In Swedish the fruit is apelsin as mentioned above. There are two common words for the colour orange: orange and brandgul (literally fire-yellow). I don’t know how old the word brandgul is, that is, if it predates the use of orange.
Other than in rainbows and on some people’s heads, when did pre-modern Europeans ever see anything orange? Were they exposed to any orange plants, orange foods or orange fabrics?
In my language (Latvian) the colour is called ‘‘oranža’’ (female) or ‘‘oranžs’’ (male), but the fruit is called ‘‘apelsīns’’ (from the German ‘‘Apfelsine’’, which means ‘‘Chinese apple’’, the same in Russian, as somebody already mentioned above)
Fire? Or is that too yellowish to count?
A purplish colour, now known as “Puce”.
At sunrise and sunset, one presumes.
Even today, if you ask people what color fire is, 19 out of 20 of them will say “red”.
Were those all that orange before air pollution?
In the Dominican Republic the fruit is china and the colour is mamey, after the flesh of a completely different fruit - ‘mamee apple’ in English.
People understand but do not generally use naranja, the more common Spanish word for both the fruit and the colour.
If anything they appear to have been more orange, as near as I can tell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Turner,_J._M.W.-_The_Fighting_T%C3%A9m%C3%A9raire_tugged_to_her_last_Berth_to_be_broken.jpg
See that stuff coming out of the tugboat’s smoke stack? 19th Century London had some of the worst air pollution in history; they probably had beautiful sunsets, too.
As psychonaut said, English-speakers both saw and identified the color orange in the natural world. They simply called it “yellow-red” and went on with their lives.
I don’t understand njtt’s assertion that orange is such a basic color. First of all, you say “it’s one of the seven traditional (and Newtonian) colors of the rainbow.” How traditional? When did we assign these names to the rainbow? It can’t be Old English, so it must be Middle English or later. I suspect very much later. Anyway, I don’t really think the seven colors of the rainbow are so fundamental, though maybe it was a formative moment in your childhood the way the 64-color box of crayolas was to me. Would you make the same argument for indigo and violet?
Oh, give up. Do you see the ocean in the background there? London is hundreds of miles from the coast, as it happens. Besides, the painting is from 1839, so it predates the smog by several decades anyway.
And there are, of course, orange flowers native to Europe. Probably to England, too, but I’m no botanist so I don’t know what they are.
I wonder whether ‘apple’ and its cognates originally had a more general meaning, more like ‘small round fruit’, and apples, oranges, lemons, tomatoes, etc, were all subtypes? Similarly, when I read that ‘hippopotamus’ meant ‘river horse’ in Greek, maybe the ‘horse’ part originally meant something like ‘large four-legged animal’?
Huh. Could be. From the Online Etymology Dictionary:
(EDIT: Duh! Double post.)
It appears that “horse” didn’t mean just “large, four-footed animal” as far as we can go back in Indo-European:
Cognates of “horse” replaced the Indo-European root *ekwo in the languages of the Germanic branch. It appears that horses were important in Indo-European society, and there’s no evidence that words derived from it were used for other animals until later times. No one’s sure, but it’s possible that “horse” and its cognates in the other Germanic languages were derived from the Indo-European root *kurs, meaning “runner”, at some point.
Uncertain, notice that phouka didn’t even understand that you were making a joke. When you make a joke that’s easy to misunderstand, don’t be too surprised that someone will fail to get it. Why are you harassing me, since I at least understood that it was supposed to be a joke, when phouka (and probably others) didn’t see that it was a joke at all?
Thanks. I was coming here to mention Hebrew, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember the actual words.
But the word I was wondering about would have been the Greek equivalent (‘hippo’?). What if ‘hippopotamus’ orignally meant ‘river beast’ instead of, specifically, ‘river horse’, and ‘hippo’ later changed meaning from ‘beast’ to ‘horse’?