Every time I go away to another country I’m made aware of the shifting plates of language. Language, whichever the particular form of a language in a specific place, is constantly changing and evolving, reflecting and shaping our ways of thinking. And, like Darwinian evolution, it seems to me something to admire and celebrate.
I went to Granada: Andalucia, in southern Spain. What distinguishes this part of Spain is the still visible and audible influence of the Islamic culture that dominated this corner of Europe for eight centuries until the Moor’s last sigh in 1492. (A significant year in history, with the Spanish Reconquista armies driving out the Moors and Columbus ‘discovering America’.)
The Alhambra in Granada is a wonder of the world. It’s an Islamic palace, fortress, town and gardens that still dominates the city panorama. I was interested in the way its name changed to reflect changing languages and cultures. Originally it had a Celtic name that was eventually Romanised to Illiberis. When the Visigoths arrived from the north they thought this equated to Elvira.
Later it became known as Garnata el yehud, the hill of pilgrimage of the Jews, a reminder that there have been times when Islamic, Jewish and Christian religions could co-exist peacefully. The Arabs then called the place Kharnatta, but when the Christian kings expelled them this became Granada in Spanish (because that’s what it sounded like to them). Granada happens to mean ‘pomegranate’ in Spanish. Early brand consultants then decided that the pomegranate would make an attractive visual symbol for the city. And five centuries later you still see the pomegranate sign around public buildings.
Fruit, as a website called 26fruits shows, always has metaphorical appeal. But in southern Spain you see fruits hanging in the trees as you walk down the streets. I still find it wonderful to see oranges, lemons and even pomegranates growing among dark green leaves. You can almost hear una naranja passing from Spanish into French as une orange before slipping between English lips as an orange. So familiar now, even as a mobile phone company let alone a once exotic fruit, orange still reminds us subtly of its foreign origins in our language. It does so through its reluctance to rhyme with any other English words.
Can you think of an English word to rhyme with orange?
Hi John – couldn’t resist.
From The Noticeably Stouter edition of ‘The Book of General Ignorance’:
There are two rhymes for orange in English, although both are proper nouns: Blorenge and Gorringe.
The Blorenge is a hill outside Abergavenny in Wales, and Gorringe is a splendid English surname
The best view of Abergavenny is from the top of the Blorenge, a 1,833 ft hill owned by the South East Wales Hang-gliding and Paragliding Club, who bought it from the Coal Authority in 1998.
Distinguished Gorringes include: General George Frederick Gorringe (1865-1945), the unpopular British First World War commander; Harry Gorringe, the first-class Australian cricketer; and Henry Honeychurch Gorringe, the man who brought Cleopatra’s Needle from Egypt to New York’s Central Park.
In 1673, New York was called New Orange (so the New Orange became the Big Apple). The city was founded by the Dutch in 1653 as New Amsterdam, taken by the English in 1664 and renamed New York, and retaken by the Dutch in 1673 and named New Orange. It lasted less than a year. Under the Treaty of Westminster in 1674 the city was ceded to the English, and New York became its permanent name.
The word ‘orange’ is a good example of what linguists call wrong word division. It derives from the Arabic naranj and arrived in English as ‘narange’ in the 14th century, gradually losing the initial ‘n’. The same process left us with apron (from naperon) and umpire (from noumpere).
Sometimes it works the other way round, as in nickname (from
an eke-name, meaning ‘also-name’) or newt (from an ewt).
Orange was first used as the name for a colour in 1542.