this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the French word for "potatoes" is "ground apples." Have The French never had an apple? (midwest.social)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I thought it was more "apples of the Earth", n'est-ce pas?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Spherical pineapples.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Alternative forms

Eerdappel [..] (obsolete)

As Arnhemmer, I don't completely agree.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Too aard to pronounce

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

No, it's like how apple juice is jus de pomme.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Yeah, I wasn't going for transliteration. "Apples of Earth" doesn't convey the same concept.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

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.