Where did the naming convention come from for these two fruits and why isn’t it applied to others?
Edit: this simple question has garnered far more attention than I thought it would. The bottom line is some English royals and French peasants used their own words for the same thing but used their respective versions for the crop vs the product. Very interesting. Also, I learned other languages have similar occurrences that don’t translate into English. Very cool.
In: Other
At one point the American plum growers association made a big push to relabel prunes as dried plums, because of the association of prunes with old people regulating their bowel movements. They even tried to get the government to allow them to call prune juice “dried plum juice” but a judge blocked it on account of that being very stupid.
Side question: why is it called prune juice? Since the prunes are dehydrated, there shouldn’t be any juice left. It should be plum juice!
It depends on language. Dehydrated apricots are called “kuraga” in parts of Eurasia, for example.
Same reason some languages have a separate word for cottage cheese and others just call it a variation of cheese. Or why English has separate words for oil and butter.
It’s all language specific.
My uneducated guess would be that the words came from different languages. The people growing the grapes spoke one language that called them “grapes”, and the people either producing or eating dried grapes spoke another language that called them “raisins”.
Kind of like how the people raising cows spoke one language and the people eating them spoke another, so we got “cows” for when they’re alive and “beef” for when they’re food.
It’s usually when two words from different languages are used at the same time, eventually they become more specific. This happens more often as a result of migration/invasion as opposed to more peaceful means of cultural exchange. The meat example is usually the most cited example but my favourite is Bow and Arrow. Both words mean bow, arrow deriving from arco, bow from Boden I think. When you have two languages co existing, using both words wouldn’t be uncommon. Eventually arco came to refer to the projectiles and boden the actual bow.
It’s usually when two words from different languages are used at the same time, eventually they become more specific. This happens more often as a result of migration/invasion as opposed to more peaceful means of cultural exchange. The meat example is usually the most cited example but my favourite is Bow and Arrow. Both words mean bow, arrow deriving from arcus, bow from Boga I think. When you have two languages co existing, using both words wouldn’t be uncommon. Eventually arcus came to refer to the projectiles and boga the actual bow.
It’s usually when two words from different languages are used at the same time, eventually they become more specific. This happens more often as a result of migration/invasion as opposed to more peaceful means of cultural exchange. The meat example is usually the most cited example but my favourite is Bow and Arrow. Both words mean bow, arrow deriving from arco, bow from Boden I think. When you have two languages co existing, using both words wouldn’t be uncommon. Eventually arco came to refer to the projectiles and boden the actual bow.
Grapes and plums have been dried and preserved for thousands of years, long before many other fruits were commonly dehydrated. Over time, these dried fruits became staple foods with their own names.
There are other names. I don’t know about English but dried ginger is called “saunth” in Hindi.
Grapes and plums could not be imported fresh to England, because they needed to be transported by boats over long durations.
So French exporters would dry their fruit before sending them over, and label them “raisin” and “prunes”, which are just the French words for grapes and plums.
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