Gramer Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff. Today we'll

talk about tomatoes and then we'll talk about why the word chiropractic is singular.

In the world of great debates, there's one that has been long enduring and still keeps

language prescriptivists awake at night. Is it tomato or tomato? Now this may not seem

as pressing as whether nuclear fusion is possible, but to people in the linguistic trenches,

it's pretty darn close. After all, how many linguistic pronunciation ambiguities have

been so long running and widely known that they actually have inspired a song? To get

to the bottom of the great tomato pronunciation debate, we have to go back. Way past the

Gershwin's putting the ditty into the world. According to linguist Jack Chambers, the

fruit was brought over to Europe around 1500 by Spanish explorers who developed a taste

for it in the new world. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the original name,

to model, came from Nahuatl, a Udoaz tech and language spoken in parts of Mexico and

Central America. Once across the pond, the word was nativeized as it began to be used

by speakers of European languages, meaning adapted to fit the sound systems of the

borrowing language. In Spanish, the name for these little beauties was tamate based on

the sound system of Spanish, which, like most romance languages, used the long A vowel

pronounced A, which was the closest vowel sound to the one heard in the original Nahuatl

word. This pronunciation was then adopted by the British, who used a similar A vowel,

sort of like we hear in the British sounding pronunciation of father. So this foreign

loan word nativization process would seem to argue that tomato is the accurate loan word

form, at least outside of the real McCoy, to model. But it's not quite so clear cut.

...