Ripe plums are falling
The etymology of a sweet oriental fruit
As well as tasting delicious, when it comes to the history of language, the plum can be highly instructive. For a start, the ripe and dried fruit, plum and prune, form what is known as a linguistic doublet. That is, two different words which share a common ancestor, in this case the Latin prunum.1
Plum also reveals how sounds can alter as they come into c…