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Comment by fauigerzigerk | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. In spanish, "orange" still has the n: "naranja".

The Iberian peninsular was inhabited by arabic speakers for over 700 years, there are a huge number of words in castellano (the Spanish language), directly borrowed from them.[0]

In total around 8% of the spanish dictionary is derived from arabic.[1]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language_influence_on_th...

[1] http://cvc.cervantes.es/ensenanza/biblioteca_ele/asele/pdf/1...

It makes more sense in english where you can't hear the difference between "An orange" or "A norange".

This is a common phenomenon in English. The "Adder" (type of snake native to Britain) was originally "Nadder". In old/middle English, it was "a/an", "my/mine", so "mine Edward" and "my Nedward" sounded the same, hence a nickname (ironically originally "ekename", so another case) for Edward is "Ned".

Indeed, from the OP:

Adder, apron and umpire all used to start with an "n". Constructions like "A nadder" or "Mine napron" were so common the first letter was assumed to be part of the preceding word. Linguists call this kind of thing reanalysis or rebracketing.

I wonder how it became "laranja" in Portuguese...

Kinda-obvious guess: definite article "la" rather than indefinite article.

Apparent counter-evidence: the relevant Portuguese definite article is "a" rather than "la" as in Spanish.

Counter-counter-evidence: at least one source (W V O Quine's "Quiddities") tells me that once upon a time the Portuguese definite article was "la" rather than "a". However, Quine was a philosopher rather than a historian of language, this particular book is a fairly frivolous one, and I don't know how far I can trust him.

Counter-counter-counter-evidence: A few minutes of googling haven't found me any other evidence for Portuguese, or any other language spoken in Portugal, ever having had "la" as a definite article.

Make of all that what you will. I'd be very surprised if it weren't derived from a definite article prefix, but exactly how it happened I would rather not guess.

As to the counter-counter-counter-evidence, the development of definite articles in Romance languages is well-understood (Latin didn't have them). They come from the adjective "ille, illa (, illud)" meaning "that" (imagine pointing at "that"). So we can immediately conclude that yes, there was an L in there at some point in the history of portuguese. It seems a little more likely that the adjective became an article with the degenerate form "la" and then degenerated further than that the adjective lost its only consonant and then turned into an article.

Point of pedantry, but you never need commas at the start and end of parentheses. So, (illud) == (, illud). Also, (illud) == (illud, ), etc.

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