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To: donna
The Romans definitely knew what monkeys were.

Blue monkeys are depicted in a wall painting on the island of Thera (mid-second millennium BC), a good likeness of a species found in East Africa as far north as Ethiopia.

Pliny describes the banana in his Natural History, calling it either ariera or ariena (the reading is uncertain). The word banana as a Latin word is found in an author writing in 1606, according to the Latin-language Wikipedia article on bananas.

20 posted on 08/29/2015 11:36:31 AM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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To: Verginius Rufus
I believe this etymology is incorrect.

There are two theories, neither of them as a Latin word, unless you're referring more generically to romance languages, which borrowed it from a region of what is now the Congo:

There are two common theories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana#Etymology The word banana is thought to be of West African origin, possibly from the Wolof word banaana, and passed into English via Spanish or Portuguese.

The other is that it comes from the Arabic word for finger. http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2014/08/origin-banana/

The first recorded use is in 1597.

28 posted on 08/29/2015 12:38:58 PM PDT by FredZarguna ( "I pulled the lever on the machine, but the Clark Bar didn't COME OUT!!!")
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