The 1577 appearance of the stand-alone orange, meaning the color, is in an English law limiting the colors in which woolen cloth could be made:Īnd moreover, be it enacted by the authority aforesaid that no person nor persons after the said feast of the nativity of St. I wonder if this 1502 appearance is of orange color as well, as opposed to an antedating of the stand-alone orange. Also, Wikipedia cites a 1502 appearance of orange, but only gives secondary sources as references and doesn’t not specify the document the word allegedly appears in. It’s not a name for the hue, but rather a description of it that uses the fruit. This is a neat example of the transition from the fruit to the color. The phrase orenge colour appears in a will dated 1512. The color orange is recorded by 1557, but there are some precursor appearances earlier in the century. Sweet oranges, like the Valencia, weren’t imported to Europe until the sixteenth century. They were the bitter or Seville orange ( Citrus aurantium). These medieval oranges weren’t the ones we usually find in grocery stores today. The fruit is first recorded in English in the fourteenth century in a Latin-English dictionary, the Sinonoma Bartholomei: And the Arabic comes from the Persian narang, a sequence that nicely portrays the relevant trade route through which the then-exotic fruit would pass. The English orange is borrowed from French, which in turn comes from the Italian arancio, which is from the Arabic naranj-and is a nice example of rebracketing, un naranj dropping the second and becoming un arancio. The color orange comes to us from the name of the fruit, which is recorded in English before the hue. In English, for example, orange is a relatively late addition to the language, dating to the mid sixteenth century. One would think that color terms are basic to the language and would be among the earliest words recorded, but this is not always the case.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |