Potato – la patataPRONUNCIATION Show (Pronounced pah-tah-tah)His new diet forbade him eating potatoes, so pa said ta-ta (patata) to them.  Patata is feminine, so it's la patata. Imagine a potato that looks like a lady: More Info 4 June 2021 Potato has a mostly straightforward etymology with one element that is not adequately explained. The English word is a borrowing from the Spanish patata, which in turn is from the Taino batata. Diccionario de la Lengua Española says that the Spanish word is a blend of the Taino word and papa, the Quechua word for the tuber, which can explain the shift from /b/ to /p/. Although both /b/ and /p/ are frequently swapped (they’re both bilabial plosives, and it’s easy to say one when one intends to say the other), so there really isn’t a need to introduce a second word to explain the shift. The real mystery is the change in the final vowel from the /a/ in Spanish to a diphthong in English, either /əʊ/ (British) or /oʊ/ (North American), and the resulting spelling shift from <a> to <o>. Such a shift to a diphthong rarely happens in a terminal vowel. My best guess is that since the <o> spelling is present in the earliest English examples of the word it is a result of the initial English interlocuters mishearing the Spanish vowel. The English sailors, who were the first to encounter the Spanish/Taino word, were not, as a rule, careful recorders of language. And, given that English spelling in the period was not standardized, it shouldn’t be a surprise that they wrote an <o> and that spelling caught on. A similar diphthongization occurs with tobacco, although there the Spanish spelling is with a terminal <o> too. The earliest recorded use of potato in English is a reference to the sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas. It is from 1565, found in John Sparke’s account of John Hawkins’s 1564–65 expedition to the Americas. The Oxford English Dictionary credits Hawkins as the author, but Sparke, who accompanied Hawkins on the voyage, is actually the author of the account:
The use of the word to refer to the common potato, Solanum tuberosum, comes a few decades later. It appears in a 1597 botany text by John Gerard:
Although Gerard calls them “Virginia potatoes,” they, like the sweet potato, are native to the tropical Americas, although by the time European explorers encountered them, indigenous people of North America were also cultivating them—trade routes existed in pre-Columbian America and the potato had moved northward along them. The name Virginia potato may reflect where the English first encountered the tuber. Cf. spud Discuss this post Sources: Diccionario de la Lengua Española. Real Academia Española, 2020, s.v. patata. Gerard, John. “Of Potatoes of Virginia.” The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. London: John Norton, 1597, 781. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2021, s.v. potato, n. Sparke, John. “The Voyage Made by the Worshipful M. Iohn Hawkins” (1565). The Hawkins’ Voyages. Clements R. Markham, ed. Hakluyt Society, 1878. New York: Burt Franklin, 27. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Photo credit: Renee Comet, 1994, U.S. National Institutes of Health. Public domain image.
What is the word for a Spanish potato?Patatas are potatoes in Spanish (from Spain), in Latin American potatoes are called papas.
What is the difference between papas and patatas?"Papa" is the standard word in most of Latin America, Canary Islands and parts from Andalusia. In the rest of Spain the standard word is "patata" . In some parts of Spain "papa" is used only for chips ("papas fritas") while they use "patata" for the potato as it is.
What are papas in English?daddy, the ~ Noun. dad, the ~ Noun. father, the ~ Noun.
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What is the word for potato in Spanish America?
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