Why don’t we refer to prunes as dried plums? Prune and plum come from the same distant etymological roots and traveled into English via French and German respectively. The French still use prune for “plum.” Other foods that undergo a name change once they’re dried include poblano peppers, which become anchos; jalapeños, which become chipotle peppers; and cranberries, the dried version of which become craisins. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Words “Plum” and “Prune” Share the Same Etymological Roots”
Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, Martha and Grant. This is Norm from Livingston, Montana.
My partner Chris and I the other day were eating some prunes and she came up with the comment on, I wonder why they’re not called dried plums. Well, that got us thinking about some of the other fruits and vegetables and we mentally went through a list like apples and oranges and pears and plums. And we couldn’t come up with any other fruit or vegetable for that matter.
The name changes when it’s dried. The only exception that we came up with is that of a raisin, which is a dried grape. So my question, I guess, is why those two words? How did they originate? Are they related?
The first thing that comes to mind for me, Martha, is peppers. Jalapenos become chipotle peppers, dried and smoked. And not always smoked. And poblanos become anchos. And I think there’s probably a whole bunch of other kind of peppers on the different hot scales that take on new names once they’re dried. And other than that, well, craisins, maybe. Craisins is a trademarked name for dried cranberries. I don’t know if that’s actually become generic yet. I don’t think so. But those are the only ones that I know of for sure.
Yeah, not a whole lot of them. But otherwise, we would say like dried bananas or dried apricot. We have things that aren’t fruit and vegetables like jerky, right? Dried meat becomes jerky. Right. Yep. I did think of that. Right. Right. So where did those originate?
Well, the prune and plum, interestingly enough, come from the same etymological roots. Prune came into English through French, and plum came into English through early Germanic roots. Ultimately, they both go back to the same Indo-European word that gave rise to a Greek word that ultimately became a Latin plural word, meaning plums, that later was reinterpreted as a singular. Now, that’s many centuries of history. What a road. And that word was pruna. Martha, how’s my pronunciation on Latin? It’s P-R-U-N-A.
Pruna ultimately ended up in some of the Romance languages, including French, where it sometimes meant plum and sometimes meant dried plum. And that was still true when pruna entered English. Sometimes prune meant plum, sometimes it meant dried plum up through about the 17th century. And as a matter of fact, the French still use prune to mean plum. The English word prune in French is pruno.
Now, the other word plum comes from pruna, the Latin word, because the L and the R sounds are formed in the human mouth in very similar ways. So over time, they often become each other. The same for N and M. So the R in pruna became an L, something like pruna, and the N became an M, giving us pluma. And similar cognates appeared in Swedish and German. So therefore, we know that the word is very old. And we got it from our deep, dramatic roots of English.
So these kind of changes of the mix of the R and L and the mix of the N and M are at the heart of historical linguistics. These are a very important part of how we know that language changes. And we can trace languages back to the common ancestors like the Indo-European language. So anyway, that’s the prune plum story.
Raisin’s a little easier, fortunately. It also used to mean the undried version of the fruit, the grape. In fact, it still also does in French. French kind of kept those old meanings for both. And it’s where English gets the word. And the French just say what amounts to dried grape to mean the same as the English raisin.
Okay. Norm, thank you so much for calling. Take care.
Hey, thank you guys. We love your show. We listen to it every week. We’re looking forward to hearing it again this week.
All right. Be well. Take care.
All right. Bye-bye.
