Quinoa

Is anyone else interested in trying quinoa? I was interested in why it is spelt as it is but pronounced completely differently. Does anyone know?

I think these are ready to harvest now but weather looks dry for next week so will leave and keep an eye on them. They are not meant to be eaten by any birds or animals but we have the full set of marauders here (apart from deer).

   

On the pronunciation, I know its grown in Peru - maybe that's how they say Quinoa.
EDIT
From goggle , https://www.aukihenry.com/2015/02/how-do...uinoa.html

I was looking through our dictionaries to see if they could throw any light on why it is spelt one way but pronounced completely differently. My first dictionary (Concise Oxford 1964) doesn't list it. The next (Oxford Compact 1996) doesn't list it but the 3rd Edition of the Oxford Dictionary (2010) does list it and says it is from the Spanish, so Qu must be pronounced k in Spanish etc. It doesn't say what the original South American spelling was, if they had one.

My thinking was, if it is a new English word, why isn't it spelt like it is pronounced.

James Wong refers to it as “The sacred grain of the Incas that’ll grow like a week in sunny Scotland.”

I've never grown a "week" before but I expect JW will have seeds for it.

https://hub.suttons.co.uk/blog/general/g...own-quinoa

Going off a slight tangent but, when I went to Peru, the guide told us about how the native people were invaded by people from another country.
The word would be passed from village to village - "Hide, the Spaniels are coming".

It was difficult to keep a straight face, imaging hordes of floppy eared dogs rampaging through the villages, looting and pillaging.
Lots of things are lost in translation.

the 3rd Edition of the Oxford Dictionary (2010) does list it and says it is from the Spanish, so Qu must be pronounced k in Spanish etc. It doesn't say what the original South American spelling was, if they had one.

The original "spelling" was probably a bunch of Incan hieroglyphs, but the usual spelling in the modern language is "kinua".

The Spanish borrowed the word in the 17th century, but they spell the "k" sound as "qu". Hence the language's name, Quechua (pronounced "ketch-wa"), is usually spelt the Spanish way, even though ordinary words are usually spelt with a k. E.g. the Quechuan word for "two" is "iskay".

Yes, I am a linguistics nerd! (Though I got some of the above from Wikipedia.)