Earth Apples, Anyone?

january 19th, 2010 at 12:51 am

I was reading a recipe for some gross Dutch soup with potatoes in it when I noticed that the Dutch word for potato (aardappel) literally means "earth apple," just like the French "pomme de terre." The only other language I know how to say potato in is German (kartoffel), so I wondered how many words there were for it. It turns out that there are only three main ones: potato, earth apple, and truffle. I enjoyed learning about this, so maybe you will too.

So it looks like this mess is Spain's fault. When they brought potatoes back from Peru, the word they used to describe them was patata, a combination of the Taino batata (sweet potato) and the Quecha papa (potato). Because Spain's empire at the time was pretty big, we ended up calling the potatoes, same as in Portugese, Italian, Greek, Norwegian (potet), Swedish (potatis), and Turkish (patates). Arabic uses batata, which it got from Spanish but replaced the p since their alphabet doesn't have one.

The other base, kartoffel, comes from some confusion about what potatoes are. After the Spanish brought some potatoes back to Europe, they had them cultivated and analyzed by a Vatican botanist. He didn't know what they were, so he named them little truffles. Sadly, the Pope at the time couldn't see that well, so he pronounced the name tartufoli, which is where the Germans got it. This word is most popular in Eastern Europe (particularly the Germanic and Slavic languages), being shared by Polish (kartofel), Russian (kartofel), Armenian (kartofil), and a bunch of others. Interestingly, many of the Germanic languages have two words for potato, one kartoffel-like word and one earth apple word. For example, in Austria, Switzerland and even parts of Germany, you might hear the word Erdapfel, or "earth apple" used instead of kartoffel. This is probably because France, home of the earth apples, is next door making lots of French noises.

Speaking of earth apples, it looks like that mess really is all France's fault. There's no clear etymology, but I think there are a few factors that contributed. First of all, France was a late adopter of the potato; they didn't become popular until around 1800. France also hates borrowing words from other languages (e.g. computer => ordinateur), so I can easily imagine them coming up with their own special word. Either way, this seems to be the etymology common to most places where the potato was introduced later, like Asia, or places ruled by France, like Central Africa. So in French it's pomme de terre and in Chinese it's 土豆 (tǔdòu [earth bean]). In Taiwan, 土豆 means peanut, so they use 马铃薯 (mǎlíngshǔ) instead. Japan uses the same characters as Taiwan, but pronounces them wrong (ばれいしょ — baresho). The rest of Asia's languages seem to use some word related to yams (e.g. Thai: มันฝรั่ง [man fà-ràng] foreign yam) or something I can't decipher at all.

That's a lot of words, so I made a map that shows how different languages handle the word in case you hate reading. It's actually pretty neat.