Food and drink

Sumo de laranja natural carries a small piece of history that runs through English as well. The tree came west from India and the word travelled with it: the Persian and then the Arabic form was nāranj, which Spanish still says almost unchanged as naranja. Portuguese received the same word and turned the first of its two nasals into an l, which is where laranja comes from, one letter away from the form its neighbour kept. English took the longer route, through French, and somewhere on it the initial n simply came off: what arrived was « orange », the same word with its head bitten away. Two things follow. Laranja is a relative rather than a new item, once the l is allowed to stand for an n. And the colour is named after the fruit in both languages rather than the other way round, so the one word does both jobs here too: uma laranja on the table, cor de laranja on a wall.