Comment on 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?

pseudo@jlai.lu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• lugal@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

  wiktionary

  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), …

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• cazssiew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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’.

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• Dozzi92@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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?

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• sxan@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Really? That’s fantastic! I didn’t know that. How awesome!

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  • lugal@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Image

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