoes than you think.
Doubt. I would expect Apples to have been more like crab apples which are very bitter. Raw potatoes are neutral.
I had a science book as a kids which had sensory experiments. You get a potato slice and apple slice, hold your nose and try both.
They taste the same if you can't smell.
I'm not a time traveler, so no. Have you?
And can you bring me a dinosaur? Like, a triceratops would be nice, although a stegasaurus or argentinosaurus would do. A baby one would be ideal. Thanks.
I grew up on a farm along a small river called the Pomme De Terre and we didn't grow potatoes. But we did have a potato lifter to harvest the 1/2 acre or so we would grow for our own consumption.
There was also a small county picnic area in the middle of nowhere by the same name. And no one knew why it was there.
So you had a potato lifter that just sat there, still and silent, in case you ever decided to grow 1/2 acre of potatoes?
Yeah, pretty much. It was a converted horse drawn implement so it was quite old and pretty worn. It did work, but us kids still had to walk behind it to pickup the potatoes it missed.
And when you could muster a small army of 10 kids from 3 families, well you maybe didn't need a potato lifter so much.
How to the French tell the difference between fried apples and fried potatoes?
Maybe context.
Fried apples? Maybe that's a Texas thing, or Scottish, but it wouldn't be a source of confusion in France because they'd take your passport away if you tried frying an apple.
Fried apples are sliced into small pieces and cooked with butter, cinnamon, and stuff. They're quite good. It's not a battered and deep fried thing. Frying covers a large range of cooking styles.
But only an apple they’d picked themselves or received from a trusted supplier with legible labeling, since it otherwise might be a potato.
And tomatoes are "love apples"
Which makes more sense, in a weird way.
Grosse Pomme is New York
Hans Grosse
Well apple is succulent stem of apple tree. Potato is succulent root of potato plant. Root is stem inside ground. Q.E.D.
I think this came from the fact that if you bit into an apple and a raw potato while holding your nose, they'd have the same exact taste and texture
That's an interesting theory. Maybe ancient humans didn't have a sense of taste.