Of the many controversial subjects in this week’s edition of the Tuesday, one stood out for a reader: the question of how the older English word narenge became the modern English word orange.
The standard explanation is that this is an example of a “false separation,” i.e., for most English speakers “a norange” sounds identical to “an orange.” (I’m writing for pronunciation here, not spelling.) That’s how nadder became adder and how napron became apron.
But how come the French word lost its n, too? A reader wants to know.
Did the English somehow influence the French? Unlikely, my correspondent argues, inasmuch as French was the high-status language and English the low-status one until the day before yesterday, with those Norman and Angevin kings of England speaking little or no English and French being the language of court, diplomacy, and, to a considerable extent, trade. But did William the Conqueror somehow vector an English infection back through French after that unpleasantness at Hastings?
It is possible that the English influenced the French, that the French influenced the English, that the two languages underwent mutually reinforcing change at a time of extensive intercourse between the two, or that the English and French words gave up the n independent of one another but for the same reason: In French, “une norange” would sound very much like “une orange.” The pronunciation probably would be something like “U-norange” in either case, but what the hearer would perceive might as easily be “une orange” as “une norange.”
Elsewhere in the Romance realm, the n survives in the Spanish una naranja.
Something like naranja probably made its way into English through the familiar career of Sanskrit to Persian to Arabic to Spanish to French to English, with a word of approximately that pronunciation meaning “orange tree” in Sanskrit. The n survives in the Persian word pronounced naranji and among the northern Indian languages in the Odia word pronounced narangi. (I’m relying on online dictionaries and reference books here and linguistically out over my skis, so please correct any errors.) The Latin aurantius doesn’t appear before the 15th century, so it may be a Medieval invention, reflecting the then-current n-less pronunciations in French and English. (Sometimes, you have to make up new Latin. The Holy See, naturally, has a Latin guy on staff.) Words get around.
Besides losing the n, what orange has in common with apron is that, however each evolved into its current form, neither has a rhyme in English, as far as I can tell.
If the equestrian term curple continues to survive, it will be only so that something rhymes with purple.
You don’t know that word? You should.
A curple is a horse’s ass.
Which reminds me that I’m supposed to write occasionally about politics. So, back to work.