I also heard in Costa Rica bananas referred to as patacones instead of platano, so I'm guessing there's a lot of regional-specific vocab at play here...
I'm sure that table omits languages in which it looks nothing like "ananas". In Brazilian Portuguese it's "abacaxi". The second response in that question seems to address this.
Actually in Portuguese the 2 words are phonetically very different.
Abacaxi is pronounced ah-bah-kah-SHEE, whereas ananás is pronounced ah-nah-NAHS (depending on the region, the tailing "s" takes the sound of "sh" which is slightly closer but still pretty far). Note that in Portuguese proper pronounciation of the tonic syllable is very important, and in this case the tonic gives each word a very distinct sound.
It may look nothing like it, but the only letter that really differs is the -c-. The -x is pronounced as -sh and -b- isn't that far removed from -n-, especially in a language with a nasal -a- like Portuguese.
This reminds me of a fragment from a Dutch TV show where the host asks a kid whether "ananas" in English is pronounced "a-nanas" or "ana-nas". Kids answers "a-nanas", host goes: "Wrong! It is pineapple!"
Classic (https://youtu.be/OBrAcIl4nmw?si=Xx9j6DJywfQkXTeJ)
Listen here, you can't tell the English what to do. We'll drive on whatever side of the road, use metric or not when we feel like it, and call fruit whatever we want
There is also "ananas" in Korean: 아나나스.
And there is also "凤梨"/"鳳梨"(Fèng lí in Mandarin) in Japanese: 鳳梨(ほ ーり, hóꜜòrì)[1]. But I think neither of them are commonly used now. So maybe it is the influence of English-speaking countries that makes (at least) these two languages choose "pineapples" now rather than other possibilities.
Ananas is a rare example of word which is exactly same in Finnish, although our vocabulary is usually totally alien compared to most European languages.
Actually this sort of clarifies things for me (perhaps falsely) that the etymology is from a pineapple sort of looking like a pinecone. Looking at the plant that it grows from, it clearly would not be mistaken for a pine tree.
I'm not from Ontario but we watched many episodes in French class in high school (American). We enjoyed the sense of humor and made a lot of references to it even after the class.
I'm not a native English speaker, so I'm wondering if I say "ananas" to an English-only person, will he generally understand that I'm talking about pineapples?
The most common term is "ananas" or some close variation, from the extinct Old Tupi language of what is now Brazil, which was a common trade language in the region in the colonial period.
The next most common term is "piña/pineapple" or a close variation. (from Latin and, for those forms using some version of the "-apple" ending, Germanic roots: English, most regional forms of Spanish [but not all, because, well, Spanish][0], Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, and others)
There's also a smaller number of languages (but with lots of speakers, e.g., Mandarin!) that use their own words not closely resembling either.
Tupi wasn't spoken only in Brazil. It was spoken on all of the South or South America, and at least for some small time became the main language of every country there.
Interestingly, in Brazilian Portuguese, it's "abacaxi" instead, from another indigenous language.
Here in Brazil, where the fruit originates, the most common name for it is "abacaxi", It's supposed to come from Tupi-Guarani family of languages and means "fruit with a nice smell". Ananas is more common in Portugal.
The root of ananas is Sanskrit. That's why you find it in so many languages.
As my brother (archeologist/linguist, reads the latter) says:
"Take a time machine and travel to a market on the Indian subcontinent, a thousand years back. Ask a fruit vendor for ananāsa/anāsa. You will get a pineapple."
Edit: Pineapples were introduced to India by Portuguese in 1548 AD.
Edit: Kindly ignore the initial claim. It's BS. :) (the time machine claim would still hold though).
The word comes from Portugese/Spanish, the origin is 'nanas' which the Tupi people in Brazil used [1]. So the actual origin is from the Tupi-Guarani linguistic families [2].
I see a particular irony in the proliferation of spurious claims about everything in every language coming from Sanskrit. And that is that Sanskrit is, in a sense, the origin of rational scientific linguistic study, with Panini. (Yes, this has to be qualified a bit.)
In Paraguayan Spanish (and I guess in many parts of Latin America) the word employed is piña, i.e., "pinecone". Ananá is also accepted, but it's almost not employed at all.
Because pineapple is the fruit of a creature called Ananas comosus. This is its (universal) scientific name.
Describing this plant as a mix of a pine and an apple is a particularly poor choice having in mind that this is a monocot, thus neither directly related with coniferes nor with dicots. When we have yet a word that is unique, short and exclusive for a new type of organism, and everybody is familiar yet with the fruit and its peculiar flavor, adopting that word would be wise.
In the same way as calling a type of animal "Sengis" should be preferred over the old and more verbose "elephant-shrews". Specially after we discovered that they aren't related with shrews at all, and totally deserve its own unique name.
Of course tradition stands in the way, so I'm just digressing
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 2058 ms ] threadhttps://youtu.be/MuiMBXmAAHA - yep still going strong..
The entry for Ananas at https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananas says it's used for the genus which includes pineapple.
The equivalent English word for the genus is Ananas - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananas .
Read the answers and you'll see the claim is based on cherry-picking.
Now, regarding usage, you're completely right. Nobody uses ananás; everybody says piña.
(Funny: When describing the ananás plant, the DRAE says about its fruit: "fruto grande en forma de piña".)
[0] https://dle.rae.es/anan%25C3%25A1s
[1] https://dle.rae.es/pi%25C3%25B1a
At least for me the following are close phonetically in Portuguese: Abacaxi Anacaxi Ananaxi Ananashi Ananasi
Abacaxi is pronounced ah-bah-kah-SHEE, whereas ananás is pronounced ah-nah-NAHS (depending on the region, the tailing "s" takes the sound of "sh" which is slightly closer but still pretty far). Note that in Portuguese proper pronounciation of the tonic syllable is very important, and in this case the tonic gives each word a very distinct sound.
Is Portuguese your native language? I can’t see how one would pronounce abacaxi in a way that sounds like ananas.
Edit: Of course, let’s not forget our Catalan (‘pinya’) and Welsh (‘pinafal’) friends.
(Actual for the other city: something more like loo-uh-ville.)
pynappel (Afrikaans)
paina (Hawaiian)
paynapul (Krio)
പൈനാപ്പിൾ (Malayalam)
piña (Quechua)
I'm sure there are many more...
[1] https://zh.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%B3%B3%E6%A2%A8#_note-DJR-...
https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=ta&text=pineapple&o...
So not only has English a word completely different from others, it also literally means another existing fruit!
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBSflK1FTSY7&t=36s
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Téléfrançais!
Almost every language that is not English? No.
The most common term is "ananas" or some close variation, from the extinct Old Tupi language of what is now Brazil, which was a common trade language in the region in the colonial period.
The next most common term is "piña/pineapple" or a close variation. (from Latin and, for those forms using some version of the "-apple" ending, Germanic roots: English, most regional forms of Spanish [but not all, because, well, Spanish][0], Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, and others)
There's also a smaller number of languages (but with lots of speakers, e.g., Mandarin!) that use their own words not closely resembling either.
[0] Yes, English is frequently like this, too.
Interestingly, in Brazilian Portuguese, it's "abacaxi" instead, from another indigenous language.
As my brother (archeologist/linguist, reads the latter) says:
"Take a time machine and travel to a market on the Indian subcontinent, a thousand years back. Ask a fruit vendor for ananāsa/anāsa. You will get a pineapple."
Edit: Pineapples were introduced to India by Portuguese in 1548 AD.
Edit: Kindly ignore the initial claim. It's BS. :) (the time machine claim would still hold though). The word comes from Portugese/Spanish, the origin is 'nanas' which the Tupi people in Brazil used [1]. So the actual origin is from the Tupi-Guarani linguistic families [2].
[1] https://termcoord.eu/2016/08/pineapple-or-ananas/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupi_people
Describing this plant as a mix of a pine and an apple is a particularly poor choice having in mind that this is a monocot, thus neither directly related with coniferes nor with dicots. When we have yet a word that is unique, short and exclusive for a new type of organism, and everybody is familiar yet with the fruit and its peculiar flavor, adopting that word would be wise.
In the same way as calling a type of animal "Sengis" should be preferred over the old and more verbose "elephant-shrews". Specially after we discovered that they aren't related with shrews at all, and totally deserve its own unique name.
Of course tradition stands in the way, so I'm just digressing