[HN Gopher] Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
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       Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
        
       Author : rpastuszak
       Score  : 49 points
       Date   : 2023-11-28 12:07 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (untested.sonnet.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (untested.sonnet.io)
        
       | mock-possum wrote:
       | This title is too clever for its own good - the article itself is
       | actually a neat little peek at the semantics of the name for the
       | fruit we call "orange."
        
       | mig39 wrote:
       | "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 :-)
        
         | selimthegrim wrote:
         | What does he call the band?
        
       | MichaelRo wrote:
       | 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" (rosii).
       | 
       | 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 Russian nor do
       | Russians suspect what it got to mean in Romanian. So "chainsaw"
       | in Romanian - drujba - means "friendship" - Druzhba - in Russian.
       | Therefore when someone comes with the friendship at you, you
       | better run, we'd have "The Texas friendship massacre" :)
        
         | pinkmuffinere wrote:
         | nit; portakallar is the plural of portakal, meaning orange (the
         | fruit)
        
         | cristianpascu wrote:
         | Seems there's a russian brand of chainsaws called Druzhba,
         | that's where we got it.
        
         | blululu wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | dbuxton wrote:
       | https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/110890462230/the-wor...
       | to see how various countries come out
        
       | bafe wrote:
       | 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)
        
         | amiraliakbari wrote:
         | 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).
        
         | diego_moita wrote:
         | In Portuguese speaking Brazil there isn't also a clear
         | distinction.
         | 
         | Limes are far more common than lemons there (that's why
         | caipirinha is made with them).
         | 
         | But there are three kinds of lemons in Brazil: limes are
         | sometimes called "Tahiti lemon" normal lemons are called
         | "Sicilian lemon" and a small, very bitter lemon with an orange
         | peel, sometimes called "Galician lemon".
        
         | ppereira wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | augusto-moura wrote:
         | Coincidentally, or maybe not, I honestly don't know. Brazilian
         | Portuguese also has a single name for lime and lemon, we call
         | both "limao" (pronounced with a nasalized end).
         | 
         | The yellow sweet lemon we call it Sicilian lemon, another fruit
         | name with origin from a country name
        
       | Raicuparta wrote:
       | My favorite example of this is turkey, the bird, being named
       | after Turkey, India, or Peru, depending on the language being
       | spoken.
        
       | lappet wrote:
       | Interestingly enough, Orange is called "oranju" in Tamil, a
       | Dravidian language.
        
         | someotherperson wrote:
         | Modern Tamil has loanwords from all sorts of languages,
         | wouldn't be surprised if orange also fell into that list.
        
           | lappet wrote:
           | Right, but the root of "orange" is apparently Proto-
           | Dravidian, as mentioned in the article
        
       | diego_moita wrote:
       | 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 name of a Celtic deity, also known as Cailleach 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.
        
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       (page generated 2023-11-28 23:00 UTC)