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- Topic: Swedish >
- "En apelsin är orange."
44 Comments
I'm a native Dutch speaker, but this is the first time I'm seeing this... It's actually loaned from the Flemish variant of the word, as they seem to call it appelsien instead of sinaasappel.
Everytime I see the Dutch language mentioned, I feel proud, because we're always that small country nobody has heard of with a language that looks like German with a touch of "hey lol I can understand a few words without dem google translate"... and people are always comparing German to other languages... I wish we had a more positive history and more positive loanwords in English (cough; apartheid, iceberg...).
Sorry for the long text, this happens everytime I see Dutch somewhere. It's just requesting some attention for the language. :/
What do you think we feel like? Flemish is an underestimated variant of Dutch. When people think of the Dutch language, they always think of the Netherlands. But the Dutch and the Flemish perfectly understand each other, albeit a little varied in words and expressions. No one ever says 'I want to speak Flemish', they always say 'I want to speak Dutch', while we believe our Dutch is more a direct variant of the "regular" Dutch. Did you know that they call Flemish "soft German"? That says it all... . They call it that because of the words we use and the way we pronounce things. Just to mention: I know exactly what you feel like! So that's why I was overjoyed when I saw the Swedish word "apelsin" for the first time in my life. Finally something I can relate to from my mother tongue. And honestly, it's just historically determined! :)
You say this like it was a good thing. Remember that it involved the extermination of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans. That was actually a very dark and shameful part of Dutch history. The same goes for the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, to different extents of course. And Afrikaners are the product of settler colonialism. It's a shame to see people justify and praise imperialism and colonialism...
221
In written English, the word "orange" first appears in the 13th century in reference to the fruit itself. The first use of the word "orange" as a color doesn't appear until 300 years later, in the 16th century. When I was learning Spanish in school, I was taught that the word for the fruit is "naranja" and the word for the color is "anaranjado" ("oranged"?), but more and more often these days I hear "naranja" used for both the fruit and the color.
The colour was named for the fruit, and anyway English got the word directly from French with both meanings. William of Orange, although from the Netherlands himself, got his appellation ultimately from the city Orange in southern France. That's not named after the colour or the fruit; it's originally just a coincidence, although of course people noticed it.
Except when it isn't ripe yet! Then there is the Blood Orange, which is quite surprising inside. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_orang
Is the final consonant /ʃ/, /ɕ/ or /ʂ/? (I'd like to pronounce the correct one even though they all sound the same to me.)