Citrus and Its Cousins
Names that travelled: one from Cantonese, one from a French missionary, one invented in a government breeding shed.
Citrus names rarely come from the language of the people growing the fruit. The kumquat arrived in English through Cantonese and was then made to obey a spelling rule that Norman scribes imposed on English in the twelfth century. The clementine is somebody's christian name. The citrange was built out of two other words in the 1890s and has never been anything but a manufactured term.
None of that is audible. What a listener gets is three short words with soft consonants, unstressed middles and endings that could be spelled several ways, and no clue at all about where any of it came from.
The trees in this grove
kumquat
Citrus japonica
KUM-kwot
The word came into English through Cantonese, where gam gwat means golden orange. English kept the two syllables of the Cantonese and then wrote the second one the way English always writes that sound, with qu. So a Cantonese fruit ended up carrying a Norman spelling convention.
clementine
Citrus × clementina
KLEM-uhn-teen
It is a man's name with fruit attached. The clementine is credited to Frère Marie-Clément Rodier, who found it in the garden of his orphanage near Oran in Algeria around 1902, and the fruit carries his religious name almost unchanged. Spelling it means spelling Clément.
citrange
× Citroncirus webberi
SIT-rinj
The name is two words welded together, citrus and orange, so its spelling is inherited rather than invented. Both halves brought a soft consonant with them: the c of citrus, which says s because an i follows it, and the g of orange, which says j because an e follows it.