Now, I'm no true linguaphile, I recognize, but I'm not convinced by this following description of the etymology of
orange in today's AWAD post for the word
eyas.
They were coined by a process called false splitting. Let's take
orange. The original word was Sanskrit naranga. By the time it reached
English, the initial letter n had joined the article a, resulting in
"an orange". The word for orange is still narangi in Hindi, naranja in
Spanish, and naranj in Arabic.
This doesn't make sense to me because English is the only langauge that has these articles-- and thus the ability for the word to evolve in the suggested way-- and yet orange is the same in French and German, too. French, of course is
un and
une, and German is
der,
die, and
das. So while the theory sounds plausible, unless there's some proof that the word migrated first into English and them from there into German and French, I think it's incorrect.
Cheers,
Kenn Sebesta
P.S. French dictionaries indicate that the word came into French from the Italian
arancia:
http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/orangeOP
