There are funny facts about the name of two fruits in two languages, English and Spanish. The two fruit names are pineapple and banana. Pineapple in Spanish is called pina and banana is called platano. The word pina is used not only in Spanish but in so many other languages and English is among those countries as the fruit is called pinapple. On the other hand, the Spanish word platano is the exception as many other languages called banana as banana or other word that is similar to it. These facts are often missed by many people.
These facts may seem funny but when you are looking from the linguistic point of view, these exceptions are very intriguing and interesting. Once people realize that there are these two exceptions, there will be many questions raised by them. Questions of how this can happen. A linguist tries to answer this phenomenon by looking at the other examples. A pineapple is a tropical fruit and it was first introduced with the name of ananas. Even its Latin word is ananas. Once it is introduced to the world as ananas, many parts of the world would adopt the same name. A little difference here and there is normal as these countries have different cultural backgrounds. Another examples would be coffee and computer. There are many languages that are using the same name or derived from these names. However, there is another variation, the pineapple or pina.
After digging deeper, the linguist finds that pineapple is actually not the only exceptions. There are other exceptions. From 50 languages being studied, there are 42 languages using ananas and there are 10 languages using pineapple while the rest are using a unique name that is so different from the others. With 42 languages, the word ananas is certainly the most common one. There are 6 types of pineapple names and the two most common ones are ananas and pineapple.
While in English, the word pineapple was actually used to call a pine’s cone in the past. It was not until the pineapple fruit was spreading to England that the changed took place. After all the pineapple fruit looks similar to the pine cone. The pine cone looks like a baby pineapple, especially when there are still green. There was no real explanation as to why the fruit receives the name pineapple while the cone was then changed to pine cones. But it is just the way it is today. In fact, not so many people know that the pine cone was called pineapple before the fruit was known in the area.
