I knew even before starting to research this theme that “interesting words from Native American/First Nations languages” was way too broad, so I decided to start with just “interesting words from Nahuatl,” the group of lects of the peoples known in history as Aztec, today called Nahau. This, though, was also way too broad—we’ve gotten a
lot of words from central Mexico, via Spanish—so I restricted it further to just “food words from Nahautl.” Which is still too broad—we’ve gotten a lot of crops and dishes from central Mexico, via human propagation, enough to
easily cover two weeks. But I’mma do just one week by sticking to the most common. With, okay, a little fudging around the edges. But it’ll fit! Promise! And we’re starting with:
avocado (av-uh-KAH-doh, ah-vuh-KAH-doh) - n., a tropical American tree (
Persea americana) having oval or pear-shaped fruit with green-to-black leathery skin, yellowish-green flesh, and a large seed; the edible fruit of this tree; the dark green of the skin of an avocado
(hex value #568203).
Thanks, WikiMedia! Also called alligator pear, it was domesticated somewhere in central America, and in Nahautl is called āhuacatl (which also means testicle, though the fruit sense came first). This in turn became Spanish aguacate, and then English modified this to avocado, first appearing in a 1696 catalogue of Jamaican plants.
And because it's made with avocado, a bonus word:
guacamole (gwah-kuh-MOH-lee) - n., a dip of mashed avocado mixed with tomato, onion, and seasonings.
First found in English the late 1910s, from Mexican Spanish, from Nahuatl āhuacamōlli, from āhuacatl, avocado + mōlli, sauce.
Fun fact: varieties of Nahautl (
correct pronunciation) are spoken by around 1.5 million people, the most of any Indigenous language north of Panama.
---L.