1662: The -O in Avocado and Tomato Jul 3, 2019

It is well-known that 'avocado' comes from a Nahuatl word for 'testicle', but what is less amusing, but more linguistically interesting, is that both 'avocado' and 'tomato' come from the same language and both end in the name sound there too: '-tl' ('ahuacatl' and 'tomatl' respectively). This '-tl' was one of if not the most common ending in Nahuatl, but the sound represented here by the L, or in IPA: ɬ, does not exist in English or Spanish (link to audio example below). Rather than becoming a [tl] sound though, such that 'tomatl' would rhyme with 'throttle', it became an [o] in both cases, which is totally different. This suggests that the Spanish—who had contact there before the English—did not like such a consonant cluster at the end of words, but they ended with a schwa ('tomate'). The '-o' then comes from an English approximation of a Spanish approximation of a sound neither language contains.

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Wikipedia audio reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_lateral_fricatives