This one is actually easy. Most commonly, orange is a color and a fruit. I'm sure we can all pretty easily list some objective facts about both of those things.
Orange is also the name of a town in some places, and a county in others. But I think you need more search terms in order to disambiguate. The search engine can't read minds, after all.
My biggest confusion learning Chinese when I was growing up was the concept of "orange". I believe orange only became part of the common vernacular fairly recently. But since Chinese words are just a combination of other words, the words for obviously orange things were using red/yellow.
Now in modern usage, the color orange is named after the fruit, but the name of the orange fruit differs by region. Some places refer to oranges as tangerines, with no differentiation between oranges/tangerines, so the word for orange is actually tangerine in those regions.
"Which came first? The color orange or the discovery fruit orange?"
It seems the fruit came first, as it is mentioned in documents three centuries before the color. The old English name for the color is "geoluhread" (yellow-red).
> If you were thought a name for some range of colors between red and orange, you would think of it as something clearly distinct than both red and orange, just as you are unlikely to accept that brown is just dark orange.
What does this mean? People have come up with all sorts of wacky names for “hues between red and orange”, but since they are not in common currency they are generally ambiguous or incomprehensible. The clearest names for these hues are reddish orange, orange–red, orangish red.
Brown is “just” dark orange (the range of hues considered “brown” for dark colors doesn’t precisely match with the range of hues called “orange” for lighter colors, but close enough).
My understanding is there was no word in English for the word orange before the fruit was widely introduced in Europe. In other words the fruit gave the name to the color, not vice versa. (Other orange colored things were usually called 'ginger' or 'red-yellow'.)
So orange wouldn't be counted as a colour in English? I'm not sure what value there is in measuring the amount of colour names in a language based purely on their etymology.
I think one of the points he is making is not that it's just dark orange, it's that we have a label for dark orange, but not a label for dark other colors on the same level of use as brown.
We call dark orange brown. Sure dark red could be called burgundy but it's not a word used as much as brown. So we use the word brown as much as the words 'dark red'.
It sounds like the brown-orange link is intuitively obvious to you. But I think the claim being made is that for most native English-speakers, the link between orange and brown is significantly less obvious than that between X and dark X, for most colours X. FWIW that is true in my case.
(Not that I deny the link exists; but when I look at e.g. an orange next to a dark brown tree branch, I don't see them as versions of the same colour in the way I do with, say, a lime and a dark green leaf. That's not a great example but hopefully you see what I'm getting at.)
Plum, peach, and grape are all color-names, and naming colors after a natural item was and remains common. Orange was derived the same way -- from the fruit. Prior to the 1500s, when the fruit was introduced to England, things were described as "saffron-red", "yellow-red", or simply "red" when we would today call them orange. (There's a really interesting perceptual thing going on here -- if you don't have a word for a color, you don't perceive the color: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hoffman_01_13/ )
As for non-English: you can trace the spread of the fruit across the Mediterranean by tracking the word appearance. But this only works for European languages... Because Asian languages have a word for orange unrelated to the fruit! In Chinese, the word remains "saffron".
Something similar in Irish -- orange was (and still is, among older native speakers in the Gaeltacht) flannbhuí, translating literally as 'blood red yellow'. This is actually the word used for the color on the Irish flag in their constitution.
Then English influence and learners who directly port from English came along and now oráiste, which was originally only the name of the fruit, has replaced it sadly.
It may well be that in the past, there was no separate word for yellow or orange, they were just considered shades of red. So people used 'red'. Then later, people felt enough need to create more nuanced terms.
In a similar way, if I remember correctly, Apple used to be the English word for all fruit[1]. We later added specific words for more fruits, and Apple only remains as the name of a single fruit - however, we still have 'Pineapples', which gained the name when apple was a generic fruit moniker.
Apparently it's common for blue and green to be clumped together - green (midori) is a surprisingly recent term in Japanese, so lots of green things are referred to as blue (aoi) because of traditional usage - including the green light on traffic lights, apparently.[2]
In Irish there is no word for the colour orange, even though there is orange on the flag. The technical term is flan bhui or “flag yellow”. Oraiste is the word for the fruit which is sometimes used to describe the colour.
Orange is also the name of a town in some places, and a county in others. But I think you need more search terms in order to disambiguate. The search engine can't read minds, after all.
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