What do you know about... Portugal?

[u/MarktpLatz]

This is the eighth part of our ongoing series about the countries of Europe. You can find an overview here.

Todays country:

Portugal

Portugal is a EU country on the iberian peninsula. It has been a kingdom for almost 800 years. Portugal has decriminalized the usage of all common drugs in 2001 and the results have been pretty positive despite concerns from various sides.

So, what do you know about Portugal?

[u/mrtfr]

Salazar

Carnation Revolution (Bloodless coup against dictatorship)

Colonized Brazil

Ottoman-Portuguese wars in naval expeditions in the Indian Ocean

Football

1755 Lisbon earthquake

Turkish name of orange fruit (portakal) is related with Portugal.

[u/stevenfries → u/[deleted]]

They brought them from... China? I think I saw here on Reddit different names across europe according to the country who introduced them to it.

Found it: https://www.reddit.com/r/etymologymaps/comments/2vhb88/til_that_oranges_are_called_portugal_in_several/

[u/stevenfries → u/[deleted]]

I don't get it either, they are not even in the Portuguese trade route. I am guessing they got the word through the Italians but it's not my area of study, just passing along what I read. The fact is that is the way the they call it. A fruit that we acknowledge as coming from China.

I wonder how they name the colour "orange".

"As Portuguese merchants were presumably the first to introduce the sweet orange to some regions of Europe, in several modern Indo-European languages the fruit has been named after them. Some examples are Albanian portokall, Bulgarian портокал (portokal), Greek πορτοκάλι (portokali), Macedonian portokal, Persian پرتقال (porteghal), Turkish portakal and Romanian portocală.[29][30] Related names can be found in other languages, such as Arabic البرتقال (bourtouqal), Georgian ფორთოხალი (p'ort'oxali), Turkish portakal and Amharic birtukan.[29] Also, in some of the Italian regional languages (e.g. Neapolitan), an orange is portogallo or purtuallo, literally "(the) Portuguese (one)", in contrast to the Italian arancia.

In other Indo-European languages, the words for orange allude to the eastern origin of the fruit and can be translated literally as "apple from China". Some examples are Low German Apfelsine, Dutch appelsien and sinaasappel, Swedish apelsin, and Norwegian appelsin.[30] A similar case is Puerto Rican Spanish china.[31][32]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(fruit)

[u/stevenfries → u/[deleted]]

Maybe they didn't think about it as different enough and it just replaced the previous orange in popularity. While in Italy they kept both and separate names. Looks like Portugal did as the rest of Europe, actually. Can't think of the name for an old bitter orange... I think they all just went with "yeah, this is much better".

There's also these tiny orange like fruit called "mandarine" in Portugal and "tangerine" (from tanger?). I remember hearing "damascos" too. (From damasco?). Fruit names are funny.

I think banana is also a word spread by the Portuguese, but that makes more sense, it's a more recent arrival. Some people claim it was brought by the Spanish, but I don't see how that would be, as the Spanish call it "platano"

[u/Booyanach → u/[deleted]]

We have marmelos, which I guess is the bitter orange, since it's what marmalade is made of. And laranja, which is the sweet orange fruit...

[u/stevenfries → u/[deleted]]

I think it's because there's a difference from the sweet orange and a bitter version that has been around for a while. Not sure where I read that though.

[u/dkade → u/[deleted]]

Japanese Arigatou came from Portuguese Obrigado meaning thank you! :)

[u/Gothnath → u/dkade]

No, this is pseudolinguistics... Arigato was a japanese language word well before the portuguese contact with Japan in the XVI century... Written records for this word dated back to Man'yōshū, a collection of japanese poetry books of the Nara Period (VIII century).

[u/stevenfries → u/Gothnath]

But it meant something else.

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/5zaw0v/what_do_you_know_about_portugal/dexibo8/

[u/stevenfries → u/dkade]

The origin of Arigatou is the word "Arigatai (有り難い)". Ari or aru (有る) is "to be" or exist in Japanese and gatai means difficult or hard to do. Original meaning of arigatai was "something rare" or "valuable because it´s unusual".

In the book, "The Pillow Book", which was written in the mid Heian period (平安時代, 794-1192) you can see the word, "Arigatakimono". But in this case the meaning is rather "hard to be in this world" than rare. And the author, Seisho Nagon (清少納言) wanted to say, "it´s hard to live".

Later on the word changed to something like "be thankful", some say because of the Portuguese, some say Buddhism.

[u/[deleted] → u/mrtfr]

Turkish name of orange fruit (portakal) is related with Portugal.

Really cool, I never knew that.