You say портокал, I say برتقال

[qatarperegrine]

I noticed while traveling through Eastern Europe that, despite the fact that Eastern European languages come from vastly different language families, they all call oranges something like "portokal." Then I moved to Arabic and learned that the word for orange is برتقال, "burtuqal."

Today I learned where all these words come from: Portugal!

The earlier word for orange is from the Sanskrit nāraṅgaḥ, which is where Persian gets nārang, Spanish gets naranja, Japanese gets orenji and we get orange. But these all referred to the bitter Indian orange. It was Portuguese traders who started bringing the sweet orange, Citrus sinensis, back from China. And thus all along their trading route -- Uzbekistan, Georgia, Persia, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy -- the new orange got named for the Portuguese who brought it.

Comments

[qatar-cat.livejournal.com]

And Χρυσομηλιά are actually the bitter variety of citrus used only to make sweets :)