quendor91

I can not really find information on where the word Banana came from. Is it from Vietnamese or some other southeast asian language?

lpatelski

I am not sure if this is correct, but it is what I found.

Banana History
Cultivation of bananas pre-dates that of rice
By Peggy Trowbridge Filippone, About.com Guide

Bananas are the fruit of Musa acuminata. Acuminata means long-pointed or tapering, not referring to the fruit, but to the flowers giving birth to the fruit.
Antonius Musa was the personal physician to Roman emperor Octavius Augustus, and it was he who was credited for promoting cultivation of the exotic African fruit from 63 to 14 B.C.
Portugese sailors brought bananas to Europe from West Africa in the early fifteenth century. Its Guinean name banema, which became banana in English, was first found in print in the seventeenth century.
The original banana has been cultivated and used since ancient times, even pre-dating the cultivation of rice. While the banana thrived in Africa, its origins are said to be of East Asia and Oceania.
The banana was carried by sailors to the Canary Islands and the West Indies, finally making it to North America with Spanish missionary Friar Tomas de Berlanga.
Sweet bananas are mutants. These historical bananas were not the sweet yellow banana we know today, but the red and green cooking variety, now usually referred to as plantains to distinguish them from the sweet type.
The yellow sweet banana is a mutant strain of the cooking banana, discovered in 1836 by Jamaican Jean Francois Poujot, who found one of the banana trees on his plantation was bearing yellow fruit rather than green or red. Upon tasting the new discovery, he found it to be sweet in its raw state, without the need for cooking. He quickly began cultivating this sweet variety.
Soon they were being imported from the Caribbean to New Orleans, Boston, and New York, and were considered such an exotic treat, they were eaten on a plate using a knife and fork. Sweet bananas were all the rage at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, selling for a hefty ten cents each.

An African Language known as Wolof (Banaana)
OR
From the word ‘Banan’, literally meaning finger in Arabic.

"The word 'banana' is apparently derived from the Arabic word 'banan' means 'finger'. That's why a bunch of banana is called a 'hand' & a banana in a bunch is called a finger."



Bayer Crop Science
A rich history

The banana could have been one of the fruits found in the Garden of Eden. After all, its history goes back to the earliest days of mankind.


A heritage of millennia

We now know that the species of this genus originated in the Malaysian jungles of South-East Asia, although nobody knows precisely where. But we can say with certainty that edible bananas have been grown since the dawn of recorded history. And some scientists see the banana as man’s first domesticated crop.

There are detailed descriptions of bananas in the most ancient sacred literature, for example the books of the Vedas, the Laws of Manú and other classic Sanskrit works. The banana is known to have been cultivated in western parts of India since time immemorial and Semitic traditions place its origins on the banks of the Euphrates; others maintain that the plants came from the foot of the Himalayas or Eastern Hindustan.

One of the first recorded references to bananas dates back to 327 BC when Alexander the Great first tasted them during his conquest of India. He is even credited with bringing the banana from India to the Western world. But the first banana boats were ancient vessels crossing the Indian Ocean to Africa.

Though this age-old fruit comes from a tree-like plant, it is actually a herbaceous perennial plant of the Musa genus and Musaceae family which grows in humid tropical and subtropical climates. An excellent source of carbohydrate, fibre, vitamins and minerals it is, in many ways, the perfect fruit.

As a fruit, the banana is consumed at the rich and poor man’s table all over the world – but no more so than in poorer countries since its nutritional properties are greater than those of rice, yucca, potatoes or maize.

The king of plants

One of the biggest migrations in human history took place thousands of years ago in equatorial Africa, a region then inhabited by the Bantu people. Originating from what is now Cameroon, they migrated to Southern Africa between around 1 000 BC and the third or fourth century AD. There is no clear explanation for the Bantu exodus but many anthropologists link it to a population explosion. Researchers exploring a fossilised rubbish pit in Cameroon found mineralised banana tissue 2,500 years old and believe this highly productive rainforest crop may have fuelled the Bantu migration. It certainly helped spread the cultivation of bananas through the continent of Africa.

In more recent African history, intrepid 19th-century explorers like Sir Henry Morton Stanley crossed the continent of Africa with a caravan of 600 men who lived off bananas for a whole year. Another 19th-century explorer and scientist, Alexander von Humboldt, wrote in his diary: “There is no other plant on earth that provides so much nutritional sustenance in this amount of space.” More poetically, the banana was once described as the “king of plants”. And where does the name come from? The Arabic word for finger, banan. After all, the bananas that originally grew in Africa and South-East Asia were only about as long as man’s finger.

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Growin’ a bunch
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quendor91

That's very interesting. Thank you for posting that.