Yes, just a translation from the French pomme de terre, where the potato came from after it crossed the Atlantic. A lot of words just follow the object, skill, product, invention or idea and maybe changed but keep roughly the same meaning. There's a lot of modern loan words from English, but also the other way around, especially related to see trade.

One of the reasons I don't experience it like that is because there are a lot of loan words from English and French, but the relationship with German is entirely different, German is branch from the same tree, while French and English words are more like organisms that hopped from tree to tree. This is probably why there are a lot more mutual false friends with German than with English and French. The only loan word from Swedish I can think of is ombudsman, wrongly changed to ombudsvrouw (ombudswoman) in case a female holds this position. I can read a Swedish newspaper and get quite an impression of what's it about, so it's remarkable alike, about as alike as German it seems to me, despite it beeing an older branch further away.

So the nature of the connection is very different per connected language. English and French don't feel connected at all to me, German does. But don't underestimate the difference, becoming really fluent on a high level is quite easy coming from German to Dutch or the other way around, but that's only after a hard struggle to get the basics right.