Down to Earth

This week's featured word is varken, the Dutch word for pig. Similarly, the Dutch word for pork is varkensvlees (pigs-meat).

Another dutch word is aarde, which means earth or soil. Planet Earth is de Aarde. And earth makes an appearance in aardappel, the Dutch word for potato (earth-apple).

I'd known both aarde and varken for a while, but I only realized today that an aardvark (aardvarken in Dutch) is simply an earth-pig. But isn't an earth-pig just a ground-hog? No, the Dutch word for groundhog is bosmarmot (forest-marmot).

neither aardvark nor groundhog
(probably a hoary marmot)