The title is pretty self-explanatory, I think. Every language I can think of has either the exact same word or extremely similar words for “orange” the colour and “orange” the fruit. Are there any languages where this isn’t the case? If so, why not?
Also, did the word for the fruit originate first, or the colour? Does it matter which language, or is it consistently the same order (ie. all languages had the word for the orange fruit first, then later the colour)? Or did they tend to come into existence at the same time?
What is the Spanish term for the color orange? I know the fruit is naranjam but am not aware of whether it also covers the color.
(I presume that differences between noun and adjective that are inherent in a language will not void the OP question – much like the differences between salad greens and a green tree may be slightly different words in some languages.)
Just a WAG, but I think the two words might be different in places where nobody had seen an orange until recently. They may have already had a name for the color, and given a different name to the newly-discovered fruit.
In Russian the words are totally different and unrelated. The descriptor orange comes from the English word, while the fruit is also called applesin like it is in the Scandinavian languages.
Russian is апельсин (apel’sín) for the fruit, same word & etymology as above; the color is оранжевый цвет (oránzhevyj tsv[sup]j[/sup]et), where цвет is the word “color” and -ый is an adjectival termination: orangy color.
Celtic:
Irish has oráiste for the fruit, and flannbhuí for the color, the latter a combination of flann, one of the red words* and buí, “yellow.”
Scottish Gaelic is the opposite: òraisd is the color, and or-ubhall (lit. “gold-apple”) is the fruit. In both cases the orange-sounding word gets used for both.
Welsh has oren for the fruit and melyngoch, from melyn “yellow” + coch “red,” for the color. Most people say “lliw oren,” lit. “orange color.”
Breton has a nice variety: for the fruit, aval orañjez “orange apple” or just orañjezenn (pl. orañjez) or aouraval “gold-apple.” The color is *melenruz *“yellow·red” or liv orañjez “orange color.”
*Irish has a variety of words that map onto our red. Ruadh, dearg, flann, etc. Flann is usually used with blood , and flannbhuí is sort of an academic / archaic word: spoken Irish uses oráiste for the color, too.
So, if I am following the thread correctly, in English the color name was derived from the name of the fruit. It then appears that several other languages, with quite different names for the fruit, have borrowed the color name from English. Can that be right? Why did these other languages with (I presume) otherwise quite different color vocabularies, have to borrow this word from English? Why did they not evolve their own term, like they did for other colors?
Come to that, why does “orange” as a color appear so late in English (1557 according to Samclem’s post)? I guess the fruit might not have been introduced into Europe until relatively late, but surely they must have had other things (flowers, paints dyes) that were that color. It is one of the basic spectral colors (the 7 colors of the rainbow) after all. It is hardly like it is cerise or ecru or taupe or something (or even crimson or turquoise).
Also, is it true, as I have heard, the fruit was originally called “a noringe” in English (presumably derived from the Spanish), and that this only later became corrupted to “an orange”? (I have an idea that “noringe” occurs somewhere in Shakespeare.)
Maybe in whatever weird Scandinavian languages you speak, but not in the one I do. In Icelandic the fruit is appelsína, and the colour is appelsínugulur (orange-colour).
This assumption needs rebuttal. The colors exist independently of language, but the way the spectrum is divided varies enormously from language to language. There’s no natural boundary between one color and the next, it’s always a continuum. Welsh, at least in medieval times, splits our “gray” into their “blue” and their “brown,” for instance; their “blue” also includes most of our “green,” a color sometimes called “grue” by culture-studies folk. Many languages divide blue: Russian синий (sinij) and голубой (goluboj), Italian blu and azzurro. I’m sure others will be along to make this point clearer than I can.
Not to hijack, but when I look at that wheel, I identify patches of red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta. I mean, I can see that there’s orange, and purple on there, but cyan and magenta are in my vocabulary just as much, and look like bigger splotches to me (although some of that may be biased by the display). Just sayin’, color identification is influenced by what you see and talk about regularly.
In Adamawa Fulfulde (Northern Cameroon) an orange is simply called a lemon, or “leemu.” The color is called “red-yellow”, which I believe would be “danejuum-ndyam goro.” In any case, oranges in that part of the world are generally green.
Oddly, the word for "yellow’ translates as “water kola nut.”
Sure. In Bulgarian, the color is oranzhevo (оранжево) and the fruit is portokal (портокал), which comes from…well, I’m not sure what the absolute origin is, but it’s the same in Farsi, which makes me think that it’s originally from Arabic, where it passed to both Farsi and Turkish, and from Turkish to Bulgarian. (Bulgarian has about a zillion Turkish borrow words, both Turkish and Farsi have about a zillion Arabic borrow words.)
If it turns out that portokal refers to the color orange in Arabic, well, never mind.
In Icelandic the fruit is appelsína, and the colour is appelsínugulur (orange-colour).