[docdeek]

The French term for potatoes is also ‘earth apple’: pomme de terre

[sleepychu]

I'm fairly sure that is the origin of Erdäpfel. We certainly thought this was a funny name for potato when we learned French in Scotland :-)

When I learned German the word for potato was Kartoffel.

[majoe]

Kartoffel is the standard German word.

Erdäpfel is used in many dialects and has plenty of variants.

Actually the various different words for potatoe and their distribution across Germany, Swiss and Austria is linguistically quite interesting (see this map [1]).

The legend is in German and roughly translates to (from top to bottom):

- Potatoes

- Ground pears

- Earth apples

- Earth pears

- Hearth apples

[1]: http://stepbysteplingue.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/karto...

[HPsquared]

I suppose this "earth apple" formulation coming up in several languages is partly because potatoes are from the New World, and Old World languages won't have a "traditional" word for them. Whereas in English it's basically a loanword.

[technothrasher]

It also makes more sense when you realize that 1) pomme in older French meant fruit generally, not apples specifically, and 2) sweet potatoes were introduced to Europe well before white potatoes were. So "earth fruit" seems fitting.

[speed_spread]

Diverging but funny: "pommes de route" is a french-canadian colloquialism for horse droppings (on the street - "road apples")

[epolanski]

Polish is ziemniaki, where ziemia is earth.

[roysting]

So just “of the earth”?

[abecode]

In Chinese one word for potato is "earth bean" 土豆 (the other word is "horse bell tuber" 马铃薯)

[em-bee]

french fries are pommes frites. the french term is also used in germany (though sometimes shortened to pommes or fritten).

[jenadine]

"Pommes frites" is German, not French. (It might have been French in the past, but nobody says that in French anymore.)