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Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
- mock-possum 3y agoThis title is too clever for its own good - the article itself is actually a neat little peek at the semantics of the name for the fruit we call “orange.”
- mig39 3y ago"Portugal" is what you call oranges in some Arabic dialects as well. I have a Moroccan friend who refers to me as an Orange, because I'm Portuguese :-)
- selimthegrim 3y agoWhat does he call the band?
- lopis 3y agoThe band is not particularly popular in Europe.
- Off 3y agoIn Algeria we call Oranges "tchina" instead of "برتقال" which is funny because the Orange back then originated from China!
- MichaelRo 3y agoRomanian language calls oranges "portocale" so definitely Persian origin by route of the Ottoman Empire. In Turkish it's "portakallar". Speaking of weird names, we don't call oranges orange but we do call tomatoes "reds" (roșii). And we call corn "pigeon" (porumb - from "palumbus" which is Latin for pigeon). To finish, the Romanian word for "chainsaw" comes from Russian but neither Romanians know what it means in Russian nor do Russians suspect what it got to mean in Romanian. So "chainsaw" in Romanian - drujba - means "friendship" - Дружба - in Russian. Therefore when someone comes with the friendship at you, you better run, we'd have "The Texas friendship massacre" :)
- pinkmuffinere 3y agonit; portakallar is the plural of portakal, meaning orange (the fruit)
- cristianpascu 3y agoSeems there's a russian brand of chainsaws called Druzhba, that's where we got it.
- blululu 3y agoI like calling tomatoes reds in Romanian, but Rosa/Red is definitely a few thousand years old. In English the color orange is actually named for the fruit which does not grow well in England and only arrived a few hundred years ago.
- rpastuszak 3y agoAuthor of the article here, I'm Polish and my partner is Romanian so it's always fun to find slavic words that exist in the Romanian vocab, especially if their original/literal meaning became obscure in Romanian. Examples: Dâmbovița (oak tree forest in PL, and yes -- there seems to have been an oak grove near the river), slănină (słonina in PL, which literally means elephant meat, but that's probably popular etymology :)). Still wondering if Cacika was named after a duck (kaczka in PL). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacica
- MichaelRo 3y agoMaybe it originates in "cyka" :D (You know, сука блядь ;)
- dbuxton 3y agohttps://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/110890462230/the-word-orange-in-different-european-languages https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/110890462230/the-wor... to see how various countries come out
- bafe 3y agoFunny enough it seems in Persian there's no clear distinction between lime and lemon. My wife calls both "limoo". She does however claim there's a particular cultivars "limoo Shirin" that is supposedly very sweet (and hard to find outside of Iran)
- amiraliakbari 3y agoLime is called "limoo Shirazi", meaning Lemon of Shiraz (a city). But you are right that both are usually just called limoo. Limoo Shirin is a rather common fruit here, I didn't expect that it is not easily found outside Iran. Although it doesn't taste that good and is usually mixed with orange juice or consumed for health benefits (it's considered good for preventing/treating cold).
- bafe 3y agoI heard that the normal yellow limes we can buy in Europe aren't as sweet as limoo shirin. however it seems to be the same plant, just a different cultivar. Anyway, now I have yet another reason to go to Iran
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ppereira 3y agoArtificial lemon flavours that you find in candy and cough syrup taste much more like “sweet lemon” than the typical lemon found in North America. It is sweet when eaten within the first minute or so and bland afterwards. It does not taste acidic at all.
- augusto-moura 3y agoCoincidentally, or maybe not, I honestly don't know. Brazilian Portuguese also has a single name for lime and lemon, we call both "limão" (pronounced with a nasalized end). The yellow sweet lemon we call it Sicilian lemon, another fruit name with origin from a country name
- saagarjha 3y ago
- Raicuparta 3y agoMy favorite example of this is turkey, the bird, being named after Turkey, India, or Peru, depending on the language being spoken.
- reidacdc 3y agoAnd in French, in particular, it's named after India, but the word is an abbreviation and contraction of the phrase "poulet d'Inde" ("Indian chicken"), which got shortened to "dinde".
- lappet 3y agoInterestingly enough, Orange is called "oranju" in Tamil, a Dravidian language.
- someotherperson 3y agoModern Tamil has loanwords from all sorts of languages, wouldn't be surprised if orange also fell into that list.
- lappet 3y agoRight, but the root of "orange" is apparently Proto-Dravidian, as mentioned in the article
- canistel 3y agoIn Malayalam, lemon is naaranga. Local sweet varieties are called madhura naaranga or sweet lemon, where interestingly the former half is tatsama (as-is) Sansktri and latter pure Dravidian. Almost all citrus fruits have the naara root. This must be the same in Tamil too, except that it is usually free of tatsama Sanskrit terms. The oranges that are commercially sold must be sweeter cultivars introduced later on, after English adoption, because of which we ended up calling these oranges. Edit: Even Tamil is the English term for Thamizh.
- diego_moita 3y agoIn case anyone cares, the country's name comes from "Portus Cale", the Roman name of a location near modern day Oporto and Vila Nova de Gaia cities. Portus means port in Latin. It is the origin for the name of the city of Oporto, also. Cala is the Latin name of the Celtic goddess of winter[1], also known as Cailleach Bhéara in Irish or Beira in Scotland. It is also the origin for the name of the region known as Galicia and the Gaia in Vila Nova de Gaia. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cailleach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cailleach
- xinayder 3y agoThe correct city name is Porto, I have no idea why they call it Oporto. In Portuguese it was usually called Cidade do Porto (city of the port), which was shortened to be just Porto.
- sayrer 3y agoIt is the English term. It collapses the definite article into one word: "the Port" -> "o Porto". Nothing modern uses this name anymore, though. I always see "Porto", even in American English. But, it's a recent enough fix that you can still find signs of it. For example, you can book a flight to "Porto (OPO)". Just like you can book a flight to "Beijing (PEK)".
- vasco 3y agoPorto in Portuguese also means port directly, and Oporto is just foreigners that mistaken the "O Porto" meaning literally "The Port" into a one word that doesn't exist in portuguese for so long that now its the international name.
- rpastuszak 3y agoIIRC a somewhat similar thing happened to Istanbul which is based on a greek phrase meaning: "to the city".
- rpastuszak 3y agoAuthor of the article here. I was actually thinking about writing about this! I live in Porto and was born in Galicia, but a different one: the Galicia spanning from Krakow to Lviv. The universe is one big twisted noodle. Different versions of Galicia exist in most of Europe, from Cornwall to Galatia in Turkey (named after Thracian Gauls). Southern Poland, some parts of Czechia and (I think) parts of Ukraine were also inhabited by Celts, hence the name of the once Austro-Hungarian province.
- lynguist 3y agoFun side note of an article and I especially enjoyed the link to Metronomy – but consulting Wiktionary which in case of complex etymologies is authoritative, shows us that Persian portogal comes from Ottoman Turkish portokal (which itself being an Imperial language of the Early Modern Age has a dozen descendants), which itself comes from Greek portokali (as the Greek were the fruit traders, greengrocers, and fishermen in the Ottoman realm; from these areas more terms entered Turkish and all the languages of the former Ottoman empire), which itself comes from Venetian portogallo (who were the traders with the Greek). The real complexity is often more interesting and makes a bigger story.
- rpastuszak 3y agoYes, that seems correct! I'll update the article when I have a moment and add a similar diagram as in the first section. Thanks for pointing this out. If you have any other decent sources, besides Wiktionary -- please share. (my email can be found in my profile)
- sayrer 3y agoIf you look at the history there, you'll see "naranj" in the Arabic. This is still the word in Spanish: Naranja (البرتقالي). The wikipedia article is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(fruit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(fruit) That article says sweet oranges originated from China or Myanmar, and made their way west. Introduced to the Iberian Peninsula by the people then called the "Moors".
- geraneum 3y agoWe still call bitter oranges “Narenj” in Persian. That’s the root of the word Orange as the author puts it. That one hasn’t changed much.
- pazimzadeh 3y agoVery cool. Also, in Farsi tomatoes are called "foreign plums" and strawberries are called "foreign berries" i.e. gojeh farangi, and toot farangi
- throwaway2202 3y agoFrankish is what Farangistan and farangi was derived from. Referring to the Franks of course. I think it is from middle ages or earlier, if I’m not mistaken.
- lopis 3y agoOh. Is this where the Thai got the word Farang too?
- throwaway2202 3y agoI actually do not know. But there’s a wikipedia page on Farang that suggests this could be the case!
- pazimzadeh 3y agoYes, but why?
- throwaway2202 3y agoTomatoes were brought from the new world. Quick googling says Strawberries are also from Europe. That would give the Farang prefix.
- pazimzadeh 3y agowhy does frankish == european?
- nodja 3y agoIf anyone like me was curious as to where the Portuguese got the sweet oranges from: It was from China through the newly found maritime trade routes.