in hungarian it’s purple onion, you just choose the wrong language :)
From what I know, it has to do with the word red covering the purple part of the spectrum long ago, and the “need” for the word purple came out later but purple things that were named red didn’t get renamed.
You can look at japanese right now and 青い covers both blue and green, with a relatively recent addition of 緑 to cover only green (thus possibly pushing 青い in the future to be only blue, who knows)
Similarly, the red fox is clearly orange, but English speakers were exposed to that species of fox before developing a word for that specific color. For bonus linguistical oddities, ‘orange’ was used for the fruit before it was used for the color.
Or the red squirrel, which is brown.
And red hair.
Well whys it called Shepherds Pie when it doesnt contain shepherds, or Cottage Pie when its nothing to do with cottages or cottagimg? How about that one…checkmate!!!
And baby powder is never powdered babies!
I was similarly let down.
Oh shit! Shouldn’t have made my own. Although it is quite good sprinkled on my salad…
Because they are only purple on the inside. Do you think apples are white? Or bananas?
So, this is kinda weird, but general colors didn’t have names for a long time. Like in Greek texts by Homer he describes the water color as dark wine color because the name “blue” wasn’t a word. So it’s possible when they named a “red onion” purple wasn’t a color and considered a shade of red.
Also as others have said purple was the color of royalty and they didn’t want an association.
It’s kind of wild when you learn that words for blue are relatively new in human language.
