Older Woman In Gridle

Banana Halloween

Another student question:

- How do you say "banana" in Latin?

- But see, the Romans did not know bananas!

That said, I do not leave completely plan my student because I remember rightly viewed with some amazement that word in a Latin American textbooks that I order some on the site "Amazon." The Americans teach Latin as a living language. They are less savvy than us on the cultural context necessary to an understanding of texts by authors, however, they handle the language with much more ease than us and therefore fall much more easily in these authors' texts; nothing is perfect! If I sometimes walked among my textbooks from overseas, not to violate official instructions Program of the French National Education, just to draw ideas from small ad hoc dialogues easy to relieve students by giving them the feeling that even a whole text without toil.

short! Back home, I immersed myself in the manual in question, and easily found my fanny, "Arian! This is surprising because one would have expected "banana", but where does this "Arian specific, which means" banana "in any modern language, to describe a reality unknown to the Romans?

I jump on Gaffiot which, "Arian refers me to" ariera "and learn that it is the fruit of the jackfruit tree, I had the good fortune not to know. There is a reference: Pliny, XII 24. This is the chapter on exotic trees in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. I begin to understand: it is possible that the Romans had not experienced the banana, but one author has described from stories of travelers.

Good. I try to find the text of Pliny in question, Latin, and if possible in French translation, which, despite the magic of the Internet, is not so easy, as Pliny wrote that kind of money that few translators who dared to translate it entirely (apparently there are only translations of the nineteenth century (needless to say we no longer found at Fnac!)) and that few users of today who have finished the scan entirely in Latin! On the other hand, it appears that "XII 24" is sometimes referred to "XII 12", there must have chapters and subsections that overlap ...

short, I finally found, and I submit the text in the translation of Littre slightly modified:

"Another fruit tree, the largest, won by the size and flavor of its fruit, which the sages of India feed. The leaf is shaped like a bird's wing and is three cubits long and two wide. The fruit comes out of the bark it is admirable for the sweetness of its juice, one is enough to satisfy four people. The tree is named pala , the fruit Ariena . It is most abundant in the country Sydraques, terms of Alexander's expedition. "

other hand, looking a bit again on the internet, I realized that it was sometimes thought that Pliny described in this text bananas, before discovering that it was rather the fruit of the jackfruit.

So, although this interpretation has been disproved, it was tempting to suggest that Latin word to translate our existing banana so common, and I do not think it would be good Pliny offended ...