The potato from Peru was one of the most important foods the Europeans brought back from their early Europe adventures. It was a crop that was calories dense, easy to grow, and it created enough surplus that people to do jobs other than grow food.
Our potato is one of the few food names we have from Carib, a language of South America and the Caribbean islands. They called sweet potatoes batata for their local sweet potato. The Spanish made it patata the root of our potato, which became the name for other tubers as well.
While the Spanish used patatas, the French decided on pommes de terre, apples of the earth. At the time pommes and apples meant fruit generally, so the French are calling it something like earth fruit. The German name is kartoffel and it’s from the same place as the truffle, the Latin tuber.
Back to the Carib language. Their word for banana was palatana, which the Spanish made plántano and we made plantains. Sweet plantains today are called plátano maduro in Spanish, meaning ripe. Their nickname is maduro and comes from Latin mātūrus, same source as our mature.
Our name banana, however, is West African and probably our only common English food name that’s from the Wolof language. It comes to us from the Spanish and Portuguese traders and arrives unbruised as banana.
the journal of gastroetymology 