I once heard that the word "portugal" meant "orange" in several languages around the Mediterranean, and I'd like to see if this is true. My question has three parts:
1) Does your language have a common noun "portugal", or very similar to it?
2) If so, does this word mean "orange", or some other fruit?
3) If the answers to 1) and 2) are "yes", could you tell me the etymology of that noun?
Thank you very much.
Interesting discussion.
1) and 2) Like other, Italians and not, have already pointed out in this discussion, in Italian "portugal" is not a common name but it is used to designate an "orange" in many dialects (I live in the Marches, central Italy, eastern side, and "portogallo" is the way oranges are called in the dialect of the area where I am from).
3) After attending some lessons of Arabic, I would believe that the origins of that noun are Arabic.
Some say it comes from the name of the country, but that does not sound plausible to me.
There is also one specific reason why I believe so: the fact that the word "portogallo" means "orange" not in standard Italian, i.e. the one that was used by the educated classes, but in dialects throughout Italy. My area had little contact with Portugal: why would people have associated a fruit with a country of which they probably ignored the very existence? Being on the Adriatic, contacts with the Near East were probably much more frequent, and it seems natural to me that people tried to imitate the sound of the word that was used to designate oranges. Someone said that even in the Brescia dialect (eastern Lombardy) a dialect equivalent of "portogallo" is used in the same way: it should be noted that Brescia was part of the Venetian state since the 15th century, and Venice has always had intense relationships with the Near East, not with Portugal. The use of the word "portogallo" as "orange" seems to be widespread in Southern and Adriatic (i.e. Eastern) dialects: all those areas had strong commercial ties with the Eastern Mediterranean, not with Portugal.
The example of "peach" is similar: in Italian it is "pesca", but in my dialect it is also called "persica" (i.e., "Persian"), as in Eastern languages.
Moreover, the Greek word for "orange" was imported from its Venetian equivalent well before the fruit was introduced in Europe by the Portuguese, so the etymology of the word can not be related to Portugal.
Finally: if the fruit is named after the country that introduced it, why would it be called "Portugal" not in countries such as Spain, France, England or Germany, i.e. in Western, Central and Northern Europe, but in the Balkans, which obviously had only marginal contact with Portugal, and much more with the Near and Middle East, especially through the Ottomans?
In my opinion, many linguists were simply not aware that the Arabic word for "orange" was very similar to the name of the European country, so this misled them into believing that the common noun "portugal" had to do with the country and they looked for a reason why it could have been so.
The point is: does someone know Arabic well enough to research the etymology of the noun in Arabic? If it turns out that the word appears in Arabic
before the fruit was traded by the Portuguese, the theory that links the common noun with Portugal inevitably can not be supported. Instead, if it turns out that the Arabic word can only be found after the 16th century, it is the other way round.
Just to add that Galician and Portuguese also have the "Persian" name for peach ("pexego, pêssego", from the old name for Persian, "pérsigo", "pérsico"), but curiously not Spanish ("melocotón").
