Why is JBT called Trifele and not Truffle?

[maf]

I like the flavour of Japanese Black Trifele and it has been productive in my climate, one of my favourites. The problem I have is that when I try and say the name to anybody I never know how to pronounce it - "triff-el" or "try-feel" or what? It is not in the dictionary either, so no help there. Is trifele regional slang or something?

When I take the Russian characters for the name from the Biotexnica website and paste them into google translate I get the translation "Japanese Black Truffle". I know how to pronounce that, so my question is why is Truffle not used for the English name?

[dice]

Latvian for truffle?
http://www.receptes.lv/receptes/serija-trifele/

[maf]

Good thinking, thank you.

One of the books I have says JBT might be of Estonian origin, and Estonia and Latvia are neighbours on the Baltic coast. Might easily have come through Latvia on its way to the west, or even been from there originally. Google translate even has a button that lets you listen to Latvian pronunciation of "trifele", here. Sounds kind of inbetween "tree-fell" and "triff-el".

Still don't understand why someone translated part of the name into English, but not the whole thing.

[carolyn137]

There's more than one Trifele, not just the black one but I think red and maybe pink, none are Japanese in origin and all were bred in the former USSR, now the CIS.

I'm sure Tania lists all of them in her data base, or I assume she does.

There's some dicussion of where in the CIS they were bred in the thread here on Icicle tomatoes.

[maf]

Hi Carolyn, I saw the mention of Japanese Black Trifele in the Icicle thread - it was one of the reasons why I decided to ask the question that started this thread. The Biotechnika catalogue lists all 5 colours of Japanese Truffles with pictures on their website, half way down this page. As you mentioned this seed company is in Saint Petersburg in Russia, which is located just a 100 or so miles away from the border with Estonia and a few hundred from Latvia.

I knew Trifele wasn't the Russian or Estonian word for truffle, but I never would have thought to look for the Latvian word, as suggested by dice.

Interesting to note that the Truffles are one of the more expensive OP varieties of tomato seed they sell at Biotechnika - twice as much as Paul Robeson for example, and more expensive than some of the F1 varieties.

[dice]

Who could guess who all within the domain of the USSR might
have worked at an agricultural institute in St. Petersburg, where
they were from exactly, or where they may have collected seed
stock from? It could have been merely a fanciful name, too,
the sweetness, color, and shape of it reminding some plant
breeder or bureaucrat of an eastern Baltic trifele, ie a truffle.

(Then some bureaucrat higher up adds the "Japanese" prefix
for who knows what reason: an inside joke, a political rebuke,
a satire of the Western capitalists and their concern for
keeping knowledge of the parentage of cultivars proprietary,
whatever.)

"Losts in the mists of time."