All by Itself, the Humble Sweet Potato Colonized the World: Study
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Re: All by Itself, the Humble Sweet Potato Colonized the World: Study
#2don't they float?
Re: All by Itself, the Humble Sweet Potato Colonized the World: Study
#3The linguistic similarity they mention at the end is actually even closer: in Maori (and New Zealand English), the word is "kumara".
However, there seems to be some doubt as to whether the word was historically in Quechua, or whether it was introduced later, based on a Polynesian word (e.g. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525...).
Re: All by Itself, the Humble Sweet Potato Colonized the World: Study
#4kuumala/kumara: in Tonga where kumala is the word used, the locals don’t know how old the word is. Same goes for their use of “delfin” for dolphin, a creature they have surely known since long before European presence. So I bet the kumala name is a recent loan word. They may have had another word in the past now forgotten.
Re: All by Itself, the Humble Sweet Potato Colonized the World: Study
#5don't they float?
Are you suggesting sweet potatoes migrate?
Re: All by Itself, the Humble Sweet Potato Colonized the World: Study
#6A lot more theories:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_...
Re: All by Itself, the Humble Sweet Potato Colonized the World: Study
#7Re: All by Itself, the Humble Sweet Potato Colonized the World: Study
#8Re: All by Itself, the Humble Sweet Potato Colonized the World: Study
#9There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16825800, but this looks like the more substantive article.