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| City Hall. Used with permission, Donald Kinney photo c. 2023 |
Last night, City Hall was lit up with orange lights to support the SF Giants, but street photographer, Donald Kinny noted that it looked more red than orange. Well, technically, if this were the early Renaissance, then he would be right—it is red, scarlet or cadmium red. Not orange.
Before 1510, the term yellow-red was used (geoluread in Old English—say it aloud with a swallowed g = y) or red-yellow to describe orange. Or the color orange was referred to as tawny (probably a Celtic loan-word). Saffron and green were the most favored colors for Medieval Irish clothing. I imagine that gold was also used to describe orange. It got me asking, why did the English language suddenly have the need to distinguish the colors red from yellow with a new word?
Weirdly the English word orange is a relative linguistic newcomer. It’s a “new” color name, meaning it wasn’t recognized as a separate color name in English until the 1500s….so, yes, some reds border on orange. Especially the light cadmium reds.
I didn’t understand that when I was taking painting classes at College of Marin why cadmium orange and red were so close in color. I dislike orange. I was pretty relieved when I discovered that color newcomer, alizarin crimson as I favor the blue reds versus the yellow reds. Also alizarin crimson was way less toxic than the cadmiums. Poor mad Vincent. Was it the cadmium yellows and reds he used responsible for his affliction?
Letting my fingers do the walking through the Google pages, I found this: “The first recorded use of "orange" as a colour name in English was in 1502, in a description of clothing purchased for Margaret Tudor.” Curious as to where the term came from, I discovered that it probably came from the Old French, pomme d'orenge.
Curiouser yet, the color term took 600 years after oranges arrived in Europe, for the color to be named in English by way of those Normans. Perhaps politics and the Reformation played into it? As in the House of Orange? The word orange, or flan bhui is flag-yellow, as there is no word for orange in Irish (oráiste is the fruit) is a politically charged color in Ireland, signifying oppression and the division of Ireland.
And of course, as you know, in English, nothing rhymes with orange. Unless it’s a Giants home game. Then all bets are on. Then City Hall and Coit Tower are bathed in a victorious orange afterglow. But here is the clincher, early oranges that came all the way from China, or India, weren’t necessarily orange-colored. They were green! They were bitter as well. I read that Florida farmers dye those green oranges orange.
Valencia oranges marked Christmas season for my grandmother who was raised in Bantry, Ireland. Each year her Christmas gift was one Valencia orange wrapped in foil.
My grannie said every Christmas they each got one sweet Valentia orange wrapped in foil for Christmas. It was something to be savored, the seeds duly counted. One for each member of the family, if luck would have it. The trick was to hold out and eat it after everyone else had eaten theirs. Then eat it in front of them. Slowly…. Valencia, located on the orange blossom coast of the Mediterranean Sea, was once spelled Valentia, in rough Latin, it meant strength/ valor. The Moorish name was Medina bu-Tarab/Turab (either city of joy, or city sand, depending on the mis-translation.)
Why did people in the British Isles describe orange cats as ginger cats? What came first, orange marmalade or the red ginger blossom? And why did Henry Miller name his novel Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch? And was it Frank O’Hara that wrote about bitter oranges? And then there are those blood oranges. But I somewhat poetically digress.
The rest of the world seems to use a variant from the Old Persian, purteghal, or narang, which is derived from the Sanskrit for the orange tree: nāraṅga. In Greek, the word for both the color and the fruit is portokali. In Romanian the fruit is portocala and the color, porticaliu.
One Guardian reader surmised that the p-word referred to Portugal but if you look at the Old Persian word (525BC), the model is at hand. It has more to do with whether one was referring to bitter oranges or sweet oranges, perhaps they came by way of Portugal. Besides, Portugal didn’t even get named until the 7th or 8th c. Do the math. It seems Seville was renown as the city of bitter oranges, and Valencia, the city of sweet oranges.
Somewhere along the way the initial N, in a case of mistaken identity for a bad article, was removed from naranga-s; the word became aranga. If you want to differentiate between the tree and the color in Spanish, you have to say naranja for the fruit, or anaranjado for the color. At least in Italian, the words are similar, the fruit is arancia and the color is arancione.
So how and when did oranges arrive to Mediterranean Europe? Arab traders brought a pomelo hybrid, bitter oranges (and the word naranja) to the Iberian Peninsula in the 10th c. But nothing is as simple as it seems, one form of citrus had already arrived to the Mediterranean as early as 1200BC, with other citrus fossil evidence on Italy dates back to the Pliocene.
The Arabs were also credited for bringing the lemons to the Mediterranean, but some form of citron, a primitive lemon—or its seeds—was discovered in Pompeii, in 310 BC. The prevailing theory is that lemons and oranges came from India or China by way of the incense route. But just to toss a fly into your neroli oil, I found this bit on archaic citrus:
In Italian [citron] is known as cedro… In Indo-Iranian languages, it is called turunj, as against naranj ('bitter orange'). Both names were borrowed into Arabic and introduced into Spain and Portugal after their occupation by Muslims in AD 711, whence the latter became the source of the name orange through rebracketing (and the former of 'toronja' and 'toranja', for grapefruit in Spanish and Portuguese. —Wiki
Sweet oranges arrived during the mid-15th century, long after the Moors were expelled from Spain. The reason why I point out the introduction of sweet oranges to Europe, is that there is a radical difference in Germanic, and Slavic languages (vs Romance languages) used to describe the fruit, orange vs. the color. More research is required.
And in the Scandinavian languages, Russian, German and Dutch oranges were called Chinese apples: apel'sin, apfelsine, or sinaasappel. In Russian, oranzhevii is the name of the color, orangenfarbe in German, and oranje in Dutch. So if you want a glass of orange juice in Germanic or Slavic countries, you have to ask for Chinese apple juice.
Moving away from the Indo-European language tree cognates, I discovered that in Hebrew, the color is called catom, and the fruit is tapuz, short for Tapuach Zahav, which means golden apple. No, not the Judgment of Paris, that’s a whole ‘nother discussion. Those were probably quinces. Is the Hebrew word related to the city of Valentia?AKA Medina bu-Tarab/Turab? Or is that too much of a linguistic stretch?
The invention of coal tar aniline dyes in the 19th century irrevocably changed our perception of color. In fact, Rimbaud’s poem about vowels, or Voyelles, pays explicit homage to the new aniline dyes. Suddenly there was a riot of color as subject matter in poetry.
The discovery of those aniline dyes, originally derived from indigo, and later, from coal tar, was an accident and the first coal-tar color discovered by a lad of 18, was aniline purple, orange’s slant opposite color (it’s really yellow, but because in the 1500s, there was no distinction between orange and yellow, a little poetic license is required.)
Curiously, the color orange is missing from Rimbaud’s poem. Is it a slight, or is it because nothing rhymes with orange? not even in French? Alors!
NOTES: Some of this information was gleaned from The Guardian’s Semantic enigmas
late 14c., in reference to the fruit of the orange tree (late 13c. as a surname), from Old French orange, orenge (12c., Modern French orange), from Medieval Latin pomum de orenge, from Italian arancia, originally narancia (Venetian naranza), an alteration of Arabic naranj, from Persian narang, from Sanskrit naranga-s "orange tree," a word of uncertain origin.
Not used as a color word in English until 1510s (orange color), "a reddish-yellow color like that of a ripe orange." Colors similar to modern orange in Middle English might be called citrine or saffron. Loss of initial n- probably is due to confusion with the definite article (as in une narange, una narancia), but also perhaps was by influence of French or "gold."
The tree's original range probably was northern India. The Persian orange, grown widely in southern Europe after its introduction in Italy 11c., was bitter; sweet oranges were brought to Europe 15c. from India by Portuguese traders and quickly displaced the bitter variety, but only Modern Greek still seems to distinguish the bitter (nerantzi) from the sweet (portokali "Portuguese") orange.
Portuguese, Spanish, Arab, and Dutch sailors planted citrus trees along trade routes to prevent scurvy. On his second voyage in 1493, Christopher Columbus brought the seeds of oranges, lemons and citrons to Haiti and the Caribbean. Introduced in Florida (along with lemons) in 1513 by Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon. It was introduced to Hawaii in 1792.
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