One of my favorite gifts of my childhood was receiving an etymological dictionary that my dad and I took turns reading to each other from. I loved the idea that the true meaning of words was informed by their origin and that by grasping that one could arrive at a deeper truth. After all, the etymology of etymology is the study (-λογία/-logy) of that which is true (έτυμος/etymos).
I recently learned that the Arabic word for orange is برتقال (burtuqal) which is clearly related to the Greek word I was familiar with – πορτοκάλι (portokali). Wiktionary claims Greek borrowed from Turkish or Italian, Turkish from Italian or Greek, Arabic from Ottoman Turkish or Greek and Italian from “Portugal”. The order doesn’t make much sense but apparently all of them credit “Portugal” for the introduction of the sweet orange thanks to the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama who brought it over from India. I guess the sweet variant was such a hit compared to the earlier bitter one that in multiple Mediterranean countries (presumably in direct trade with the Portuguese), the name stuck over the earlier one that comes from the original Sanskrit नारङ्ग (naranga) that leads to the English “orange”. But the earlier name persists in the “portugal” languages to refer to the bitter orange as arancio (Italian), νεράντζι (Greek), or نرنج (Arabic). Neat!
Alexander’s name is transformed in Farsi/Arabic from Alexander to Al-Iskander (الِاسكندر), treating the initial Al as the arabic article. Similarly, Alexandria is now transformed to Al-Iskandar-ia (الِاسكندرية) where the suffix corresponds to the feminine adjective form. Reminds me of the case for the word “forty” in Greek where τεσσαράκοντα (tessarakonta) was paretymologized as τες σαράκοντα (tes sarakonta) with tes being the plural article and so the Modern Greek word for “forty” has become σαράντα (saranta).