It then travelled on across the mountains of the Hindu Kush into Persian as narang, and from there it made its way into Arabic in the form of naranj.
The ancient Dravidian word for this fruit eventually made its way north into the classical North Indian language Sanskrit as naranga.
Our modern English word orange probably goes back very many centuries to one of the Dravidian languages of southern India like Tamil or Telugu: the modern Telugu word for orange is narinja. Oranges seem to have originated in southeast Asia. Belfast is a long way from Andhra Pradesh, but the Indian subcontinent is where we need to start if we want to explain the attraction this colour has for certain Irish Protestants. They also have a predilection for the colour orange. The Democratic Unionist Party are having difficulty coming to terms with the official use in Ulster of Irish Gaelic, the indigenous Celtic language of Ireland. PETER TRUDGILL traces the clockwork progress of the word ‘orange’ from southern India to northern Europe, and finds the odd detour.
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