Language of the Voiceless: Traces of Taino Language, Food, and Culture in the Americas From 1492 to the Present

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the world and later brought to Hawaii where it became the national symbol of that
state. This word, like many Taino words, is a combination of two words. The first
is ana (found in surviving Spanish words such as banana, guanabana, ananah,
Anacaona) which means fruit or flower. The literal meaning of this word is flower
or fruit that is born from the stomach. The other word, guava derives from the
Spanish guayaba, which comes (essentially unchanged) from the Arawak or
Taino’s closes cousin wayaba. Moreover, According to Fray Ramon Pané, “the
dead would turn into guayaba trees during the day and become alive at night” 16 .
Potato: The word potato was a corruption of the Taino word batata which
refers only to sweet potatoes. Columbus introduced the plant to Spain in 149 3.
Later, Spanish explorers in the Andes encountered what we call potatoes which is
a completely different tuber. The batata (sweet potato of the Caribbean) was a
central part of Taino diet. Unfortunately for the Taino, as the expansion of the
Spanish conquest reached Peru and the Inca empire the term became associated
with the Spanish diet and borrowed by the Quechua speakers thinking it simply
meant tuber. However, the Quechua had the word papa to describe what is today
known as potato. The linguistic doubt in the pronunciation gave birth to the
famous English expression “potaitoe-potato”, one being closer to the Taino
batata, the other, like the Quechua papa. Unlike English, the Spanish and the
French allowed the survival of each term morphologically independent from one
another. In English, confusion ensued and persisted.
16
(Pane, 1498)