2697: What's Your Favorite Fruit: Portugal? May 9, 2024

 In a number of languages, the fruit orange or for example the Spanish 'naranja' became the name of the color in between yellow and red, making it the last of the secondary colors to get a widely used distinct name beyond 'yellow-red' in many European languages. The name for the fruit itself though around the world is less ubiquitous. In Arabic the name for the fruit is البرتقالي (alburtuqaliu) meaning literally "(the) Portugals", which is also the name for the color. Note that Arabic has no <p> nor <g> sounds so they are substituted for <b> and <q> respectively. The reason for this is that the citrus fruits from Southeast Asia were first introduced by Portuguese traders, and even in parts of Italy like Turin there is a similarly derived name for the Turin orange. In Hebrew meanwhile, the fruit name is תפוז (tapuz) which is neither borrowed nor from a normal Hebrew root, but a contraction of תפוח זהב (tapuach zahav) meaning 'golden apple'. This is separate to the word for the color orange כתום (catom), one of many Biblical Hebrew terms for gold.