Ficus also has nothing to do with melons, so right there the theory that Romans classified all fruits as either apples or melons is done. Look, our ancestors weren't fucking idiots.
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Malum is the Latin word for Apple and the thread makes a big deal about malus being the genus name for apples and trying to link the concept of evil and apples in Roman thought, but etymologically, no.
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Mālus (sorry, typo up there) is what happens when the Greek word for apple, μᾶλον (malon) or μῆλον (melon), moves west. It does not sound like malus, the Latin word for evil. Also IIRC mālus is feminine so a bad apple would be mālus mala anyway.
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Don't quote me on the genders of Latin nouns though as it has been a looooong time since I dealt with Latin. ANYWAY.
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As neat as it would have been for us to get the word for melon from the Greek word for apple, we didn't. The ancient Greek for melon is μηλοπέπων (melopepon, apple-gourd, shoulda gone with the Greeks).
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The Romans took it as "melopepo". By late Latin they had decided it was just melo. It then made its way into French and reacquired an n, becoming melon.
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Incidentally, the Romans called walnuts "nux Gallica" - Gaul nuts. Because that's where they found out about them, apparently. By late Old English we had walh-hnutu, meaning foreign nuts. They weren't apples.
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See above re: our ancestors were not idiots. They understood that these were different things.
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Replying to @NeolithicSheep
my god thank you for this, I find these sorts of things perpetually annoying but they persist no matter how much it's debunked.
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it makes me feel about the same as when I heard the claim that Welsh and Ancient Greek don't have words for blue.
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