All of us who have curious minds, and in our writing are many, we often ask ourselves questions that are equally curious. Those types of questions that tend not to have a clear and concise answer. Questions that serve to fill hours of debates and entertain a after-dinner with the family We are referring to questions of the type What was before; the egg or the hen? or questions like the one that the following article brings us: Where does the word come from? orange ? Was it before color or fruit? If you are a curious person like us, you have surely done it more than once. We will try to give you an answer.
The word orange
There is a book by T A Kenner, "Symbols and their hidden Meanings" ("The symbols and their hidden meanings") that has an answer for this curious doubt. According to this book it was first the fruit that the color, since until it appeared, the color was known as red-yellow or yellow-red.
The first known use of the word orange referring to a fruit dates back to the thirteenth century , however the first use of which there is evidence about the word orange referring to color dates from the sixteenth century, ie, about 300 years apart.
What is also curious is to see how this happens in the same way in other languages , like for example in English that we have the word orange both to define the fruit and to refer to the color. The same thing happens with the French whose word orange It serves in the same way to refer to both. In Portuguese they use laranja and in the case of Valencian or Catalan we refer to fruit or color with the term taronja
If we look at Latin, the mother of almost all the languages we have named above, perhaps we can provide more clues to the mystery. In Latin, the orange as fruit was known as malum auratum , that is, golden apple and orange as color was, likewise, auratum , or what is the same, golden. So for the Romans, the orange color was very similar to the tone of gold. Although in Latin there is no proper term to refer to the orange color or the fruit queen of the juices, it seems that, at least for the Romans, it was first the color and then the fruit.
Another theory to answer if the word orange was born as a reference to color or to the fruit that says it comes from Sanskrit naranga what does orange mean? At the same time, this word comes from the Dravidian root for aromatic. In fact, the orange trees are native to the Indian subcontinent, where the use of these languages was common. From Sanskrit it would pass to the Persian of this one it would stop to the Arab.
The orange trees are introduced in Europe through the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages, and they do it with the Arabic name. This Arabic name is adapted to Spanish resulting in the terminology of orange, and orange for its fruit. In the other European languages, the name comes from the Spanish term.
This phenomenon is not something exclusive of the word orange. In fact there is a name for this type of words; polysemy . The polysemy that is that the same word has several meanings. Words like mouse, saw, cat, mango and even the word orange, have several meanings.
There are, like the example we are talking about in this article about the word orange, other curious questions that we usually do to people and that they do not have an easy answer either. As happens with the word orange, there is another equally puzzling question: What was the chicken or the egg first?
This seemingly innocent question, has been making humans for centuries without reaching a unanimous solution until the scientist Mary Stoddard along with her team, decided to respond to such a curious enigma.
After thoroughly analyzing the different species of birds and their eggs, they reached a conclusion that would put an end to this controversy. According to Stoddard, "Definitely, the egg came first." He answered without hesitation, and added
"An egg with shell and specialized evolved in some vertebrates while making the transition to terrestrial life, and then these animals gave rise to the first terrestrial vertebrates, which include birds."
At some point another group of curious scientists and even historians with an extravagant spirit will come to investigate the curious question that we proposed at the beginning of this article. What came first, orange as fruit or orange as color? Until then we will continue to launch hypotheses and debate which one seems the best solution. For now, tell us! What is your opinion about the word orange? According to you, what went first; the fruit or the color? Come and leave us your comments We will be happy to read you!