Comment by solatic

Comment by solatic 12 hours ago

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> “There were pictures of huge mountains of ‘earth apples’,” she recalled, using the word Erdäpfel, an affectionate term for the potato sometimes used by Berliners

Fun fact: the Hebrew translation of potato, תפוח אדמה, is the portmanteau of "earth" (אדמה) and "apple" (תפוח).

If you should ever be so fortunate as to have too many potatoes, see if you can shred them with a food processor and combine with onion, egg, salt, and pepper to make potato kugel, which freezes exceptionally well.

docdeek 12 hours ago

The French term for potatoes is also ‘earth apple’: pomme de terre

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  • sleepychu 12 hours ago

    I'm fairly sure that is the origin of Erdäpfel. We certainly thought this was a funny name for potato when we learned French in Scotland :-)

    When I learned German the word for potato was Kartoffel.

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    • majoe 10 hours ago

      Kartoffel is the standard German word.

      Erdäpfel is used in many dialects and has plenty of variants.

      Actually the various different words for potatoe and their distribution across Germany, Swiss and Austria is linguistically quite interesting (see this map [1]).

      The legend is in German and roughly translates to (from top to bottom):

      - Potatoes

      - Ground pears

      - Earth apples

      - Earth pears

      - Hearth apples

      [1]: http://stepbysteplingue.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/karto...

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  • HPsquared 11 hours ago

    I suppose this "earth apple" formulation coming up in several languages is partly because potatoes are from the New World, and Old World languages won't have a "traditional" word for them. Whereas in English it's basically a loanword.

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    • technothrasher 11 hours ago

      It also makes more sense when you realize that 1) pomme in older French meant fruit generally, not apples specifically, and 2) sweet potatoes were introduced to Europe well before white potatoes were. So "earth fruit" seems fitting.

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      • roysting 10 hours ago

        Technically apple is also just the general term for fruit from its root in Proto-Indo European, ab(e)l.

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      • wiether 10 hours ago

        Do you have more detail about your second point?

        Since they both come from America, sources I can find place them in Europe during the XVIth century.

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  • abecode 7 hours ago

    In Chinese one word for potato is "earth bean" 土豆 (the other word is "horse bell tuber" 马铃薯)

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  • em-bee 8 hours ago

    french fries are pommes frites. the french term is also used in germany (though sometimes shortened to pommes or fritten).

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  • speed_spread 4 hours ago

    Diverging but funny: "pommes de route" is a french-canadian colloquialism for horse droppings (on the street - "road apples")

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notepad0x90 11 hours ago

Potatoes originated from the Americas, so I suppose that word was created in the past 500 years. But even for modern computer names, I would thing old languages would just use amalgamations like that.

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  • card_zero 8 hours ago

    Checks

    Wiktionary says it was in Old High German a thousand years ago, but defines that word as "pumpkin, squash, melon", which is strange since pumpkins are New World too.

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    • wiml 5 hours ago

      Squashes are New World, but gourds and melons were grown in the Old World (Wikipedia says brought to Europe during the Roman era).

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pixl97 9 hours ago

>make potato kugel,

This seems very similar to a hash brown breakfast casserole in the US.

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seydor 11 hours ago

the same in many languages, french pomme de terre, greek geomilo,

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