Would you like to practice your #fruit (fak-ha, فاكهة) vocabulary? For your or Taalhuis’ next trip to Egypt?

Here are a few words to get your vitamine C.. With some language facts, powered by our former Arabic teacher, Roel 🙂

Let’s start with Farah, buying a Mohz (موز)

The mohz (singular: mohza) is one of the most important fruits. In most other languages it’s called banana. This wordfinds it’s origin in Arabic, because one banana (finger) was referred to with ‘banānat al-mawz’, a finger of the banana. This became banāna.

Khōkh (خوخ) in Egyptian means peach, but in Levantine it means prune 🙂

(Prune in Egyptian is bar’ū’ برقوق)

A mandarine is called sefendi, because the 19th century fruit grower was called Yusuf Efendi. The mandarine got it’s name from him.

Grapes are called eanab (عنب)

nd if you’d like to try fresh dates, they are called Bala7 (بلح )

And if you say Middle East, of course you say pommegranate, Rummaan (رمان):

Unfortuanately we didn’t make a picture of an artichoke.. This word is from the Italian “articiocco”. This probably came from *arcioffo and *arciocco from the still used carcioffo. That word relates to the Arabic (al-)ḵaršūf, refering to this plant. In Spanish and Portugese the words alcarchofo and alcachofra kept the Arabic article!

“Bil hana wa shiffa” with these healthy additions to your vocabulary 🙂