"Portugal" is what you call oranges in some Arabic dialects as well. I have a Moroccan friend who refers to me as an Orange, because I'm Portuguese :-)
What does he call the band?
The band is not particularly popular in Europe.
Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
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Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
#42Very cool. Also, in Farsi tomatoes are called "foreign plums" and strawberries are called "foreign berries" i.e. gojeh farangi, and toot farangi
Frankish is what Farangistan and farangi was derived from. Referring to the Franks of course. I think it is from middle ages or earlier, if I’m not mistaken.
Oh. Is this where the Thai got the word Farang too?
Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
#43Funny 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)
We don't have this distinction in Brazilian Portuguese too. When you refer to lemons you're usually referring to the green lime (which is called "limão-taiti", meaning tahiti lemon). When we want to refer to the yellow lemon (the common lemon outside South America) we usually say Sicilian lemon. There's another very common type of lime which we refer to as "limão-capeta" (devil's lemon), it's a small, orange-color li…
We had a Brazilian come to visit us in Europe and she was wondering why do we insist on using Sicilian lemons instead of the "normal" ones. When she went out to buy limes, she understood it at the cash desk.
Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
#44Very cool. Also, in Farsi tomatoes are called "foreign plums" and strawberries are called "foreign berries" i.e. gojeh farangi, and toot farangi
Frankish is what Farangistan and farangi was derived from. Referring to the Franks of course. I think it is from middle ages or earlier, if I’m not mistaken.
Yes, but why?
Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Limão Capeta must be what we call Limão Galego or Limão Bergamota or Limão Cravo in the south. It has more names than tangerines and makes a great caipirinha.
Funny that you mentioned this, in Italian "bergamotto" is a sort of bitter orange
In Portuguese "bergamota" by itself is tangerine.
Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
#46Romanian 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…
Author of the article here, I'm Polish and my partner is Romanian so it's always fun to find slavic words that exist in the Romanian vocab, especially if their original/literal meaning became obscure in Romanian. Examples: Dâmbovița (oak tree forest in PL, and yes -- there seems to have been an oak grove near the river), slănină (słonina in PL, which literally means elephant meat, but that's probably popular etymology :)). Still wondering if Cacika was named after a duck (kaczka in PL).
Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
#47In 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 Galic…
Author of the article here. I was actually thinking about writing about this! I live in Porto and was born in Galicia, but a different one: the Galicia spanning from Krakow to Lviv. The universe is one big twisted noodle.
Different versions of Galicia exist in most of Europe, from Cornwall to Galatia in Turkey (named after Thracian Gauls).
Southern Poland, some parts of Czechia and (I think) parts of Ukraine were also inhabited by Celts, hence the name of the once Austro-Hungarian province.
Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
#48In 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 Galic…
Porto in Portuguese also means port directly, and Oporto is just foreigners that mistaken the "O Porto" meaning literally "The Port" into a one word that doesn't exist in portuguese for so long that now its the international name.
IIRC a somewhat similar thing happened to Istanbul which is based on a greek phrase meaning: "to the city".
Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
#49Fun 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 fisherme…
Yes, that seems correct! I'll update the article when I have a moment and add a similar diagram as in the first section.
Thanks for pointing this out. If you have any other decent sources, besides Wiktionary -- please share. (my email can be found in my profile)
Re: Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
#50Funny 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)
What about toranj? I still have no idea which citrus fruit it is. I know that the traditional pattern in the middle of Persian carpets is called this way, and it has some significance in Sufi symbolism. (plus there's Toranj by one of my favourite modern Iranian musicians -- Mohsen Namjoo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a64OFz4PkkA)