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Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal

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Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal

#11

Post by cristianpascu »

MichaelRo wrote: post #4

Romanian language calls oranges "portocale" so definitely Persian origin by route of the Ottoman Empire. In Turkish it's "portakallar". Speaking of weird names, we don't call oranges orange but we do call tomatoes "reds" (roșii). And we call corn "pigeon" (porumb - from "palumbus" which is Latin for pigeon). To finish, the Romanian word for "chainsaw" comes from Russian but neither Romanians know what it means in Rus…

Seems there's a russian brand of chainsaws called Druzhba, that's where we got it.

Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal

#12

Post by amiraliakbari »

bafe wrote: post #8

Funny enough it seems in Persian there's no clear distinction between lime and lemon. My wife calls both "limoo". She does however claim there's a particular cultivars "limoo Shirin" that is supposedly very sweet (and hard to find outside of Iran)

Lime is called "limoo Shirazi", meaning Lemon of Shiraz (a city). But you are right that both are usually just called limoo.

Limoo Shirin is a rather common fruit here, I didn't expect that it is not easily found outside Iran. Although it doesn't taste that good and is usually mixed with orange juice or consumed for health benefits (it's considered good for preventing/treating cold).

Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal

#14

Post by lappet »

someotherperson wrote: post #13
lappet wrote: post #10

Interestingly enough, Orange is called "oranju" in Tamil, a Dravidian language.

Modern Tamil has loanwords from all sorts of languages, wouldn't be surprised if orange also fell into that list.

Right, but the root of "orange" is apparently Proto-Dravidian, as mentioned in the article

Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal

#15

Post by [deleted] »

bafe wrote: post #8

Funny enough it seems in Persian there's no clear distinction between lime and lemon. My wife calls both "limoo". She does however claim there's a particular cultivars "limoo Shirin" that is supposedly very sweet (and hard to find outside of Iran)

[deleted]

Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal

#16

Post by blululu »

MichaelRo wrote: post #4

Romanian language calls oranges "portocale" so definitely Persian origin by route of the Ottoman Empire. In Turkish it's "portakallar". Speaking of weird names, we don't call oranges orange but we do call tomatoes "reds" (roșii). And we call corn "pigeon" (porumb - from "palumbus" which is Latin for pigeon). To finish, the Romanian word for "chainsaw" comes from Russian but neither Romanians know what it means in Rus…

I like calling tomatoes reds in Romanian, but Rosa/Red is definitely a few thousand years old. In English the color orange is actually named for the fruit which does not grow well in England and only arrived a few hundred years ago.

Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal

#17

Post by diego_moita »

In case anyone cares, the country's name comes from "Portus Cale", the Roman name of a location near modern day Oporto and Vila Nova de Gaia cities.

Portus means port in Latin. It is the origin for the name of the city of Oporto, also.

Cala is the Latin name of the Celtic goddess of winter[1], also known as Cailleach Bhéara in Irish or Beira in Scotland. It is also the origin for the name of the region known as Galicia and the Gaia in Vila Nova de Gaia.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cailleach

Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal

#18

Post by ppereira »

bafe wrote: post #8

Funny enough it seems in Persian there's no clear distinction between lime and lemon. My wife calls both "limoo". She does however claim there's a particular cultivars "limoo Shirin" that is supposedly very sweet (and hard to find outside of Iran)

Artificial lemon flavours that you find in candy and cough syrup taste much more like “sweet lemon” than the typical lemon found in North America. It is sweet when eaten within the first minute or so and bland afterwards. It does not taste acidic at all.

Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal

#19

Post by augusto-moura »

bafe wrote: post #8

Funny enough it seems in Persian there's no clear distinction between lime and lemon. My wife calls both "limoo". She does however claim there's a particular cultivars "limoo Shirin" that is supposedly very sweet (and hard to find outside of Iran)

Coincidentally, or maybe not, I honestly don't know. Brazilian Portuguese also has a single name for lime and lemon, we call both "limão" (pronounced with a nasalized end).

The yellow sweet lemon we call it Sicilian lemon, another fruit name with origin from a country name

Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal

#20

Post by lynguist »

Fun side note of an article and I especially enjoyed the link to Metronomy – but consulting Wiktionary which in case of complex etymologies is authoritative, shows us that Persian portogal comes from Ottoman Turkish portokal (which itself being an Imperial language of the Early Modern Age has a dozen descendants), which itself comes from Greek portokali (as the Greek were the fruit traders, greengrocers, and fishermen in the Ottoman realm; from these areas more terms entered Turkish and all the languages of the former Ottoman empire), which itself comes from Venetian portogallo (who were the traders with the Greek).

The real complexity is often more interesting and makes a bigger story.

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