The English for “ananas” is “pineapple”, did the English really think they grew on pine trees?
It’s their superficial resemblance to pinecones.
It’s a bit cherry picked, but only a bit, since there are a few languages that just copied the English word later on.
Japanese and Korean come to mind.That actually makes it funnier to me because ananas would be easier to pronounce in Japanese vs pineapple. Ananansu(u is silent) vs Painappuru.
Oh absolutely!
They just had no ananas exposure beyond that from the Americans.
Spanish conveniently missing
Here’s how the creation of the graphic went:
- Create a binary
- Ignore vast majority (of people working with subject)
- slap together chart, cherrypicking
- Gloat
And anthough it might be correct, I’ve never head anyone say mañana in Basque. We just use piña(pinia)
Fun fact: no one knows why us squid are called that in English and no other language calls us anything like that.
i call bullshit. its “abacaxi” in portuguese, not nanana
Probably to avoid confusion with bananas?
Is english known for trying to avoid confusion?
Oh you can’t even imagine the amount of times I put a pineapple up there.
Here i go, imagining again.
“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.
Removed by mod
There is no such thing as a pineapple tree. That’s an AI image.
Pineapples grow in an even more ridiculous way.
Holy shit. It’s insane that random AI generated drivel and misinformation has already started seeping into random conversations like this. It really has already become completely ubiquitous, hasn’t it? 🤦🏻♂️ OOF
Thankfully due to the costs and training rot, its not going to get worse.
Pineapples don’t grow on trees. Take that A’I’ slop somewhere else.
👆 ai detected
Those look closer to durian than pineapples tbh.
Durian have a far worse reputation than their actual reality. Surströmming, on the other hand, over-achieves its reputation.
that image looks pretty crazy!😮
It’s AI-generated non-sense. Pineapples grow on small plants like this:
ahh that makes a lot more sense as I’m currently following MegadethRulz’s homegrown pineapple saga here :D
Yeah, I grabbed it at random froma search results. I think it’s not real.
“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.
It also explain why we here in the Nordics call oranges “appelsin”, as in a “Chinese apple”.
Same in Dutch: sinaasappel
Great! Can’t have myths about random fruit in this otherwise totally valid, reasonable and trustworthy story about a woman that was made from a man’s rib and talked to reptiles.
If a narrative is not literally true, does that mean it has no truth value?
What is “truth value” supposed to mean?
Sorry, I wasn’t explaining myself well.
Just because a story isn’t factually true, doesn’t mean that it has no value, or negative value. There are other types of values which can supersede factual value:
- aesthetic
- symbolic
- ethical
- didactic
Truth isn’t always about facts. Sometimes factual statements can be used as a weapon of deceit.
There are other types of value, of course. It’s just funny to specifically call the apple out for being a myth. The entire story is a myth, so they could have made it a pomelo for all I care.
But… we’re talking French and Adam and Eve was written in Hebrew. Is it the same for Hebrew?
Hebrew used a generic word for fruit, all languages translated that word as their version of apple which was generic at the time, and then much later, all languages changed the meaning of their word for apple, it’s not specific to French. The use of apple for one specific fruit is fairly recent - more recent than the King James Bible, even.
I don’t know what the word in Hebrew is and if it also changed its meaning since then, though.
Literally yes, ground apple is potato in hebrew
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.
Something thankfully not all French-speaking countries agree. But the ground apple is pretty much universal. The alternative “patate” is also widely used,
Stuff from the “new world” (Americas) often got some weird names. Like the “Indian chickens” (turkeys).
Edit: I misunderstood
I misunderstood
Winner. I’d forgotten about that.
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
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.
Isnt that most common in Austria
That’s my understanding. Though I have only visited the Kartoffel regions myself.
I know the Germans near the Czech border are also calling it erdapfel sometimes but in southern Bavaria and Austria it’s the norm from my experience.
I’m in Bavaria, and my grandparents used to say Erdapfel, though for any generations after that I’ve only ever heard them say Kartoffel.
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 whore. 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
Is this a copypasta?
It is now
The James Nicoll quote is better - use that instead.
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.
Franglais is my language of choice after several drinks in any French speaking country. I am from Jersey, New, so it’s the best I can do with my education.
Four twenties ten and seven. That’s four goddamn numbers in a row!
The franglais in me screams that neufant ought to be acceptable. I’m sure Canadians are saying it, who knows what language they really speak.
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.
Let the language which is without sin cast the first stone.
::: lanzars una piedra :::
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.
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.
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.
Spherical pineapples.
as they couldn’t pronounce the Dutch word
I mean I can’t blame them, the language’s phonosyntactics are very different from French, it’s hard to pronounce in general and sounds awful to boot.
It’s funny how Dutch doesn’t shy away from loaning French words, despite the difference. Examples are chauffeur, etalage, cadeau, auto and medaille.
I don’t agree that aardappel is hard to pronounce in general if you’re an English speaker though. Check it out: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/aardappel
Alternative forms
Eerdappel […] (obsolete)
As Arnhemmer, I don’t completely agree.
Too aard to pronounce
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?
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.
How recent? Like, New World recent, or Christianity recent, or the-invention-of-writing recent?
I think not much older than the new world. 1700’s or so and I don’t think there was widespread cultivation until the 20th century.
Johnny Appleseed was a real guy, but he was doing his thing in the late 1700’s. Apples from grafting were pretty good eating, by then; trees grown from seed were mostly only good for making cider.
yeah and that gets back to ground apples. if people are used to apples in cooking and making alcohol but not so much munch on it, numy, numy. I could see the ground apple thing.
Don’t forget Calvados n_n
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.
