2915: Potatoes Around the World: Surprisingly Diverse Dec 14, 2024

For a newly discovered food—potatoes were only brought to Europe in the 16th century and were only commonly eaten by people centuries after that—there are a remarkable amount of different etymologies for words for the potato in the Old World. In some regions, including Swedish, English, European Spanish, Turkish and Arabic, the word comes from a Taino word referring not to a potato but a sweet potato, ‘batata / batana’, botanically unrelated. Other languages like French, some Southern German dialects, Polish, and Serbo-Croatian use a term meaning “apple of the earth”. The last major group is usually something like the German ‘Kartoffel’ from the Italian ‘tartufolo’ meaning ‘truffle’, in reference to its being grown underground, and this includes also Russian, most Caucasian languages and Kurdish.

Some other languages have completely unrelated words to any others; Czech’s ‘brambor’ and Hungarian’s ‘borgonya’ refers to ‘Brandenburg’ and ‘Burgundy’, with the former being introduced specifically by a Prussian policy from Frederick the Great, encouraging commoners to eat potatoes in the War of the Bavarian Succession, so as to not deplete wheat stores. The Hungarian etymology is unclear. Finnish uses a word, ‘peruna’ meaning ‘pear’, from Swedish, even though Swedish uses a different word.

Meanwhile, no European country uses the native Quechua word ‘papa’ which actually means potatoes, natively, but that word is used in Spanish of the Americas. No other language adopted a native word that actually referred to a potato, but many did take words referring to sweet potatoes, apples, pears, and even more widespread, truffles.