The apple and melon were formally a catchall name for a many fruits. It was generic similar to how we might use fruit or produce. The offspring of these apple words seem to popup everywhere.
The Greek mēlon meant apple as well as a bunch of fruits. We get our name melon from their name mēlopepon for a gourd apple.
Combined with their word for earth, chamai, the Greeks used melon to name chamaimelon or earth apple that would used to make our camomile tea.
They also mixed melon with honey meli to make melimelon or honey apple, our quince. It eventually becomes marmalade when you turn it into a jam, honey apple preserves.
The other Greek apple name was malon.
Quince was also called kydonion malon or apple from Kydonia on Crete, today’s Chania. As it travels through Latin and into French, the malon gets dropped, Kydonia becomes quoyn and eventually quince.
When malon becomes malum in Latin, it attaches itself to a bunch of names. Lemons are citreum malum or citrus apples. Apricots are malum praecoquum, early ripening fruit and where we get our precocious.
A Persian apple was malum Persicum or what we know as a peach. Here, too, the malum gets dropped along the way, and it goes through pessica, pesche on it’s way to peach and the French pêche. So peach basically a shorthand that means Persian, like quince a shorthand meaning Chania, Crete.
The pomegranate was originally a seeded apple or malum granatum. It later took another apple name pome, to become pomum granatum. At one point the French shorted the fruit name to grenade which they would use for a weapon. The Spanish do the same and today call both the fruit and explosive by granada.
From the Latin pome with get our French apple, pomme. The potato is pomme de terre or apple of the earth. That only makes sense if you’re using apple in its most generic sense. Likewise, their French fries are pomme fries or apple fries.
In Medieval Latin the orange was briefly pomum de orenge, or apple of the orange tree.
The tomato gets roped here, too. It used to be pomme d’amour or love apple, similar looking to the Italian tomato pomodoro. The Italian the meaning is debated, specifically the second half of the word. Some claim it comes from d’oro, gold apple, in reference to it’s the color of golden yellow variety. Others argue that it’s names after the North African Moors or pomo de’Mori. The more amazing part than the naming is that the tomato, which seems so central to Italian food, does show up until relatively recently. It gets imported to Europe by explorers coming back from America.
Finally, all of our apples. To get a sense of how generic this term once was it covered everything from dates to cucumbers. Go back a few hundred years in English and a banana was an appel of paradis and dates were called finger apples, fingeræppla. Meanwhile, cucumbers were named like French potatoes as earth-apples or eorþæppla. Reminder, earth-apple is also the Greek beginning for our camomile.
Even more extreme is that we once called the inedible pine cones by the name pineapples. When we eventually met the tropical fruit, we decided the likeness was close enough and used the same name. English is alone on this one. Other languages like French or Spanich call the tropical pineapples ananás. That comes from the Brazilian Tupi name nanas for excellent fruit.
- apple
- melon
- fruit
the journal of gastroetymology 