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A German children’s magazine once had eggplant seeds in an issue as the “crazy easter egg tree”. We don’t call them eggplant but aubergine.
Same in French :)
Whereas eggplant was coined in English, most of the diverse other European names for the plant derive from the Arabic: باذنجان bāḏinjān. Bāḏinjān is itself a loan-word in Arabic, whose earliest traceable origins lie in the Dravidian languages. The Hobson-Jobson dictionary comments that “probably there is no word of the kind which has undergone such extraordinary variety of modifications, whilst retaining the same meaning, as this”.
Interesting!
