2800: ...and I Say Tomato Aug 20, 2024

Continuing the tomato talk from yesterday, perhaps second to ‘tomato’ and its number of cognates, the Polish ‘pomidor’ or Russian помидо́р (same, but in Cyrillic) is found across many languages. Most Slavic languages use a version of this, along with a number of Turkic languages, particularly in the former-Soviet sphere, like Uzbek, Yakut, and Azeri, along with Armenian and Yiddish too, but also a number of others which probably got it from the Persian پامادور (pâmâdor), including dialects of Arabic and Turkish, that would otherwise use a word related to ‘tomato’ where Arabi’s lack of [p] forced this to be بَنَدُورَة (banadūra), and the same in Turkish. One interesting case is that Georgian has two words for tomato, commonly პომიდორი (ṗomidori), but also ოქროვაშლა (okrovašla) which might look totally unrelated, but the latter is a calque. A calque of what?–you might ask.

Given this list, you might this this originated somewhere in the Central Asian world, either from Russian or Persian, but despite their immense levels of influence, this is from an Italian phrase “pomo d’oro” meaning “apple of gold”, mentioned yesterday. While it was unlikely that that phrase led to the phrase “love apple” through a French misinterpretation as “pomme d'amour” (apple of love), it did lead to ‘pomodor(o)’ in Italian. Back to Georgian, this word is made of the elements ოქრო (okro) for ‘gold’ +‎ ვაშლი (vašli), for ‘apple’ +‎ -ა (-a). The reason why the Italian word, ‘pomodoro’, is not as common in Western Europe or among other Romance languages, but is prevalent in this context, has to do in part with 18th-century missionaries and others who first introduced tomatoes to this part of the world. Since tomatoes were still commonly feared as poisonous in the 18th century, this was the only point of contact that introduced the East to them.

A few other notable mentions:

•Romanian uses the name for the color roșie (from roșu: “red”)

•Swahili uses nyanya which also means ‘grandma’ 

•Thai uses a word มะเขือเทศ (makhuthes) being a compound meaning “foreign eggplant”

•Hungarian’s word paradicsom from German Paradiesapfel (paradise apple)