Actually, “orange” is one of the last basic color terms to be added to a language as it makes more distinctions. Black/white, red, green, yellow, blue, and brown all tend to appear in languages before orange, purple, pink, and gray.
PS. Based on the sequence listed in my post above, I would assume the word entered Europe during the Moorish occupation of Iberia, with Arabic naranj giving rise to Spanish naranja and then passing on to other countries.
Sorry, I meant to add the etymology section from OED.
In Afrikaans, the orange fruit is called “lemoen” (pronounced like “le-moon”). The colour is called “Oranje” (pronounced like “oran-ye”). Lemons are “suurlemoen” (lit. “Sour Lemon”)
In German, it’s either Apfelsine or *Orange *for the fruit, and *orange *for the color.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry on the Berlin-Kay color hypothesis and the debate around it:
The color orange is one of those that aren’t used by many languages.
Catalan has 43 words for “orange”.
Interesting answers. So it looks like quite a few languages have a different word for the fruit (I find it funny that “Chinese apple” seems somewhat common in Europe, as apples and oranges are pretty different, hence a certain idiom ;)). It seems that a vast majority of the words for the colour orange have roots in the name of the fruit in some language though (ie. many seem to be ultimately derived from the Sanskrit naranga).
Yes, when I look at the colour wheel or spectrum I find cyan to “pop out” as a colour as much as yellow, yet it is often lumped in as blue (sometimes even green is lumped in with blue). Do orange and purple tend to emerge as colours in languages before cyan or other breakdowns of the blue-green spectrum?
Just came to add that in Czech, too, they’re different: the colour is called ‘oranžový’, whereas the fruit is known as ‘pomeranč’.
yay - eight hundredth post!
And yet in the United States a “love apple” is a tomato – which is actually a berry.
Delayed Reflex, read the Wikipedia entries linked to in my post and Colibri’s post. Orange is part of the seventh stage of acquiring color terms. Notice that the Berlin-Kay hypothesis apples only to basic color terms, which wouldn’t include cyan because that is thought of in most languages as just a variety of blue or green. My guess would be that cyan emerges in a language after orange.
Thanks Wendell, actually I did read the articles but I somehow ended up asking the wrong question - I actually wondered why orange/purple emerge as defined colour terms ahead of cyan, when based on its width in the spectrum blue-green colours should be just as distinctive as red-yellow colours.
Actually now that I looked up an older thread about blue-green acuity, badlyburnttoast pointed out that there is a low-point in sensitivity in the blue-green range in human vision which may have an affect on how we perceive (and thus define) colours. This is a bit of a sidetrack from the original topic though.
That’s such a great typo.
Not as basic colour terms it doesn’t. According to Berlin-Kay it will almost certainly have either 0 or 1 basic terms for orange.
Note that in Hebrew, both words (mentioned above) are bessentilally neologisms. The word for the color (Katom), derives from a biblical word for “finest gold”, which appears in Lamentations 4-1, among other places. The word for the fruit (Tapuz), is simply short for Tapuach Zahav, or “golden apple”.
Some languages call tomato’s ‘apple of gold’, following the Italian pomodoro.
That boggles my mind. Do you have a list anywhere?
In Armenian, the fruit is called “nareeng.” The color is “nareeng ah guyn.” Directly translated, that means “orange colored.” So the color isn’t orange it’s “orange colored.”
I suspect that the notion of Catalan having 43 words for “orange” is Uncertain’s idea of a joke.
Yes. I hope to progress to making actual jokes someday. Thanks for “getting” this attempt.
Yes, I am well aware that the name of the fruit was borrowed from some other language. Indeed, I explicitly mentioned the possibility of it having come from Spanish in my post. However, in the bit you quote I was quite explicitly talking about the color name, and the suggestion (based on what others had said upthread) was that this had derived, in English, from the fruit name, and later spread to other countries where the fruit is named quite differently (so they certainly did not derive their color name from their word for the fruit). A Wiki page dealing with the etymology of the name of the fruit is not to the point of what I said.
Also, I well aware that different languages divide up the color space in different (though not arbitrarily different) ways. Color naming, however, is far from being entirely at the mercy of linguistic relativism, and, even if it were, the point remains that in modern English (and, I strongly suspect, most of the other major European languages) it is, as one of the seven traditional (and Newtonian) colors of the rainbow, a fairly basic color term, covering quite a wide range of hues and shades, and learned relatively early on by children, quite unlike some of the rarer color words that exist for making finer distinctions, but that even many adults do not know or use regularly. As such, it seems remarkable that the word for the color orange seems to have entered English (and, it would appear, a lot of the other European languages) so late. Nothing that has been said so far has addressed this point.
