Portuguese navigators have also been credited with bringing orange trees to the Mediterranean region around 1500. After introduction of the sweet orange, it was quickly adopted as an edible fruit; it was so highly regarded that wealthy persons grew oranges in private conservatories, called orangeries. Certainly by 1646 it was well known in Europe. In some South East Indo-European languages the orange was named after Portugal, which was formerly the main source of imports of sweet oranges. Examples are Bulgarian portokal Greek portokali Persian portaghal Albanian portokall, Macedonian portokal , and Romanian portocala. In Italian the word portogallo to refer to the orange fruit is dialectal. It means literally "Portugal". Similar words are in common use in most Italian dialects across the whole country. Related names can also be found in other languages: Turkish portakal, Arabic al-burtuqa Amharic birtukan, and Georgian p'ort'oxali. Portuguese, Spanish, Arab, and Dutch sailors planted citrus trees along trade routes to prevent scurvy. On his second voyage in 1493, Christopher Columbus took the seeds of oranges, lemons and citrons to Haiti and the Caribbean.
Well look at that. I had no idea! I suppose I should have guessed that 'pomme' referred to 'apple'...
) who sorted through through websites manually. Never mind the virtual spider that is supposed to crawl through cyberspace indexing stuff.
