Yam (vegetable) Yam (vegetable) Yam is the common name for some plant species in the genus "Dioscorea" (family Dioscoreaceae) that form edible tubers. Yams are perennial herbaceous vines cultivated for the consumption of their starchy tubers in many temperate and tropical world regions. The tubers themselves are also called "yams", having numerous cultivars and related species. In parts of the United States and Canada, "yam" is sometimes used to refer to varieties of the unrelated sweet potato ("Ipomoea batatas"). The name, yam, appears to derive from Portuguese "inhame" or Canarian (Spain) "ñame", which derived from West African languages during trade. The main
Varieties of Chinese the second family. The ordinary negators in these varieties are all derived from a syllabic nasal *m̩, though it has a level tone in Hakka and Yue and a rising tone in Min. Existential negators derive from a proto-form *mau, though again the tonal category varies between groups. First- and second-person pronouns are cognate across all varieties. For third-person pronouns, Jin, Mandarin, and Xiang varieties have cognate forms, but other varieties generally use forms that originally had a velar or glottal initial: Southern varieties also include distinctive substrata of vocabulary of non-Chinese origin. Some of these words may have come