Filling the Fields: Fruit & Vegetable Deep-Dive
Every culture has its own words for the familiar fruits, vegetables, and other plants that they cook with and consume.
Carrots are recorded in Greek as karoton, then in Latin as carota, and French as carotte before entering Middle English. Interestingly, carota seems to have replaced the older word daucum (a Greek loanword itself) in Late Latin. A daucum could also be a parsnip. The word for carrot was similar in several Northern European languages such as German Möhre, Russian morkov, and Old English moru. English parsnip descends from Latin pastinaca (again, referring also to carrots), which had a bizarre second meaning of “stingray”. Its more familiar sense in turn derives from the pastinum, a sowing tool.
In Latin, the word radix (root), could also mean radish. Radish appears, unusually, to have passed straight through a Vulgar Latin form radice into Old English redic and from there evolved into its modern form.
Turnip can be deconstructed into turn + nepe, deriving from the Latin name napus. The turn part may allude to their round, “lathe-turned” shape.
The word onion has been passed down through French union and oignon, from a Latin word unio. Unio also, and probably originally, referred to large pearls, as those that were imported from India: their name means “unique”, reflecting the belief that no two of these pearls matched. Pliny discusses this in Natural History.
Unlike the previous words, leek is one of a wide family of similar Germanic nouns: Dutch look, German Lauch, Danish løg and so on. Garlic was coined as “spear leek” because the cloves looked like spearheads.
One of the oldest attested fruits is the fig. Its etymological history is very deep, preceding Latin ficus (fig tree) into forms such as Phoenician pg (ripe fig) and Syriac pagga. Wiktionary supplies this colourful side note, explaining the coining of the word sycophant, which literally means “fig shower”:
The gesture of “showing the fig” was a vulgar one, which was made by sticking the thumb between two fingers, a display which vaguely resembles a fig (sûkon), which also meant vulva. The story behind this etymology is that politicians in ancient Greece steered clear of displaying that vulgar gesture, but urged their followers to taunt their opponents by using it.
Apple is a solidly Germanic noun. The Latin word was malum, which is also cited as encompassing the lemon and quince. As pears go, most European languages use a word descended from Latin pirum. From prune and plum derive from Latin prunum. English peach comes from the second word of the Latin compound term malum persicum, or Persian apple.
A strawberry has nothing to do with straw, but rather are “strewn” upon the bush. The rasp in raspberry is not the sound but, probably, a rose wine called raspise. A lingonberry takes its name from Swedish ljung, heather.
Cherry comes from Latin cerasium. A grape is something which is graper, picked; as a raisin it descends from racemus, a bunch of fruit.
Over the last few centuries, Europeans have incorporated more foreign plants into their cuisine. The avocado, by its Nahuatl name ahuacatl, could also refer to a testicle (by their similar shape.) Interestingly, there was a phase in English of calling them “alligator pears”. Tomato comes from Nahuatl tomatl. The name of the potato originated as batata in a very interesting extinct language called Taino, which was the main language of the pre-Columbian Caribbean.
Now over to @Vsotvep to balance out my Eurocentrism with a look at the fruits and vegetables of Japanese?