Oranges

As far as I can tell, there’s one very common way to say orange in Indo-European and other language families:

  • English / French / German / Latin – Orange
  • Spanish – Naranja
  • Italian – Arancia
  • Hindi – Nārangī

This is derived from Sanskrit, which I knew. What I didn’t know was that Sanskrit took ‘nāraṅga’ from Proto-Dravidian, the ancestor of Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, etc.

For example, Telugu uses ‘nārinja’ (I speak it, so I can verify). However, Kannada seems to use ‘kittale’, which is of course different. That is albeit according to Google Translate, the accuracy of which is sometimes dubious for languages that people don’t often translate to or from (e.g. a problem I personally have is that Telugu translations can be inaccurate).

Bonus: Finnish uses ‘appelsiini’, and Russian uses ‘appelsin’, which mean ‘Chinese apple’

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