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All about the orange! | ||
Tags: Colors/Colours | Meaning of words | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| strikingstar Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4955 days ago 292 posts - 444 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese, Swahili Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 1 of 48 26 October 2011 at 10:26am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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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? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Leurre Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5207 days ago 219 posts - 372 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Korean, Haitian Creole, SpanishC2 Studies: Japanese | Message 2 of 48 26 October 2011 at 10:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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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) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5116 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 3 of 48 26 October 2011 at 10:48am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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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 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| strikingstar Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4955 days ago 292 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese, Swahili Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 4 of 48 26 October 2011 at 11:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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".
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:
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 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| t123 Diglot Senior Member South Africa https://github.com/t Joined 5393 days ago 139 posts - 226 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans | Message 5 of 48 26 October 2011 at 11:27am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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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 Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5102 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 6 of 48 26 October 2011 at 11:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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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. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6691 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 48 26 October 2011 at 11:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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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 " 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| H.Computatralis Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 6086 days ago 130 posts - 210 votes Speaks: Polish*, French, English Studies: German, Spanish, Latin | Message 8 of 48 26 October 2011 at 11:54am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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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. 7 persons have voted this message useful |
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