Message #120258

[Bianca]

The English word potato comes from Spanish patata (the name used in Spain).

The Spanish Royal Academy says the Spanish word is a compound of the Taino batata (sweet potato) and the Quechua papa (potato).

This probably indicates that originally, the potato was regarded as a type of sweet potato rather than the other way around, despite the fact that there is actually no close relationship between the two plants at all. Potatoes are occasionally referred to as Irish potatoes in the English speaking world, this term originated to distinguish them from sweet potatoes.

Romanian cartof, Ukrainian картопля (kartóplja), Bulgarian картоф (kartof), Russian картофель (kartofel), German Kartoffel, Danish kartoffel, Icelandic kartafla (or jarðepli, see below), Latvian kartupelis, and Estonian kartul (as well as many other similar names in various languages) all derive
from the Italian word 'tartufoli', which was given to potato because of its similarity to truffles
(Italian: tartufo).

However, the current Italian term for the potato is 'patata'.



Another common name is "ground apple": pomme de terre in French, aardappel in Dutch, jarðepli in Icelandic (or kartafla, see above), תפוח אדמה in Hebrew (often written just as תפוד), and Erdapfel in Austrian German. An analogous name is Finnish as peruna, which comes from the old Swedish term jordpäron "earth pear".

In 16th century French, pomme meant "fruit", thus pomme de terre meant "ground fruit" and was probably literally loan translated to other languages when potatoes were introduced. In Polish potato is called just ziemniaki or in some regions "kartofle", and in Slovak zemiak, from the word for "ground". In Persian it is called seeb-i zameen (سیب‌زمینی) which also translates into 'ground apple'.

In Hindi, Nepali, and several other Indian languages the potato is called alu or aloo, while in Marathi and Gujarati, the potato is called bataka or batata.




 This article contains Chinese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters.

Different names for the potato developed in China's various regions. The most widely used names in Standard Mandarin are "horse-bell yam" (simplified Chinese: 马铃薯; pinyin: mǎlíngshǔ), "earth bean" (simplified Chinese: 土豆; pinyin: tǔdòu), and "foreign taro" (simplified Chinese: 洋芋; pinyin: yángyù).

The Indonesian word is kentang.