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All about the orange!

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strikingstar
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 Message 1 of 48
26 October 2011 at 10:26am | IP Logged 
In the case of the orange, I've always found it curious that the color and the fruit
share the same name. This occurs without any exceptions across all the languages that I
know.

English: orange - orange
Spanish: naranja - naranja
Swahili: chungwa - chungwa
Mandarin/Cantonese: 橙 - 橙 (cheng/chaang)
Arabic: برتقال - برتقال (burtuqaal)

Forgive my ignorance, but are there any languages out there in which the color and the
fruit do not share the same name? If not, does anyone care to speculate how this came
to pass? And finally, are there other similar symbiotic relationships across a
preponderance, if not all languages?
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Leurre
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 Message 2 of 48
26 October 2011 at 10:33am | IP Logged 
I know this is cheating, but Korean is a great example heheh
Simply because they use the English word for orange (fruit)

Orange(fruit)- 오랜지
Orange(color)- 주황색(朱黃)
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Solfrid Cristin
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 Message 3 of 48
26 October 2011 at 10:48am | IP Logged 
There are different words in Norwegian (appelsin/oransj) and as far as I remember also in the other Scandinavian languages. It is different also in Russian and Turkish, and I believe also in Dutch. With the exception of Turkish I think all the other languages have some variant of orange for the colour, though. I think I have heard that the Norwegian word for the fruit orange derives from Dutch where it is something in the vicinity of sinasappel - apple from China. Please correct me those of you who actually know Dutch.:-)

Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 26 October 2011 at 10:50am

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strikingstar
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 Message 4 of 48
26 October 2011 at 11:03am | IP Logged 
Leurre wrote:
I know this is cheating, but Korean is a great example heheh
Simply because they use the English word for orange (fruit)

Orange(fruit)- 오랜지
Orange(color)- 주황색(朱黃)


Interesting. Is there an older name for the fruit in Korean? That the fruit is called
"O-ren-ji" seems to suggest that the name was adopted much more recently.

Are there other examples that do not involve transliteration from one language to
another?
That is kinda "cheating".

Solfrid Cristin wrote:
There are different words in Norwegian (appelsin/oransj) and as
far as I remember also in the other Scandinavian languages. It is different also in
Russian and Turkish, and I believe also in Dutch. With the exception of Turkish I think
all the other languages have some variant of orange for the colour, though. I think I
have heard that the Norwegian word for the fruit orange derives from Dutch where it is
something in the vicinity of sinasappel - apple from China. Please correct me those of
you who actually know Dutch.:-)


Hmm, it seems that appelsin is similar to sinaasappel (Dutch) and Apfelsine (German).
And oransj is of course similar to orange. It seems the word has been borrowed
extensively in many languages as the fruit gradually made its way around the world from
China/India/Indochina.

From wiki:

Quote:
Portuguese navigators have also been credited with bringing orange trees to the
Mediterranean region around 1500... In some South East Indo-European languages the
orange was named after Portugal, which was formerly the main source of imports of sweet
oranges. Examples are Bulgarian portokal портокал, Greek portokali πορτοκάλι, Persian
portaghal پرتقال, Albanian "portokall", Macedonian portokal портокал, and Romanian
portocală. In Italian the word portogallo to refer to the orange fruit is dialectal.
[36] It means literally "Portugal". Similar words are in common use in most Italian
dialects across the whole country.[37] Related names can also be found in other
languages: Turkish Portakal, Arabic al-burtuqal البرتقال, Amharic birtukan, and
Georgian phortokhali.


On the surface, the fact that the color and the fruit share the same name in many
languages would seem to suggest that the concept of the color is closely tied to the
fruit itself. But then, the color used to be referred to as "geoluhread" in Old English
before the introduction of the fruit to the West, which would disprove the previous
statement, unless it was an anomaly and not the norm.
link

And what about places in which the fruit originated? I don't know enough about Chinese
etymological history to say that either the color or the fruit was ever known by
different names.

A nice experiment would involve finding people who have never had contact with the
fruit, e.g. the uncontacted peoples and seeing if they have a name for the color in
their language.

Uncontacted peoples

Edited by strikingstar on 26 October 2011 at 11:39am

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t123
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 Message 5 of 48
26 October 2011 at 11:27am | IP Logged 
It's different in Afrikaans, the colour is oranje and the fruit is lemoen, confusingly similar to the English word lemon.
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Doitsujin
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 Message 6 of 48
26 October 2011 at 11:28am | IP Logged 
In German, we use both Apfelsine (which is of Dutch origin) and Orange for the fruit but only orange for the color.
BTW, in MSA, orange color is برتقالي [burtuqaalee]. برتقال is only used for the fruit.

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jeff_lindqvist
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 Message 7 of 48
26 October 2011 at 11:43am | IP Logged 
Swedish has "apelsin" for the fruit and "orange" for the colour. SAOB has this info about the origin:
"af ä. nt. o. holl. appelsina, nt. o. ä. t. appelsine; jfr d. appelsin, t. apfelsine; eg. äpple från Kina, Kina-äpple (jfr holl. sinaasappel, chinaasappel, ä. t. Sinaapfel, Chinapfel, fr. pomme de Chine; jfr äfv. eng. China orange, fr. orange de Chine "
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H.Computatralis
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 Message 8 of 48
26 October 2011 at 11:54am | IP Logged 
Actually, there is an ongoing debate among linguists about the universality of color terms, so you may be onto something.

However, I think the case of the orange fruit is just a case of massive borrowing by many languages. Here it says for the etymology of the English word:

Middle English orenge, orange, from Old French pome orenge 'Persian orange', literally 'orange apple', influenced by Old Provençal auranja and calqued from Old Italian melarancio, melarancia, compound of mela 'apple' and (n)arancia 'orange', from Arabic نارنج (nāranj), from Persian نارنگ (nārang), from Sanskrit नारङ्ग (nāraṅga, “orange tree”), from Dravidian (cf. Tamil nartankāy, compound of நரந்தம் (narantam) 'fragrance' and காய் (kāy) 'fruit'; also Telugu nāraṅgamu, Malayam narakam, Kannada naranga).

For the color sense, replaced Old English geoluhread (“yellow-red”) compare Modern English blue-green.



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