The new, sweet oranges quickly displaced the bitter variety

December 2, 2023 3:31 PM

The word for orange and its cognates in several Indoeuropean languages arrived in Europe via Persian (نارنگ‎ nārang then, and نارنج nārenj nowadays). At the same time, in Persian oranges are called پرتقال (porteqāl) which literally means... Portugal! Why is that? from Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
posted by chavenet (9 comments total)

Language and food, my things! Thanks for posting.
posted by winesong at 4:54 PM on December 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh excellent - this is [ahem] my marmalade; where we get to appreciate Farts of Portingale.

On the back-and-forth front, the Japanese imported bread パン pan from Portugal 500 years ago, and since WWII are sending panko パンコbreadcrumbs back to Europe as added-value exotica.
posted by BobTheScientist at 5:03 PM on December 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

Our household is attempting to learn Romanian, which I feel is up there with English in a 'borrow what ya feel like' language situation. I've been looking up non-intuitive word derivations, so it was only in the last few months I learned about this exact thing - because in Romanian, it's portocală.
posted by cobaltnine at 7:39 PM on December 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've always wondered about this - thank you!
posted by blendor at 9:27 PM on December 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

the back-and-forth is traceable in the fact that whereas Portuguese and Spanish have only the one word for the fruit, Italian conserves both, arancia in standard parlance, and pattualli/portaialli/purtuall’/portugai in various dialects from south to north. (Greek also has both, neratzi and portokali.)
posted by progosk at 2:59 AM on December 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

(Incidentally, Germans (and Dutch) have different twin names for them: Orangen/oranje and Apfelsinen/sinasappel, Chinese apple, which tells yet of other trade routes.)
posted by progosk at 3:05 AM on December 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’m a beginning student of Arabic and the word for the color orange, البرتقالي, sounds a lot like “Portugal” ! I imagine that is so for similar reasons.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 6:01 AM on December 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Also: as the illustration in TFA notes, in Italy there was also a brief derail due to the fruit's hue beginning to carry its own semantic weight: Renaissance Italian "melarancio" was pseudoetymologized to match pomum aurantiacum, golden apple, so as to acquire Hesperidian status (see here for more on this conflagration). The fruit had left the original (Dravidian) meaning of "fragrant" behind long before, but its colour seems only to have established itself as its new identifier throughout Europe around the 16th century. (Curiously, the Occitan "oronge" for the strikingly orange bulbous cap of Amanita caesarea mushrooms remains the current vernacular in French to this day, mirrored by Cretan dialect and Arbëreshe (Italo-Albanian) "νεραντζάτους χοχλιούς" / "nerantzate" for the same species.)
posted by progosk at 6:52 AM on December 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Gotta add that Princes of Orange, top dogs and soccer colours in the Netherlands, get their name from the commune of Orange in S. France. Which in turn gets its name from "Arausio" a Celtic deity who was nothing to do with either the colour or the fruit but may have something to do with the cheek / side-of-face.
posted by BobTheScientist at 8:26 AM on December 3, 2023 [2 favorites]