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False friends

prune (French) plum

gin (Phrygian, Turkey) to dry out

korn (Swedish) barley

sik (Ukrainian) juice

glass (Swedish) ice cream

prick (Thai) pepper

chew (Amharic, Ethiopia) salt

Hawaiian bananas

Hawaii’s traditional cuisine is based on quite a restricted list of ingredients: fish (there are 65 words alone for describing fishing nets), sweet potato (108 words), sugarcane (42) and bananas (47). The following are among the most descriptive words for this fruit:

mai’a kaua lau a banana, dark green when young, and yellow and waxy when mature

kapule a banana hanging until its skin has black spots

palaku a thoroughly ripe banana

maui to wring the stem of a bunch of bananas to cause it to ripen

pola the hanging down of the blossom of a banana palm or a bunch of bananas

halane a large bunch of bananas

hua’alua a double bunch of bananas

manila a banana tree not used for fruit but for rope fibre

lele a tall wild banana placed near the altar, offered to the gods and also used for love magic

Replete

As the meal enters its final stages, a sense of well-being descends on the diner – unless, of course, you’re suffering from bersat (Malay), food that has gone down the wrong way …

uitbuiken (Dutch) to take your time at dinner, relaxing between courses (literally, the expansion of the stomach)

nakkele (Tulu, India) a man who licks whatever the food has been served on

slappare (Italian) to eat everything, even to the point of licking the plate

’akapu’aki’aki (Cook Islands Maori) to belch repeatedly

Post-prandial

After it’s all over, what are you left with?

femlans (Ullans, Northern Ireland) the remains of a meal

sunasorpok (Inuit) to eat the remains of others’ food

shitta (Persian) food left at night and eaten in the morning

Food poisoning

Visitors to Easter Island would be advised to distinguish between the Rapa Nui words hakahana (leaving cooked food for another day) and kai hakahana (food from the previous day that is starting to rot).

Hunger

Food cannot always be taken for granted. Homowo is a Ghanaian word that means ‘hooting at hunger’. Local oral tradition recalls a distant past when the rains failed and there was a terrible famine on the Accra Plains, the home of the Ga people. When a good harvest finally came and there was more than enough to eat once again, the Ghanaians celebrated by holding a festival, still celebrated to this day, that ridiculed hunger.

Daily Bread

Food often figures in colloquial sayings and proverbs, as this selection from Spain shows:

quien con hambre se acuesta con pan suena whoever goes to bed hungry dreams of bread (to have a bee in one’s bonnet)

agua fría y pan caliente, nunca hicieron buen vientre cold water and hot bread never made a good belly (oil and water never mix)

pan tierno y leña verde, la casa pierde fresh bread and green firewood lose the house (two wrongs do not make a right)

vale bolillo it’s worth a piece of bread (it doesn’t matter)

con su pan se lo coma may he eat it with bread (good luck to him)

Quenched

After all this talk of food and eating, it’s hard not to feel thirsty:

gurfa (Arabic) the amount of water scooped up in one hand

tegok (Malay) the water one can swallow at a gulp

qamus (Persian) [a well] so abundant in water that the bucket disappears

yewh-ma (Wagiman, Australia) to scrape out a hole in the sand to collect fresh water

jabh (Persian) arriving at a well and finding no water

Bakbuk bakbuk bakbuk

Like the English expression ‘glug glug glug’, the Hebrew word for bottle, bakbuk, derives from the sound of liquid being poured from it.

Pythons and sponges

Those who have not experienced sgriob (Scottish Gaelic), the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky, may have suffered from olfrygt (Viking Danish), the fear of a lack of ale. And it’s not always a fish the world drinks like:

beber como uma esponja (Portuguese) to drink like a sponge

uwabami no yo ni nomu