FUN FRIDAY

On Fridays, I’ve decided, I’m going to post about things that interest me. Not that I’m not interested in everything college, because of course I am, but Fridays are going to be about my passions: languages, cooking, fiction and whatever my next obsession is.

So to start with, The Fascinating History of the Word ‘Orange’:

Did you know that prior to the introduction of oranges to England in the 13th century, the English language had no word for the color ‘orange’?   In fact, orange wasn’t commonly used as a color word until the 16th century.  That’s why we use the word ‘red’ to describe red-heads, even though most of the time that hair color actually closer to orange.  

Smart people have traced the word ‘orange’ back through the Arabic and Persian ‘naranja’ to the Sanskrit ‘naranga.’  Some other European languages use variations on ‘naranja,’ like the Spanish ‘naranja’ or the Serbian ‘narandžasta.’  A number of Germanic languages, however, translate the fruit that we call orange as some kind of ‘Chinese apple’; for example, ‘appelsin’ in Danish.  And a number of Slavic languages use some form of ‘pomeranz’ – like the Czech ‘pomeranč’ – that derives from the French ‘pommes d’orange’ which means something like ‘orange apples.’ 

Interestingly, though, the common word for ‘orange’ in modern colloquial Arabic is ‘burtoqal’ which is also the Arabic word for ‘Portugal’.  Apparently Portuguese sea traders, after discovering sweet oranges in China and realizing how eating them could prevent scurvy, then planted them everywhere they went.  In Portuguese itself, however, the word is ‘laranja’ from yes, the Arabic ‘naranja.’