אֲפַרְסֵק

The peach was one of the first summer fruits to arrive in the Land of Israel, probably in the first or second century CE during the Roman Empire. The Romans called the peach persica, a shortening of its Greek name melon persikon ("Persian apple"), a name that testified to its geographical origin - Persia (or more correctly, what the Greeks and Romans thought was Persia). The sages of the Mishnah adopted the name and referred to the fruit as "persek," as appears in the Mishnah: "The apple and the quince, the peaches and the almonds, the plums and the pomegranates, although they resemble one another, are diverse kinds" (Kilayim 1:4). The sages of the Talmud found it difficult to pronounce the cluster of consonants at the beginning of the word (pr-) and therefore added a prosthetic aleph to the beginning of the word, which split the syllable into two, a phenomenon known in borrowing foreign words into Hebrew and other Semitic languages. A similar phenomenon exists today in borrowing words into Arabic, for example the word "استوديو" (astudyu) from "studio." Thus the word became "afarsek," and it has been used in this form from the days of the Talmud until today.