Why is this weird? "Apple" used to be the generic word for fruit in many different languages, it wasn't until recently that it took on the meaning of a specific type of fruit. I don't think calling potatoes "fruit of the earth" is at all strange. The English equivalent to this is the word "pineapple" -- a fruit that kind of looks like a pine cone.
In a lot of languages the word for apple used to refer to all kinds of fruits, particularly new ones from more or less exotic lands. Pineapples also don't look much like apples, do they?
Pomme de terre (IIRC) is a sad version of a underground apple.
Pineapples look like a pinecone but with a sweet fruit inside. Makes sense to me.
Then again horse apples, i.e., horse shit doesn't taste great at all. Then again, again: horse apples, the Osage Orange fruit, are inedible. Osage Orange is neither an apple or orange tree.
Here's something else to gnaw at your brain: "corn" used to be a generic term for any cereal grain, and now only refers to the one group of crops. Also we now (mostly) only use "cereal" to describe the stuff you have for breakfast with milk. Which used to be just shitty puffed grains but now also includes all kinds of flakes and processed nonsense.
Potatoes are indeed tasty. Some varieties are even sweet-ish. I can't say I've had potatoes that were as sweet as apples, without the addition of a lot of sugar.
You can't include English in any rational discussion about languages. It breaks every rule, and isn't one language, but a pidgin of three or four. It's a bastard of a language, and what-about-ism involving English is so trivial it's not worth debating. You can always find a worse example of any language linguistic stupidity in English.
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
Case in point: Pomegranate. pomme = apple or more generically fruit, granate = grenade. It's a shrapnel apple. Apt description if you've ever eaten one.
Recently I watched an press event with a Canadian politician, who was switching between French and English as we must sometimes. He was talking about a bag of apples (which his colleague was holding) costing a stupid amount of money. He made the mistake of saying a bag of potatoes, which i found fucking hilarious as I speak both languages and understand the mistake. Unfortunately for him, the people criticising him were morons and were like WHY WOULD HE SAY POTATOES IS HE STUPID.
Franglais is my language of choice after several drinks in any French speaking country. I am from Jersey, New, so it's the best I can do with my education.
Great! Can't have myths about random fruit in this otherwise totally valid, reasonable and trustworthy story about a woman that was made from a man's rib and talked to reptiles.
You wouldn't eat them as a dessert but as a basis for brewing alcohol.
It's wild how much fruits changed in recent times.
So much so that most zoo are stoppimg giving them to animals and switched to more leafy greens. They have gotten so sugary that they promoted tooth decay and obesity.
It's a bit cherry picked, but only a bit, since there are a few languages that just copied the English word later on.
Japanese and Korean come to mind.
Something thankfully not all French-speaking countries agree. But the ground apple is pretty much universal.
The alternative "patate" is also widely used,
Stuff from the "new world" (Americas) often got some weird names. Like the "Indian chickens" (turkeys).
Semi.
Another kind of slur is calling "spießig" (dunno the english word. Google suggests stuffy or bourgeois) Germans "Almans" which is essentially the french word for german people but if you call a german "Alman" it's kinda an insult (unless you own it).
I grew up on a farm along a small river called the Pomme De Terre and we didn't grow potatoes. But we did have a potato lifter to harvest the 1/2 acre or so we would grow for our own consumption.
There was also a small county picnic area in the middle of nowhere by the same name. And no one knew why it was there.
Yeah, pretty much. It was a converted horse drawn implement so it was quite old and pretty worn. It did work, but us kids still had to walk behind it to pickup the potatoes it missed.
And when you could muster a small army of 10 kids from 3 families, well you maybe didn't need a potato lifter so much.
I didn't know that. Still a little odd to consider a potato "fruit," but then avocados and tomatoes are considered vegetables, when one's a berry and the other's a fruit.
good tasting apples are a relatively recent thing. They are one of the fruits where a good tasting one is rare and then has to propagated with grafts. Apples that grow from seed are not that great and before a certain point was mainly turned into cider and vinegar and such.
We also have a potato-like : word "patate". "Pomme de terre" is déformation of "parmetière" from the name of M.Parmentier who introduce potatoes to the french population.
Literally, “apple of [the] earth”. The word pomme used to mean "fruit" in Old French. The French construction originated, as calques, Dutch aardappel, Icelandic jarðepli, Persian سیبزمینی (sib-zamini), Modern Hebrew תפוח אדמה (tapúakh adamá), the rare English earthapple, German Erdapfel, etc.
In fact, apple was a catch all term for fruits in many languages from time to time, hence pineapple (originally meaning pinecone, later used for the exotic fruit because of similarity) or German Apfelsine (orange, literally apple from China), ...
That's actually not true, 'ground apple' is a common name for different sorts of tubers in a number of different languages, going back to the latin 'malum terrae'.
That is news to me. Never thought to dig too deeply into my French studies in middle and high school (two decades ago), and so "apple of the earth" was just appropriate. Like, yeah, why wouldn't it be apple of the earth?
That one's a euphemism, though. I don't think it counts. That's not the real name that normal (non-horse-people, all horse people are abnormal; I know, because I married one) use.
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.
Well now "freedom fries" makes more sense. You know, like how apple pie is assosiated with the usa? So now it's freedom fries......anyone remember freedom fries?
Fried apples? Maybe that's a Texas thing, or Scottish, but it wouldn't be a source of confusion in France because they'd take your passport away if you tried frying an apple.
Fried apples are sliced into small pieces and cooked with butter, cinnamon, and stuff. They're quite good. It's not a battered and deep fried thing. Frying covers a large range of cooking styles.
Hey, that's a good point. Fried apples might me sweeter than fried potatoes, but they'd be much more similar than in other forms. Frying tends to bring out the sweetness in carbs.
And can you bring me a dinosaur? Like, a triceratops would be nice, although a stegasaurus or argentinosaurus would do. A baby one would be ideal. Thanks.
Ancient humans? Europe didn't have potatoes until they were imported from the Americas in the 1600s. Conversely, the Americas didn't have apples. So it would basically be impossible for anyone before the Colombian exchange to have eaten both of these fruits.