Word History: Oranges imported to China from the United States reflect a journey come full circle, for the orange had worked its way westward for centuries, originating in China, then being introduced to India, and traveling on to the Middle East, into Europe, and finally to the New World. The history of the word orange keeps step with this journey only part of the way. The word is possibly ultimately from Dravidian, a family of languages spoken in southern India and northern Sri Lanka. The Dravidian word or words were adopted into the Indo-European language Sanskrit with the form nraga. As the fruit passed westward, so did the word, as evidenced by Persian nrang and Arabic nranj. Arabs brought the first oranges to Spain, and the fruit rapidly spread throughout Europe. The important word for the development of our term is Old Italian melarancio, derived from mela, “fruit,” and arancio, “orange tree,” from Arabic nranj. Old Italian melarancio was translated into Old French as pume orenge, the o replacing the a because of the influence of the name of the town of Orange, from which oranges reached the northern part of France. The final stage of the odyssey of the word was its borrowing into English from the Old French form orenge. Our word is first recorded in Middle English in a text probably composed around 1380, a time preceding the arrival of the orange in the New World.
So that doesn’t quite clear it up… I think this indicates that the word was first applied to the fruit, and then became a color (As the fruit passed westward, so did the word). So did they just not talk about the color before the fruit? Would you just say “oh that redish yellowish color”?
There may not have been such a color in their lives before they saw an orange. They may have had a similar color, say like a moon when it first appears on the horizon. It that case they might have said “red like the moon.”
That seems unlikely, considering that orange is a very popular color in flowers and autumn leaves. Not having a name, sure - yellow(ish) or red(ish) would do, although that’s hard to wrap my brain around. But surely they *saw *the color, even if they didn’t have a name for it?
I’ll modify what I said, in light of the posts that followed.
What I meant to say was that they might not have had the exact color of an orange(whatever an orange looked like at that point!), so they called a similar color “xxxx like a yyyyyy.”
Red as the coals of a dying fire. Red as the blossom on an xxxxx bush. Red as the newly rising moon.
As long as they could be understood by their listener.
Actually, it may not be all that far-fetched to suggest that there was little need for a descriptor for the colour orange in the early English language - England has only two orange coloured native wild flowers (and one of them is insignificant/easily overlooked and is called the scarlet pimpernel anyway; the other is not particularly common); most of the native fruits are green, red or blue/black.
OK, we have sunsets (when it isn’t raining), fires and and autumn leaves, but I think it’s fair to say that the ancient Britons would have had far less use for a name for the colour orange than would, say, the native South Americans - where there is an abundance of orange-coloured fruit (in the cucurbitae and the solanaceae, probably others)
I hope this thread is merely comatose and that I’m not a necromancer. I just wanted to add that many languages don’t have words for colors like “orange”: there’s a great linguistic study referenced in The Language Instinct (sadly, I don’t have a copy) that showed that some cultures get by with as few as three names for colors. I think it’s black, white, and red. As a culture gets more words for colors, the words are added in a fairly predictable order: if there are four words, blue will be the fourth word, for example. (or maybe it was green).
So I don’t dispute that English could go a long time with no word for orange. I was just saying that they’d seen a very similar color before, in the sunset, in flames, in coals, and perhaps in fish eggs.
The etyma cited in the OP are not accurate as displayed. There are letters missing. Should be:
Proto-Dravidian naru-
Sanskrit naranga
Persian narang
Arabic naranj
From this online etymology page. The Tamil pronunciation of arancu is almost the same as English “orange,” because -nc- is pronounced -nj- in Tamil, and the final -u is an obscure vowel like in Japanese or Korean which put it at the end of syllables in loanwords ending in consonants other than -n. Like beisu-boru (baseball) or aisu-kurimu (ice cream).
You can hear this in the movie Mystery Train, where two Japanese are arguing over who was the better rock-‘n’-roll pioneer. Erubisu.
Karu Perukinsu.
Erubisu.
Karu Perukinsu. (etc.)
The original study is quite interesting - it involved lots of work to see how the color space was divided in different languages. Languages can have as few as two ‘basic’ color words (which isn’t to say they won’t have others, necessarily - just as we have mauve in English but don’t consider it basic like blue or red.) If there are two basic color words, white and black are the prototypes for those colors, and black tends to also be used in reference to dark or cool colors, white for light colors. If there’s three basic color terms in a language, the third is red. Going on like that, the fourth will be yellow or green, the fifth green or yellow, the sixth blue, and after that come things like pink, orange, brown, grey, and purple. The point of that study though was to see whether cultures with one basic color word for, say, blue and green (which is not all that uncommon) considered them as similar as we would consider different shades of blue. It turns out they don’t, and it’s quite common to see circumlocutions like “bleen like the grass” and “bleen like the sky”. The particular shades chosen as the best representatives of their colors don’t vary culturally, and it’s thought that this probably reflects something about the human visual system.
I’ve read that orange was referred to as red, yellow, dun, tan - basically, whatever word was closest. It’s certainly the case that they didn’t have nearly as much need for it in the days before such a wide variety of pigments were available. You certainly wouldn’t be faced with trying to come up with a way to describe an orange shirt.