All of us who have curious minds, and in our writing we are many, we usually ask ourselves equally curious questions.That kind of questions that usually do not have a clear and concise answer.Questions that serve to fill hours of discussions and liven up a desktop with the family We are referring to questions of the type What was before; the egg or the chicken? or questions like the one in the following article: Where does the word orange come from? Was it before color or fruit? If you are a curious like us, surely you have done it on more than one occasion.We will try to answer it.
The word orange
There is a book by TA Kenner, "Symbols and their hidden Meanings", which has an answer to this curious question.According to this book, it was first the fruit that the color, since until it appeared, the color was known as red-yellow or yellow-red.
The first known use of the word orange referred to a fruit dates back to the thirteenth century , on the other hand, the first use of which the orange word is recorded referring to color dates back to the 16th century, that is, about 300 years apart.
What also results curious is to check how this happens from the mi sma way in other languages , such as in English that we have the word orange both to define the fruit and to refer to the color.Pas the same with the French whose word orange also serves to refer to both.In Portuguese they use laranja and in the case of Valencian (the language spoken in Valencia, a region of Spain) or Catalan (the language spoken in Cataluna, another region of Spain) we refer to fruit or color with the term taronja.
If you look at Latin, mother of almost all the languages that we have named above, perhaps we can contribute more clues to the mystery. In Latin to orange as fruit it was known as malum auratum , that is, golden apple and the Orange as a color was, likewise, auratum , or what is the same, golden.So for the Romans the color orange was very similar to the tone of gold.Although in Latin there is no term proper to refer to the orange color or the queen fruit of the juices, it seems that, at least for the Romans, first it was the color and then it was the fruit.
Another theory to answer whether the word orange was born as a reference to color or fruit is what it says comes from the Sanskrit naranga that means orange tree.At the same time, this word comes from the dravidic root for aromatic.In fact, orange trees are native to the Indian subcontinent, where the use of these languages was common.De Sanskrit would pass to the Persian of this pararia at Arabic.
Orange trees enter Europe through the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages, and they do so with the Arabic name.This Arabic name adapts to Spanish resulting in orange, and orange terminology for its fruit.In other European languages, the name comes from the Spanish term.
This phenomenon is not something exclusive to the word orange.In fact there is a name for this type of words; polysemy .Polysemy which consists in the same word having several meanings.Words like mouse, saw, cat, mango and even the word orange itself, have several meanings.
There are, as the example of which we speak in this article about the word orange, other curious questions that people often ask ourselves and that they don't have an easy answer either.In the same way that happens with the word orange, there is another equally disconcerting question: What was the chicken or the egg first?
This seemingly innocent question has been asked for centuries.human being without reaching a unanimous solution until the scientist Mary Stoddard together with her team, decided to respond to such a curious enigma.
After analyzing conscientiously the different species of birds and their eggs, they reached a conclusion that would put an end to this controversy.Segun Stoddard, "Definitely, the egg came first." I answer without hesitation, and add
" An egg with shell and specialized evolved in some vertebrates while making the transition to terrestrial life, and then these animals gave rise to the first terrestrial vertebrates, including birds.”
At some point there will come another group of curious scientists and even historians with extravagant spirit who give them to investigate the curious question that we proposed at the beginning of this article.Which came first, orange as fruit or orange as color? Until then we will continue to hypothesize and discuss which one seems best solution.For now, tell us! What opinion do you have about the word orange? According to you, which came first; the fruit or the color? Encourage us to leave your comments We will be happy to read you!
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