persiko

The word contains a wrong guess about geography, and English inherited it. Rome called this fruit persicum malum, the Persian apple, then dropped the apple. Persicum became Old French pesche and then English peach, so the gift here is that peach and Persia are the same word: our name for the fruit is a mispronounced country. Esperanto kept the longer, more obviously Latin form persiko, which makes the connection visible in a way English hides.

The peach is not Persian. It was domesticated in China, where stones have been found at Neolithic sites and where the tree carries several thousand years of symbolism attached to long life. It travelled west along the Silk Road, reached Persia, and reached Rome from Persia - so the Romans named it after the motorway rather than the factory. The Chinese name, 桃 (táo), is the older one by a considerable margin.

In the kitchen and the orchard. A persikarbo is a peach tree, a persikujo the same thing in the older style. The fruit has a kerno, a stone, and a fuzzy ŝelo you may or may not want to remove - which is what senŝeligi is for, twelve ranks back up this chapter. Persikkolora is peach-coloured.

The fruit shelf so far. Pomo the apple, piro the pear, ĉerizo the cherry, vinbero the grape, citrono the lemon, banano the banana, and now the peach. That is enough to pack a picnic, which is what the course does with them next.