Showing all posts tagged with linguistics.
Earth Apples, Anyone?
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.
In your mouth, please see the gift of horses.
I found a new favorite toy: Translation Party. It's easy: enter an English phrase and Translation Party will translate it back and forth between English and Japanese until it reaches "Equilibrium."
I started taking proverbs from Wikiquote after a while and the results were pretty great. These are my favorites:
