Last evening I was out with a few friends from work for a couple of beers, and as it is wont to, the discussions took us to pretty wierd topics.
A german friend, Christoph, made a comment that in the old days, in Europe, anything round and the size of an apple was called an apple. Hence in most European languages the name for an orange has something to do with an apple from China. E.g. it is Applesin in Norwegian!!!!
Expanding on this topic further I was telling them about the names of the orange(/lime) family in tamil and when I told them that Grapefruit is called Bamblimas in tamil - Michael, a french friend, said that they call grapefruit Pamplemousse in French; which is very close to the Tamil word. I was of the opinion that the French word was influenced by Tamil - through Pondicherry - as Bamblimas means big and fat and is a very suitable name for this fruit which is the biggest and fattest of the family!!
Strange!! Enof said.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment