I want to start today’s Word Bites installment with yet another poll. This time, I want to ask, how do you pronounce ‘tomato’? Do the last two syllables sound similar or identical to those of ‘potato?

For two words that might sound strangely similar for some, the presence of two possible pronunciations (or predominant patterns of pronunciation) for ‘tomato’, but not ‘potato’ is a rather intriguing phenomenon in the English language. I mean, no one pronounces ‘potato’ as ‘poe-TAHH-toe’ , right? And so today, I want to look into why this is the case, which involves digging a bit into the histories of both words, and tracking how they evolve in the English language.

Neither the potato nor the tomato are native to the Old World, despite their widespread use in various cuisines from French fries to some ragù. Instead, these plants were introduced from the New World, namely Mexico and Central and South America, in a process known as the Columbian exchange. Not only were plants like these introduced to the Old World, the Americas also saw the introduction of fruits such as bananas, and grains such as wheat and rice. This exchange also brought about the introduction of Old World diseases, most notoriously smallpox, to the Americas, and the introduction of New World diseases such as syphilis to the Old World. While ‘potato’ and ‘tomato’ were introduced to the English language from Spanish, it is the indigenous American languages from which we find the origins of both words.

Potato

The word ‘potato’ derives from the Spanish word ‘patata’, but it did not refer to the exact same kind of potato today. Instead, it was used to refer to the sweet potato, another tuber mainly native to Ecuador. ‘Patata’ is directly borrowed from an Arawakan language called Taíno, which we have covered before, although the Royal Spanish Academy also suggested some influence from Peruvian Quechua, from the word papa.

In any case, the word was eventually extended to cover all of these starchy tubers, and also made its way into the English language in the 16th century. From etymologies I can find online, the earliest record of the word ‘potato’ in the English language dates back to the 1560s, and some giving the year 1565. Perhaps keep this year in mind, we would need it to answer our question later.

As a side note, some other languages did not use the loanword from Taíno or Peruvian Quechua. Instead, languages like French, Dutch, and some German dialects likened the potato to some kind of fruit dug from the ground, giving names translating to “Earth [or ground] apples”. For example, you would be familiar with the French word pomme de terre (ground apple), the Dutch word aardappel (Earth apple), and perhaps Swabian German Grombir (ground pear). Heck, even the Mandarin Chinese spoken in Mainland China tends to use 土豆 (ground bean).

Meanwhile, the Standard German word Kartoffel derives from Italian’s tartufolo, which translates to “truffle”, possibly alluding to a similarity between potatoes and truffles having a knobbly appearance and growing underground.

Tomato

The word ‘tomato’ is a more recent addition to the English language among the two words. The form we used today entered the English language in 1753, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. This derives from the word ‘tomate’, which was used from the early 17th century, and was introduced, once again, by the Spanish, who used the same word to refer to the fruit / vegetable. The Spanish, in turn, were introduced to this word by the Aztecs, who spoke a Uto-Aztecan language called Nahuatl. It was from this language from which the ‘tomato’ ultimately derives from, as tomatl, literally the swelling or swollen fruit.

Nahuatl, like several languages spoken in the region, is famous for having the ‘tl’ sound [tɬ]. This sound is entirely foreign to the Spanish, and so, for ease of pronunciation, the Spanish would most likely have borrowed this word as ‘tomate’.

Prior to the entry of the word ‘tomato’ into the English language, the fruit was also referred to as a ‘love-apple’, bearing a similar pattern to that of Italian’s pomodoro, which also involves the element pomo or ‘apple’. But the doro part likely derives from d’oro, which in Italian spoken in the mid-16th century, likely means ‘of gold’, possibly alluding to the importation of yellow or orange varieties of tomatoes into Italy during that period.

The Great Vowel Shift

The Great Vowel Shift was a period in the history of the English language when some notable sound changes occurred, particularly in its vowels. It occurred sometime in the 1400s to the late 1600s, which also coincided with the period in which English started to become standardised. But the key takeaways from the Great Vowel Shift that are relevant to the words we are studying today mainly pertain to the treatment of long vowels in the English of the 1400s, and how they changed over time.

Long vowels in Middle English, before the Great Vowel Shift, came in 7 different flavours in southern England. These were  /i: e: ɛ: a: ɔ: o: u:/. All of these underwent changes in some form, with some changing vowel height over time, and most eventually becoming diphthongs by the conclusion of the Great Vowel Shift. For now, let us focus on the /a:/ vowel.

The first change made to the /a:/ vowel was to raise its vowel height. That is, the height where the tongue is raised when articulating a certain vowel. /a:/ was thus raised to/æ:/, and later to /ɛ:/ and /e:/. The next set of changes involved breaking this long vowel into a diphthong, or two adjacent vowel sounds in a single syllable. Interestingly, this process resulted in an increase in vowel height in the second vowel, being realised as /eɪ/ by the end of the Great Vowel Shift.

When the word ‘potato’ was introduced to the English language in the 1560s, it likely entered with a long /a/ sound in the second syllable, or /a:/, as in /po’ta:to/ or somewhere along those lines. This would have been affected by the Great Vowel Shift, which later changed to the /eɪ/ sound we are more familiar with when pronouncing the word today, as /pə’teɪ.təʊ/.

The word ‘tomato’ entered the English language in the 1750s, a bit too late to be truly affected by the Great Vowel Shift, and right when Modern English was in relatively full swing. As it was directly derived from Spanish /to’mate/ (and by extension, Nahuatl /to.matɬ/), the second syllable still retained the /a/ sound (or the lengthened /a:/ sound) consistent with the corresponding Spanish and Nahuatl words. For some speakers, this /a:/ sound never quite underwent the vowel change, and stuck on as /tə’ma:.təʊ/ to this day.

But the story does not really end there. Long after the Great Vowel Shift, for some reason, Londoners (and people in the surrounding regions) started pronouncing some vowels differently in the 1700s and 1800s. This could have affected the /a:/ sound in ‘tomato’ in a similar fashion, eventually leading to the /tə’meɪ.təʊ/ pronunciation.

So this has been a little dive into the origins and etymologies of the potato and the tomato, and the likely history of sound changes in the English language that has culminated in the current pronunciations of these words. The Great Vowel Shift is an interesting period in the history of the English language that I have wanted to read up and cover, and it is quite rewarding to learn about how this period has also influenced the pronunciations of ‘potato’ and ‘tomato’. So yes, cool stuff.

And as a little concluding teaser, there is the question why ‘data’ also has two distinct pronunciations, as /da:.tə/ and /deɪ.tə/, with the former being comparatively rarer. It entered the English language from Latin in the 1640s, right around the concluding end of the Great Vowel Shift. Yet, the /da:.tə/ pronunciation is more commonly associated with Australian and New Zealand English, spoken in a region that was first settled and colonised by the British in the 1770s. Could this Great Vowel Shift (or the London vowel shift later on) explain what is going on in the differing pronunciations of the word ‘data’? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Further reading

Johnston, P.A. (1992) ‘English vowel shifting: One Great Vowel Shift or Two Small Vowel Shifts?’, Diachronica, 9(2), pp. 189–226. doi:10.1075/dia.9.2.03joh.

Stockwell, R. (2002) ‘How much shifting actually occurred in the historical English vowel shift?’, Studies in the History of the English Language, pp. 267–282. doi:10.1515/9783110197143.2.267.