The English word orange begins to be used to designate the color orange in the 16th century. In the final stage in the journey of the word, the Old French form was borrowed into Middle English, at first spelled orenge in a text dating from around 1400. Old Italian melarancio was translated into Old French as pume d'orenge, "apple of the orange tree." The a in the Old Italian word was replaced by o in Old French due to the influence of the name of the town of Orange (from which oranges reached the northern part of France) and possibly also due to the influence of the Old French word or, "gold" (by association with the rich color of the fruit). The Arabic word is the source of Old Italian arancio, "orange tree," and this word was compounded with Old Italian mela, "apple," to make melarancio, referring to the fruit of the orange tree. The Arabs brought the first oranges to Spain and Sicily between the 8th and 10th centuries, and from there the popularity of the fruit spread throughout Europe. As the fruit passed westward from India, so did the word for it, becoming Persian nārang and Arabic nāranj. The modern Tamil word for an orange, for example, is nāram, and in ancient times, a Dravidian word similar to this was adopted into the Indo-European language Sanskrit as nāraṅgaḥ. ![]() The ultimate origins of the word lie in the Dravidian language family, a family of languages spoken in South Asia that includes Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. Very interesting article with cool examples.Word History: If we trace the origin of the English word orange from its source, we follow the path of the fruit as its popularity expands from Asia to Europe. * In the "words that begin with an n" category he didn't include the most famous example: orange, the fruit, which has an n in Persian and Arabic from which it was borrowed but lost it ( (fruit)#Etymology) ![]() * I used to think that baby was the actual word and babe was a corruption, turns out most probably it was just the reverse (baby < babe + y) (. * Somewhat related to the last category: Have you ever wondered why the initial sound in chair and chandelier are pronounced differently in English? There was a sound change in French, chair was borrowed before that change and chandelier, like many other French word that start with ch, after that change. The name is from the town of Orange on the Rhone in France, which became part of the. Its Roman name was Arausio, which is said in 19c. * According to OED the reason that some animal names have the same singular and plural was that they originally contained a long vowel, e.g. 0 Comments sources to be from aura 'a breeze' and a reference to the north winds which rush down the valley, but perhaps this is folk etymology of a Celtic word. > Rhotic versus non-rhotic is the only real big difference I'm aware of Turns out, horse was also in this group but after a sound change its vowel shortened, hence the -s plural now. Ranged against the migratory tribes of the Cimbri under Boiorix and the Teutons under Teutobod, were two Roman armies, commanded by the proconsul Quintus Servilius Caepio and consul Gnaeus Mallius Maximus. There's always more out there than we're aware of. The Battle of Arausio took place on 6 October 105 BC, at a site between the town of Arausio, now Orange, Vaucluse, and the Rhne river. > such differences are primarily differences in accent One famous difference is that in Australian english, the words can ("a can of tuna") and can ("I can do that") don't rhyme (I believe "can" is actually the wrong word in AE for "a can of tuna", but the example is just there to illustrate the word's meaning). These obviously exist, but they're often so regular that they don't present much of an obstacle to communication. How do you feel about Jamaican english (which is, in its vernacular, not mutually intelligible with the three I just mentioned)? Vocabulary differences ("a tin of tuna" for "a can of tuna") and meaning differences (like the story where British politicians wanted a motion tabled immediately, because it was important, but American ones felt strongly that it shouldn't be tabled at all, because it was important) happen too.Īustralian, British, and American english are nevertheless fairly close. ![]() The original form for at least some of those words is to start with "hw". For example, the first line of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is "Hwaet! We Gardena in geardagum". ![]() "Hwaet" is the word that became "what" in modern English, and was (given that when the poem was written people tended to spell relatively phonetically) presumably pronounced.
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