Dear Mr Encyclopedia, when were raspberries discovered? Wasn’t Avalon “the isle of apples?” When did Christian bibles start describing the forbidden fruit as “apples?” Were they not red apples?
What color did they call ripe ribe avu-crispa (a gooseberry)?
The Biblical fruit is just given as “pərî” and could be any fruit. Avalon is from the Welsh aflonydd, “peaceful”, so named because it was King Arthur’s vacation spot. Raspberries have not yet been discovered, at time of writing.
I tried to be careful about the biblical reference. It’s been translated as “apple” since at least the 12th century CE.
The biblical comment was not to argue that the Torah said “apple”, but that it has been translated as “apple” for centuries, demonstrating that the apple has been a commonly known fruit in Britain for a long time; and that ripe apples are frequently red.
Apple (malum) was used of the fruit from the 12th Century or thereabouts in ecclesiastical Latin, but the first known red apple is recorded only in the mid-17th Century, when an apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head and turned bright red in embarrassment.
The trend presumably picked up from there - c.f. the popularity of rouge in the French court.
Dear Mr Encyclopedia, when were raspberries discovered? Wasn’t Avalon “the isle of apples?” When did Christian bibles start describing the forbidden fruit as “apples?” Were they not red apples?
What color did they call ripe ribe avu-crispa (a gooseberry)?
The Biblical fruit is just given as “pərî” and could be any fruit. Avalon is from the Welsh aflonydd, “peaceful”, so named because it was King Arthur’s vacation spot. Raspberries have not yet been discovered, at time of writing.
I tried to be careful about the biblical reference. It’s been translated as “apple” since at least the 12th century CE.
The biblical comment was not to argue that the Torah said “apple”, but that it has been translated as “apple” for centuries, demonstrating that the apple has been a commonly known fruit in Britain for a long time; and that ripe apples are frequently red.
Apple (malum) was used of the fruit from the 12th Century or thereabouts in ecclesiastical Latin, but the first known red apple is recorded only in the mid-17th Century, when an apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head and turned bright red in embarrassment.
The trend presumably picked up from there - c.f. the popularity of rouge in the French court.
You got me.