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Spanish Word of the Day Archive
Wednesday January 16, 2008
tomate, noun:
tomato
You may already know that the tomato is not a vegetable but a fruit. But did you know that they were probably first grown in Mexico? In Náhuatl, which is the indigenous Mexican language that was once spoken by the Aztecs and is still a minority language in Mexico, the word for this fruit is tomatl. In Mexico today the word for a normal tomato is jitomate and tomate is used for a green tomato.
Náhuatl passed on many words to Spanish, some of which have come through to English: avocado - el aguacate in Spanish, chocolate el chocolate and chilli el chile.
Today a million bilingual and monolingual speakers speak Náhuatl in the central plateau of Mexico.
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