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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

The recipe is also similar to Hamedh [0], a delicacy in Iraqi and Baghdadi Jewish households. The only major difference is the addition of tomatoes thanks to the Columbian Exchange, and rice - which would have not been cultivated or traded in West Asia yet.

On that note, in Arabic, Farsi, and Hindustani the word for Tomato is essentially shared (tumatar/tamatimu) with the English word "tomato".

But anyhow, a lot of home cooking and traditional meals actually have a pretty long history.

[0] - https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2000/12/12/hamad-iraqi-b...

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Actually, in Persian, tomato is literally translated as “western plum”. This is common in our language as we usually say “western” or “foreign” as a prefix to many things that were introduced to Iran (strawberries, sit-style toilets, etc)

Appreciate the clarification!

My pleasure! I also find languages very interesting and have had the opportunity to grow up in a bilingual home and learn French and German.

One more fun fact is that potato is a direct translation of the French “Pomme de terre” (“sib zamani” or “ground apple”).

Back to the actual topic, this is a recipe that’s definitely worth trying. Persian shallots are actually more garlicky than oniony. A great addition to lamb dishes and yogurt.

Thank you! In Hebrew we literally call the potato תפוח אדמה which is "ground apple". Now I know where the idea comes from.

I find it fascinating that the Persian word for "foreign"/"Western", farangi, actually means "Frankish", which gives some idea of the "compressed geography" people experience regarding faraway places. It was also used to name a race on Star Trek.

It is not a “clarification”. You are wrong and are spreading misinformation. In Farsi, the word for tomato is gojeh farangi.

Interesting, in various European languages those tend to be "Turkish": turkey hens (the bird called turkey now), Turkish corn (maize), Turkish beans (long beans).

Again, trade routes.

> maize

Which, in turn, originated in Mexico and didn't make its way to Europe until the 1500s.

In Panama they say Chino for foreign versions and in Cambodia they say barang which literally means Frankish (via farang from Thailand).

> Turkish corn (maize)

And in Turkish maize is called "Mısır", which comes from the country name Egypt (which is also Mısır in Turkish).

When Arabs conquered Egypt, they called it "Mishr" (مصر) which literally translates to "country" or "borderland". Maize was originally imported from the Americas, but because the trade route was through Egypt, Turkish people initially called it Egypt Wheat or Egypt Millet. In time, it is started to be called only Mısır/Egypt.

I wonder what they call maize in Egypt then?

According to Kagi Translate, a term for maize that's specific to Egypt is "الذرة الشامية" (al-dhura ash-shāmiyyah) which could be directly translated to "Levantine sorghum". Can anyone with actual knowledge of Egytian Arabic confirm?

Also I had the idea that "Maize" might have come from "Mısır", but etymonline claims it comes from the native (Arawakan) name for the plant: mahiz.

As an aside, tomatoes are golden apples (pomodoro), and oranges are Chinese apples (Apfelsin) in some languages.

A lot of cultures appear to name botanicals using apples or, in GP’s context, stone fruit as “reference” points.

Thank you for this. Knowing both those words, i could never work out the original/history of the terms.

>A lot of cultures appear to name botanicals using apples

don't know if it makes the point or upends it, but the fruit in the Garden of Eden wasn't specifically an apple.

Wow, апельсин - apelsin(Russian) makes total sense now

Potatoes are called "earth apples" in french (pomme de terre) and a bunch of other european languages

Wait 'till you hear about melon - "μήλον" i.e. "apple" in Greek.

Melon, watermelon, pomelo, etc. The ancient Greeks themselves started that with the "golden apples of the Hesperides" a.k.a. oranges.

I guess any fruit people didn't know how to call was ... some kind of apple.

Everything is an apple, it seems. You also have earth apples (pomme de terre in French, aardappel in Dutch) for potatoes, grenade apples (pomegranate in English, granatäpple in Swedish, ...), pineapple, ...

It helps that Latin has the word pomus for fruit.

Chinese does the same thing, using prefixes like 西 (western), 番 (foreign), and 洋 (foreign) for introduced items.

For tomatoes, interestingly, it has two common names that follow this pattern: 西紅柿, literally translated as "Western Red Persimmon", and 番茄, literally translated as "Foreign Eggplant".

Other produce examples include 番薯 (Foreign Yam) for sweet potato, 西瓜 (Western Melon) for watermelon, 洋蔥 (Foreign Onion) for bulb onion etc.

The recorded English-language etymology for "ketchup" suggests that the word comes from one of the Chinese dialect's word for tomato. Do you have any idea which Chinese word sounds like ketchup?

Not exactly a Chinese dialect, but Vietnamese calls tomatoes "cà chua": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/c%C3%A0_chua .

Are the Vietnamese and Chinese languages related? Or perhaps one of the two cultures was introduced to that fruit by the other, and thus preserved the name?

Not related at all in recent history and I have no insight on the etymology links but Vietnamese used to be written in a mix of original Vietnamese Chinese-style characters before they changed to a Latin alphabet with Colonialism and Communism so there was definitely contact.

Thank you

China ruled Vietnam for a thousand years (111 BC–939 AD) so I'm sure there was some linguistic cross pollination.

Though tomatoes come around long after that period...

possibly Hokkien 膎汁 (kê-chiap, “fish sauce”) via Malay kecap ~ kicap “any dark clear sauce from soy, fish etc”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup#Etymology

My personal theory based on nothing more than the vibe of the thing is that it comes from the Malay/Indonesian word ‘kecap’ (which is pronounced almost identically to “ketchup”), the word for sweet soy sauce. This is soy sauce that is thickened and sweetened with palm sugar, and I could see European cooks attempting to replicate it based on the vague descriptions given by sailors, and ending up with ketchup.

It came from the Malay word, but the Malay word comes from Hokkien.

Oh, interesting, I didn’t know that, but it makes sense given the influence of Hokkien cuisine on Malaysia.

Interesting, thank you.

茄ke2 汁zap1, but if I remember it correctly, Dan Jurafsky believes it is from 喼git1 汁zap1, worcestershire sauce

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iYwUh1Hdho

In Chinese the use of 西 (western) often really means from the West compared to China so India/Central Asia/Middle East, which can be a little confusing at first if you are used to the word meaning "Western World".

For instance, watermelons come from Sudan/Egypt and thus arrived in China from the West long before Europeans visited.

Another example is The Journey to the West (Monkey King) novel which is also about travelling to India.

Austrians call tomatoes Paradeiser, from an older word for Paradise.

There is a bird native to the Americas which in English is called the turkey, from its original name "Turkey fowl", because it was thought to come from "the east" of which Türkiye is the country with which most Europeans were familiar (due to being the closest). In Turkish, the bird's name references India ("hindi"); the same is true of other languages such as French ("dinde", from "poule d'inde", chicken of India).

> rice - which would have not been cultivated or traded in West Asia yet

Surprisingly it was still imported in surprising quantities nearly 1000 years before it started to be cultivated. Not significant enough quantities for it to be a common staple, but still an interesting tidbit

One day, someone - someone like you, maybe, someone with the Hacker Nature - was looking at the rice they'd bought and thought "You know what, it just *cannot* be all that difficult to just grow this stuff here, it costs a fortune to import. How hard can it possibly be?"

So they set to digging irrigation trenches, and had a go at it, and maybe a couple of shitty harvests later they'd got the trick nailed.

And here we are.

Possibly! It seems more likely that migrants brought rice cultivation. Or maybe a mixture of both. Maybe some "I wonder how we could grow that here. Lemme visit that new community of immigrants"

In Sicily and Spain, rice cultivation began because Islamic expansion brought advanced irrigation and cultivation techniques. It's called the "Arab Agricultural Revolution"

  > On that note, in Arabic, Farsi, and Hindustani the word for Tomato is essentially shared (tumatar/tamatimu) with the English word "tomato".

In the Levant we use the word بندورا "bindora" in Arabic for tomato.

Huh. Like Pomodoro. That makes sense.

In Russian we use tomat and pomidor interchangeably.

Meanwhile English speakers joke about disagreements over the pronunciation of tomato

My favourite take on this. https://youtu.be/kcHKm0cm-jI?is=fqjBSNiJ2jYEXuq1

Very likely from Pomodoro. In Arabic P is pronounced B or F.

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