Potato

Discussion in 'History' started by arauca, Jan 27, 2013.

  1. arauca Banned Banned

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    What year was potato introduced into Europa. Because to my understanding ( wrong or right ) potato was introduced into Russia in the 17 century
     
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  3. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    Unsure. Wikipedia might have something on it, but I know in the movie Elizabeth (about Queen of England), Sir Walter Raleigh introduced her to a potato from Virginia a state he had named after his Virgin queen. Correct me if I am wrong, as I don't get all of my knowledge from television, but it seemed correct enough for my curiosity.

    NOTE: I recall someone biting into a raw potato in the movie.

    Edit: Yes it was Sir Walter Raleigh...
    That would allow plenty of time for the Potato to work its way to Russia in your time frame, although I have no idea how it got to Russia. I would guess it worked its way through Europe. Sorry I have not seen any movies on that.

    Here is a nice movie on how spaghetti caught on though.
    [video=youtube;l7yJ8C5TbeY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7yJ8C5TbeY[/video]
     
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  5. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Wikipedia has a fairly long and scholarly article on The History Of The Potato.

    It appears that the potato was introduced to western Europe in the second half of the 16th century. It took some of them a while to figure out what to do with it, so it did not become a staple crop until much later. By 1601 Italians were growing them for livestock feed. Since potatoes grow below ground level, they were somewhat resistant to pilferage by bandits and foreign armies and this made them more popular as human food.

    It took southern European governments a long time to adapt to potato farming. They had rules requiring crop rotation, and at the time of year when potatoes mature, grain was already scheduled to be planted in the fields where potatoes would grow best.

    But in northern Europe, the potato was quickly adopted for its ability to feed a lot of people, even during bad weather when many other crops failed.

    By the 19th century, the potato was basically keeping the European people alive. But in the middle of that century a disease attacked the plants. Since they were all descended from a small number of plants brought over hundreds of years ago, there was no genetic diversity to fight off the infection. In Ireland one million people died of starvation due to the Irish Potato Famine. This famine motivated thousands of Irish people to uproot themselves and emigrate to America, where food was abundant and they hoped to be treated much more fairly by us than they were by their English occupiers. I guess they were, considering that one of their great-grandchildren, John F. Kennedy, was elected President in 1960.

    I can't find a date for the introduction of the potato to Russia, but Friedrich Engels, one of the early communists, declared that the potato was the equal of iron for its "historically revolutionary role."
     
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  7. Orleander OH JOY!!!! Valued Senior Member

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    anyone know what kind of potato it was? In South America they seem to have a large variety. I was unaware of Sir Walter Raleigh giving a North American potato.
     
  8. arauca Banned Banned

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    Thank you folks for helping with the great vegetable Potato . I repentantly found Potato was introduced into Russia by Zar Peter the Great in 1773 it was brought from Holland . Now Potato is the second staple to bread in Russia .
    Apparently Russia was isolated from the west until the Zar Peter the great defeated the Swedish blockade in the Baltic sea.
     
  9. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    So did all potatoes evolve from the American potato? What's the difference? I'm guessing they just evolved differently (aside from genetic modifying) after being spread around, but IDK.
     
  10. arauca Banned Banned

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    If I remember correctly there were a large number of variation of potato in the Andes ( Peru, Bolivia, iii )
     
  11. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    I see. TY
     
  12. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    In English, we traditionally write the title as CZAR. Lately we have tried to improve that and transcribe it phonetically as TSAR.

    It evolved from the Latin title CAESAR (originally pronounced KAI-sar but in Modern English SEE-z'r) for the rulers of the Roman empire. German KAISER is from the same source.
     
  13. arauca Banned Banned

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    In Russian is pronounced Zar not Czar and not Tsar you have to follow the original pronunciation, pretty soon you will change into some thing else . The English language is a borrowed language anyway
     
  14. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Every Russian textbook and dictionary spells it ЦАРЬ and tells us to pronounce it TSAR. The letter Ц (tse) is always pronounced as "TS." I don't know if there is a single exception to that rule in the entire language.

    Huh? English may have borrowed a lot of foreign words, but the language itself is authentic.
     
  15. arauca Banned Banned

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    We have in the Slavic language 32 letters in the alphabet , it is possible to accommodate a variety sounds. Take your word " alphabet " why not use "F" instead PH, the ph does not sound as "F"
     
  16. Read-Only Valued Senior Member

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    There are probably dozens of English words where the "ph" is pronounced as an "F". Two readily come to mind - phonetic and telephone. Fraggle can most likely tell us the origin of that. Wait for it.

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  17. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    @ Fraggle Rocker,

    If someone was ever called "Zar Peter the Great" then I would not see a necessity to alter the spelling to "Czar". I think it is fine to alter the spelling if you are the author, but I would not view either as incorrect.

    Imagine you were in a jungle and found a Tribe. The head leader is a women who they referred to as "Bamiwawa Ortel" where "Bamiwawa" is the title, and "Ortel" is the name. Would you be correct by altering that spelling to suit your interests? Could you call her "Queen Ortel", or "Bamimami Ortel"?

    @ Arauca,
    Interesting that Slavic uses 32 letters and it is our language that uses sounds like "PH" instead of "F". If we used "F" perhaps we could lessen our alphabet which is already 6 letters shorter than the Slavic alphabet to begin with. It should be the Slavic language that uses unnecessary letter combinations to make sounds, since it uses 32 letters compared to our 26 letter alphabet.
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The potato family has many wild species, which find their greatest genetic diversity (and thus probable origin) in Central and South America and especially the northern Andes. The domestic type appears to be a refined crossbreeding of at least four wild species, probably in Peru, and there are hundreds of landraces of it in various places in the Andes mountains and altiplano. The Andes people plant them from seed, usually, several (four or five to twenty or more) landraces per farmer.

    IIRC the entire European potato crop is one, maybe two, of those landraces, mostly planted from cuttings (eyes). Almost a clone monoculture.

    A whole bunch of people are credited with bringing it to various places in Europe, from Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Ralegh to anonymous Spanish pioneers coming home. The guy who did the best job of promoting the plant was a Frenchman named Parmintier, one of the first nutritional chemists - my favorite story has him planting 40 acres of spuds outside the walls of Paris during a time of high bread prices, so that the poor would steal and spread them. It worked. That would have been around 1775, long after their first arrival from the Spanish conquests (Pizarro conquered the Inca in the mid 1530s, and the potato spread back from that immediately).
     
  19. arauca Banned Banned

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    Thanks for the history of this humble vegetable that helps to feed the world
     

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