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vijayjohn wrote:Have you seen article #16 (starting on p. 409) in this book? It seems to make a detailed argument for why the Tarascan origin holds up better than the Persian one.
linguoboy wrote:vijayjohn wrote:Have you seen article #16 (starting on p. 409) in this book? It seems to make a detailed argument for why the Tarascan origin holds up better than the Persian one.
That's where I got the Tarascan forms I cited.
Indeed, Becerra suggests Tarascan "charapeti" not only as the etymon of sarapico (a derivation of which he is sure) but also as the possible etymon of [sarape]. Both of these proposals remain to be evaluated. If his gloss of Tarascan "charapeti" is right (Spanish colorado means 'red' and almagre means 'red ochre') and if sarape ~ zarape comes from that Tarascan word, that would mean that at the time our problematic word arose the Tarascans were dying the objects so called red or with red ochre (from the plant called sarapico in Spanish?).
vijayjohn wrote:Sarapis is not a word in Latin at all, and sarrapis in Latin is a hapax legomenon (see here) and doesn't necessarily refer to any kind of clothing, let alone specifically a Persian tunic.
vijayjohn wrote:
The fourth link is just the same dictionary you linked to before, the third link cites the first link, and the first and fourth links both cite the same source, namely a comedy called Poenulus by the Roman playwright Plautus. As I just said (did you click on the link in my previous post?), Poenulus doesn't provide any evidence at all for sarapis referring to any kind of clothing or in fact even existing as a word in Latin. AFAICT the spelling that Plautus himself used was <sarrapis> and this otherwise isn't a word attested in Latin. The second link seems to cite a source in Greek, not Latin. I'm not sure what these dictionaries are supposed to prove. If indeed sarapis was a word in Latin referring to some kind of clothing, then there should be some actual textual evidence that it was used as a word, not a few random dictionaries compiled more than a thousand years after the language's death.
Car wrote:So the word for customs in Romance languages has the same origin as divan. I came across it when looking for the etymology of Italian dogana, but I don't get where the g comes from. I assumed before looking it up that Italian has kept it (French losing some sounds along the way is par for the course, after all), but it turns out it wasn't there before after all?
Synalepha wrote:Car wrote:So the word for customs in Romance languages has the same origin as divan. I came across it when looking for the etymology of Italian dogana, but I don't get where the g comes from. I assumed before looking it up that Italian has kept it (French losing some sounds along the way is par for the course, after all), but it turns out it wasn't there before after all?
That's an interesting question that you might ask here.
Brzeczyszczykiewicz wrote:I've always liked that of attercop, according to Chambers an obsolete or dialectal term for "spider" and "ill-natured person".
In Old English it was attorcoppa, which could be rendered as "cup (or "head") of poison".
The word has survived to refer to spiders in general in Danish (edderkop) and Faroese (eiturkopp).
linguoboy wrote:Catalan gallof, a word I learned just recently, has an interesting history. It's a borrowing of Castilian gallofo, which in turn derives from gallofa "food given to pilgrims". The etymology of this is thought to be Mediaeval Latin Galli offa, literally "Gaul's morsel". Many pilgrims to Spain were Galli, that is to say, Frenchmen. Offa is said to derive from a Common Celtic source, but the etymon is uncertain.
Linguaphile wrote:Another widely-used descendant of this word appears in the English term cobweb, earlier coppeweb.
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