The world's languages can be grouped into those which call oranges oranges, those which call oranges apples and those which call oranges Portugals.
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Of those languages which call oranges oranges, a guest consonant often makes a cameo appearance at the start: N in Spanish (naranja), L in Portuguese (laranja) and T in Catalan (taronja), while Italian (arancia) does without.
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It's ironic that they're called "portugals" in Turkey, because in Portugal a turkey is called a peru, though at least in Peru a turkey is called a turkey. Elsewhere (e.g. Poland, France), a turkey is called an Indian. Basically nobody knows where the bird came from.
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If you need another funny unneeded linguistic fact, I've just learned that Polish "słoń", an elephant, comes from Turkish "aslan", a lion. They're both big animals from Africa which Slavic people have never seen. Oh, and Polish "wielbłąd", a camel, comes from "olifant"/elephant.
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West Indies?
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I also have no idea where the bird comes from.
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Holly cow! You made me realize the relationship between "dinde" and "d'Inde".
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It's funny how this was obvious to me as a non-native... I'm sure there are other similar "logical" word constructions in French which might be invisible to a native.
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I thought you were pulling my leg, but you're 100% rightpic.twitter.com/6WHQ5J057n
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In Hebrew, the words for Apple and Orange are similar: Apple is "תפוח" ( "ta-pu-ach") and orange is "תפוז" ("ta-pu-z") i.e, they differ in the last letter. Yiddish, it would be (orange) מאַראַנץ ("marants") and (apple) עפּל ("effl") I don't really know any other language.
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It could be that "marants" is in the "arancia" category, which would be nice because it's yet another different random consonant in front of the common root. I have no knowledge of Yiddish, so I don't know how likely this is.
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