This 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.”
"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 :-)
Romanian 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" :)
I 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.
Author 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).
Funny 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)
Lime 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).
I 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
Artificial 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.
Coincidentally, 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
I believe this is true in Hindi as well, both are “nimbu”. It’s generally not a problem because we overwhelmingly buy limes for food use at home but it did take a bit to figure out (when I was younger, of course) that the two fruits that I knew from school were not something my mother distinguished.
We don't have this distinction in Brazilian Portuguese too.
When you refer to lemons you're usually referring to the green lime (which is called "limão-taiti", meaning tahiti lemon).
When we want to refer to the yellow lemon (the common lemon outside South America) we usually say Sicilian lemon.
There's another very common type of lime which we refer to as "limão-capeta" (devil's lemon), it's a small, orange-color lime with a less sour taste than the green lime.
So, in short, we don't distinguish between lemon and lime, everything is a lemon.
We had a Brazilian come to visit us in Europe and she was wondering why do we insist on using Sicilian lemons instead of the "normal" ones. When she went out to buy limes, she understood it at the cash desk.
I can’t recall having the sour variety of lemon in Iran. There’s lemon (english lime), and there’s sweet lemon. Well, it is only sweet if you have it in the first couple of seconds after opening. After exposure to the air, it doesn’t taste that great.
That's exactly what my wife said too, the limoo shirin is only sweet just after peeling/juicing and turns bitter fast. I looked it up and looks very similar to the "standard" yellow lemons we get in Europe, mostly grown in Spain and Italy. However she's adamant that they don't taste the same
What about toranj? I still have no idea which citrus fruit it is. I know that the traditional pattern in the middle of Persian carpets is called this way, and it has some significance in Sufi symbolism. (plus there's Toranj by one of my favourite modern Iranian musicians -- Mohsen Namjoo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a64OFz4PkkA)
That seems bizarre, they’re different fruits, they taste different - how can you just call them both the same thing? Doesn’t that cause unnecessary confusion? Or do they just call them like ‘green thing’ and ‘yellow thing?’
And 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".
In 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.
In 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.
It 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)".
Porto 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.
Author 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.
Fun 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.
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".
Frankish 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.
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[ 0.16 ms ] story [ 1902 ms ] threadSpeaking 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" :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacica
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).
The yellow sweet lemon we call it Sicilian lemon, another fruit name with origin from a country name
When you refer to lemons you're usually referring to the green lime (which is called "limão-taiti", meaning tahiti lemon).
When we want to refer to the yellow lemon (the common lemon outside South America) we usually say Sicilian lemon.
There's another very common type of lime which we refer to as "limão-capeta" (devil's lemon), it's a small, orange-color lime with a less sour taste than the green lime.
So, in short, we don't distinguish between lemon and lime, everything is a lemon.
It has more names than tangerines and makes a great caipirinha.
Wikipedia says it is a hybrid between an orange and a pomelo, developed in Barbados.
OK, to answer my own question: toranj == citron
https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/hayyim_query.py?qs=tor...
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.
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
In Portuguese it was usually called Cidade do Porto (city of the port), which was shortened to be just 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)".
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.
The real complexity is often more interesting and makes a bigger story.
Thanks for pointing this out. If you have any other decent sources, besides Wiktionary -- please share. (my email can be found in my profile)
The wikipedia article is pretty good: 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".
Also, in Farsi tomatoes are called "foreign plums" and strawberries are called "foreign berries"
i.e. gojeh farangi, and toot farangi