I saw a reference to a Greek film called Attenberg and looked up the director, Athina Rachel Tsangari; I was mentally stressing Athina on the penultimate, since the classical form is Ἀθήνη, but to my surprise I saw her name was given in Greek as Αθηνά. Confused and curious, I went to the Greek Wikipedia page for the name and found that it was “από το επίθετο Ἀθαναία [sic: s/b Ἀθηναία], που συναιρέθηκε σε Ἀθηνάα > Ἀθηνᾶ” ‘from the epithet Athanaia [s/b Athenaia], which was contracted to Athináa > Athiná]’; it’s not just a personal name but the Modern Greek name for the goddess. That seemed interesting enough to share.
Her surname, incidentally, is from τσαγκάρης ‘shoemaker’:
Inherited from Byzantine Greek τσαγκάρης (tsankárēs), from Mediaeval and Late Koine Greek τσαγκάριος (tsankários) & τζαγκάριος (tzankários), τζαγγάριος (tzangários) with simplification of ⟨γγ > γκ⟩, from Koine Greek τζάγγη (tzángē) + -άριος (-ários). The Hellenistic term, chiefly in the plural, found as a transcription of Late Latin zancha / tzanga, from Persian ظانگا (zângâ) as in Parthian. Cognates include the medieval Byzantine Greek τζαγγίον n (tzangíon, “a kind of Byzantine shoe”) and possibly the modern τσαγανό n (tsaganó).
They don’t define τσαγανό, but apparently it means δυναμισμός, θάρρος, νεύρο, ενεργητικότητα [dynamism, courage, nerve, energy]; the semantic connection is not clear to me.
the semantic connection is not clear to me
Give it some welly!
Ἀθηνᾶ is common in classical Attic (Plato, Euripides etc.); I think it might be the standard form (with Ἀθήνη being Homeric) but I no longer have access to the full TLG to verify this, sadly.
They just went one step back before the Attic-Ionic shift of long α to η. The Doric form Ἀθάνα is actually attested, says footnote b of the English Wikipedia article; interestingly it also knows Ἀθηναία and its Epic version Ἀθηναίη. Footnote c calls Ἀθήνη Ionic rather than Epic.
And so I learn that the name is transparently an adjective derived from the city (Classically Ἀθῆναι), not the other way around even in folk etymology.
That’s not a simplification, it’s a spelling that became available after some postclassical sound shift or other…
So we’re dealing with a [z] that was transcribed as z, which was eventually misinterpreted as [ts]? That’s downright German.
About Ἀθηνᾶ… There is a serviceable account of the distribution and chronology of the forms in Bailly, Dictionnaire grec-français (end of the article).
They just went one step back before the Attic-Ionic shift of long α to η.
Yes, of course, but the modern form with /i/ is not from long α. That one step took them off a cliff.
z, which was eventually misinterpreted as [ts]? That’s downright German.
Affrication but only partial devoicing, if τζ sounds what I think it sounds like.
Today, τζ is [dz] and τσ is [ts], but the spelling τσ is a fascinatingly recent invention; τζ was used for both for a thousand years.
Not from a Classical Attic one, but from an older one.
Right, but it’s absurd to skip the vital intermediate step and make it look like /i/ came from /a/. Who would do that, especially since the intermediate step is the main Ancient Greek form?!
About the semantic development of τσαγανό, here is the account in Georgios Babiniotis (2010) Ετυμολογικό Λεξικό της Νέας Ελληνικής Γλώσσας:
I am confused by the further etymology of τσαγανός ‘crab’ offered here. I would like a source for this zangano ‘bird’s foot (with claws)”. This explanation goes back to Du Cange Glossarium ad scriptores mediae & infimae graecitatis, volume 2 , p. 1555 here. See under چاغنوس at the bottom of page 21 here, which denies the existence of the Spanish form. There is, however, Spanish zángano ‘drone bee; loafer, scrounger’ (which might work as a source for ‘crab’… in a pinch).
I also don’t understand what contacts would lead to Greek borrowing the word from Spanish, though. But Italian zanca (as in Dante, Inferno) ‘leg’ (pl., ‘stilts’), cianca ‘leg’ would make more sense. (For the sense, perhaps cf. American English daddy longlegs ‘harvestman’.) Laz ç’ağana ‘crab’ is apparently just a borrowing from Pontic Greek.
(If I understand him correctly, Nişanyan has a complicated account whereby τσαγανός and Turkish çağanoz ‘crab’ are related to τσιγγάνος ‘Roma’ (some etymological possibilities for τσιγγάνος in the Wiktionary here). I am not going to pursue that line further.)
Good lord, what a tangled tale! Thanks for investigating, as always.
I don’t know what this ظانگا is or where it came from. The form looks extremely odd.
In any case, words of the family of Late Latin tzangae pl. (some kind of boots), Greek τζαγγίον ‘boot of red leather’ (as worn by the Emperor), etc., begin to show up in the late 4th century CE at least, as far as I can tell. Presumably the PIE root of the Iranian antecedent of these words is *ĝʰengʰ- ‘step, stride’. Compare Middle Persian zang ‘ankle, shank’; Avestan zaṇgəm ‘ankle’, bi-zəṇgra- ‘two-legged’, caθβarǝ-zəṇgra- ‘four-legged’; Ossetic zæng, zængæ ‘shank, leg’; Vedic jáṅghā ‘shank (the leg from the knee to the ankle), lower leg’, jaghána- ‘buttocks; rear’; Greek κοχώνη ‘buttocks’; Lithuanian žengiù, žeñgti ‘step, pass’, and of course the Germanic family of Old English gangan ‘go, walk’ (Scots gang).
the name is transparently an adjective derived from the city
Ἀθηνᾶ is, but not Ἀθήνη / Ἀθάνα, which seems to have originally been used for both the city and the goddess, as it is in Homer. Of course that looks like it could have started life as an adjective itself, referring both to the Attic polis and the Attic Pallas.
I was mentally stressing Athina on the penultimate, since the classical form is Ἀθήνη
I mentally stress the penultimate because I hear Pete Townsend singing “Athena” in my head.