It occurred to me to wonder why the word nephew, which comes from French neveu, is written with -ph-, so I looked it up in the OED, which (though the entry was updated in September 2003) is uncharacteristically unhelpful — after listing over a hundred variant spellings (including neveaw, newowe, neuo, nephwoy, and nevvey) gives the following etymology:
< Anglo-Norman nevou, neveu, nevew, nevu, newu and Old French, Middle French neveu (also in Old French as nevou, nevo, nevu, nepveu, etc.; French neveu), originally the oblique case of Old French nies, niers (c1100; 2nd half of the 12th cent. in sense ‘grandson’, c1500 as nepveux (plural) in sense ‘descendants’) < classical Latin nepōt-, nepōs, grandson, descendant, a prodigal (see sense 2c), a secondary shoot (see sense 5), in post-classical Latin also nephew (4th cent.), niece (13th cent.), cognate with neve n.1. Compare also nepote n.
Which has some interesting information (I didn’t know about the OF nominative nies, niers, or the native Germanic form neve, parallel to German Neffe), but doesn’t address the spelling issue. Spellings with –p– go back way earlier than I would have guessed (?1456 Duke of York in Paston Lett. & Papers (2004) II. 100 “To take possession and saisine, in the name and to þe vse of our ful worshipful nepueu th’Erl of Warrewic”); I realize it must be Latinizing, after nepōs, but it seems very odd — we write river, not riper or ripher, even though again French –v– is from Latin –p-. Does anybody know anything more about the history of this spelling change, and the concomitant spelling pronunciation with /f/ which is universal in the US and exists in the UK as well? Come to think of it, that’s another thing I’m curious about — I’ve long been aware of the UK pronunciation /ˈnɛvjuː/, but for some reason I had the impression it was antiquated; the OED, however, implies it’s the more common one:
Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈnɛvjuː/, /ˈnɛfjuː/, U.S. /ˈnɛfju/
So I’ll ask you Brits: do you say it with /v/ or /f/, and do you think of the former as standard or old-fashioned?
John Wells included “nephew” in his surveys of British English in the 1990s (reported here). “Nephew pronounced with /f/ has today clearly overtaken the older /v/ pronunciation, leaving it behind with only 21%. … An overwhelming majority of over 90% of those born after 1948 adhered to the spelling pronunciation /’nefju:/.”
Consider your own name, which can be spelled with either a v or a ph, but is always pronounced /v/ due to the same sound change. The hypocoristic form nevvy landed in the 18C and is spelled as pronounced, even to the “vv” which normally doesn’t occur in English words (chivvy, civvies, divvy, flivver, navvy, revving, savvy, skivvies all have similar offbeat or unknown origins), as it would be read as “w”.
An idea that I’ve got after about 1 minute of thinking. Maybe unusually strong influence of Latin -p- is because nephew should often have been written in wills?
Born before before 1948 in Australia, long UK-based, I usually say “nevu”, but on reflection, I find that “nefu” sounds fine too, and I may even use them interchangeably.
Brit born in the 80s here. I can’t remember ever hearing the “v” pronunciation of nephew.
I only hear the pronunciation with /v/ from people who voice all fricatives anyway.
I use /f/. Only upon reading your post did it occur to me that the pronunciation with /v/ sounds familiar. I might even have used it occasionally. I’d never actually thought about it.
Like Bathrobe above, I’ve never paid close attention but I realize now that I pronounce both ways. /v/ usually occurs when I’m tired or rushed, /f/ when I’m more alert or saying just the word. After reading John Cowan’s comment above, I also realized I pronounce Steven and Stephen differently.
For what it’s worth, I have a weird mish-mash accent. Born in America’s upper Midwest, raised in the Deep South in a close community of transplants, with close family ties in Britain and New England, and extensive French and Latin lessons.
Huh, so it looks like my original impression was correct and the /v/ pronunciation is antiquated. I wonder why the OED lists it first in a 2003 revision?
Consider your own name, which can be spelled with either a v or a ph, but is always pronounced /v/ due to the same sound change.
I’m not following you. How can /sti:vn/ reflect the same sound change as /nefju(:)/? Also, people often do pronounce the -ph- spelling with /f/; see Joy’s comment above.
Surprised to find the OED gives /fɑiəl/ as the pronunciation of phial. All my life I have assumed that it was pronounced the same as vial.
Well, one of Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories was titled “The Ipswich Phial”….
Of course talking about “the same sound change” was nothing but a brain fart on my part. My intended point was that since Stephen is a really old borrowing, it came in before there was a phoneme /v/ in English. At that time [v] was solely due to intervocalic voicing of /f/, so Stephen and a few other Latin words of Greek origin got the English used to occasionally writing ph for /f/, while automatically voicing it between vowels just like native /f/.
So when the Old French word for ‘grandson’ landed in Middle English, it must have seemed natural to write it indifferently nepheu, neveu, nefeu (and variants), the pronunciation in all cases being [v]. Then the arrival of foreign words with initial [v] led to the creation of the new phoneme /v/ (vane, vat, vixenare native, but come from dialects with pervasive initial voicing). The Great Spelling Shakeout eventually landed us with the spelling nephew, now with /v/ as well as [v]. Finally, spelling pronunciation did its evil work and gave us /f/, first in the U.S. and then in the UK, and now we hear that its baleful influence is starting to corrupt Stephen as well.
The story of phial/vial must be much the same, except that /f/ is the original sound in English here, and vial must also reflect a dialect with initial voicing. In Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy series, in which the Anglo-French Empire grew under the descendants of Richard Lionheart instead of breaking up (and magic is effective), there is a story called “The Ipswich Phial”, a parody of the title of Len Deighton’s spy novel The IPCRESS File (made into a Michael Caine movie).
I (who am antiquated) say it with a v (as in Weller.)
My wife, who is much less antiquated, says it with f and v.
My children say it with f; mind you, they don’t yet have cause to use the word as much as I do.
East End of London born. & bred. When reading your piece I’m thinking that I say it with a ‘v’ but I start questioning myself. I think it’s one of those words where I change the pronounciaton according to the social register of the other paticipant(s) in the conservation: so ‘v ‘ with family and ‘f ‘ when using register of a more standard English to fit in with speakers of other English varieties or RP.
Fascinating — I’m glad I asked!
The spelling of (older) French nepveu besides Standard neveu must be due to the same reasoning that has Lefebvre as an alternate spelling for Lefèvre: the pronunciation has the fricative v but the Latin original has a stop (nepos, faber), which a latinizing spelling reintegrates into the French word (just as Latin b was integrated into English debt because of Latin debita).
For French, latinizing spellings are typical of the Renaissance (eg Rabelais’ original text). Many such spellings were simplified later, but some of them have remained, eg doigt ‘finger’ (Latin digitus) and vingt ‘twenty’ (Latin viginti), perhaps to differentiate these words from homophones (eg dois, doit ‘must, owe(s)’ or vin ‘wine’).
As for nephew, I first learned this word in the fifties, with [f].
spelling pronunciation did its evil work …its baleful influence
I gather you don’t like spelling pronunciations.
I was taught to say it with [v], probably even without the alternative being mentioned. But of course L2 teaching is prone to archaisms.
More likely vint “came”; the t resurfaces in such common contexts as vingt-et-un.
Tell us what you really feel
The worst spelling pronunciation perversion I’ve encountered is “HUSser” for “hussar” (should be “huzZAR”). I heard someone say it that way and I politely pointed out that it’s “huzZAR” and then we drew our phones like Billy the Kid and googled it and my nemesis pointed to one of those sites like dictionary.com or whatever where “HUSser” was given as an acceptable pronunciation.
I told him that that only proved the internet was a wretched hive of scum and villainy and that he should trust me on this one.
M-W, an impeccably American dictionary, gives only “huzZAR,” so I think your interlocutor didn’t have a leg to stand on. One might, in theory or in desperation, claim “HUSser” to be an American form that M-W somehow ignores, but we Yanks don’t have hussars, so that’s right out. Similarly, I say “can-TOON-ment” for the relevant sense of cantonment, since Brits have them and we don’t.
And se-CON-ded, for the same reason.
David: or vin ‘wine’ — More likely vint “came”; the t resurfaces in such common contexts as vingt-et-un.
You must be right!
CanTOONment is only the second pronunciation in either the OED or the ODO; the first uses the LOT vowel, and so I’d say can-TAHN-ment, using my own LOT vowel. I’d do the same with boffin, full stop, letterbox, and other LOT Briticisms.
Wikipedia says we do have cantonments, anyway: “In United States military parlance, a cantonment is an essentially permanent residential (i.e. barracks) section of a fort or other military installation such as Fort Hood.”
A curiously difficult question to answer, and I’m not really sure how I say it, but I think it’s with /f/ or perhaps a very weakly voiced /f/. I think I’ve always said it that way (born 1940s).
A survey of myself reported 90% -f- 10% -v-
Born 1957 in Abingdon, Berks: I say nephew with a /v/. The pronunciation with an /f/ doesn’t sound too bad though, certainly not as bad as pronouncing the t in often. Fighting a losing battle for forrid (forehead).
CanTOONment is only the second pronunciation
But it is the standard pronunciation in the sense “quartering of soldiers”; check your Daniel Jones or watch a British war movie.
Wikipedia says we do have cantonments, anyway
I stand corrected!
I haven’t thought of “seconded” as specifically British. I’ve heard people here in Washington, DC, use it in referring to people being temporarily transferred from one government agency to another.
Dammit, are all my UK/US shibboleths going to crumble to dust? So how do people in Washington, DC, say it: se-CON-ded or (as I would expect from Americans) SEC-onded? If the former, they must have picked it up from the Brits.
Sec-CON-ded in Toronto.
It’s “se-CON-ded” in DC too.
But I don’t think these same people would talk about “taking” a decision or describe something as being a “one-off” or use other Britishisms.
Speaking of “nephew”, does anyone use the word “nibling” seriously?
Never heard of it.
I use “nibling” from time to time; I have several of them, not all of the same gender.
Aha, nibling: “Coined by linguist Samuel E. Martin in 1951 from nephew/niece by analogy with sibling.” I guess if it were going to catch on, it would have done so by now.
In the U.S. Army, 1969-71, the only pronunciation I ever heard for “cantonment” was “c’n-TONE-ment.”
And as for online dictionaries, I had occasion to look up “eschew” recently and was flummoxed to find that the first pronunciation given was “ee-shoo.”
And now I too am flummoxed.
It seems like everybody has a different pronunciation of “eschew.” I just checked an online dictionary, and it didn’t have that pronunciation, but it did list six others, half of which do not sound right to my ear.
I’m still surprised this pronunciation isn’t simply considered part & parcel of H-dropping.
I just checked an online dictionary, and it didn’t have that pronunciation, but it did list six others, half of which do not sound right to my ear.
This is why I tend not to bother with online(-only) dictionaries. The AHD has only es-CHEW, which (conveniently) is my own pronunciation.
David, it’s the stressed vowel of forehead that matters: traditionally LOT, but by spelling pronunciation FORCE, as in (be)fore. I say /fɑrəd/ myself.
The spelling ‘forrid’ obviously based on ‘torrid’
When I was a kid, ‘forrid’ was the norm and ‘forehead’ was used by people who didn’t know better. Now it seems that ‘forrid’ is on its last legs.
I say ‘forrid’. But not ‘weskit’.
nibling: “Coined by linguist Samuel E. Martin in 1951 from nephew/niece by analogy with sibling.” I guess if it were going to catch on, it would have done so by now.
Thanks for this. I know a woman in London who uses this word all the time for her siblings’ children. I’d always thought it was her own family’s coinage.
I only say /f/ in nephew.
With hussar the two pronunciations I’ve heard are həZAR, the more common one that I use, and hʊZAR with the u like the oo in foot. The latter was used by a man I knew who actually had been one, but he was a dreadful snob so it may be a bit frou-frou.
I used to say forrid but now I say fore-head.
Come to think, sibling itself is not used very often compared to its equivalent in other languages (søsken, geschwister). In English, I’d be more likely to say ‘brothers & sisters’.
I was introduced to “nibling” by a friend some years ago; so far I think I have only managed to use it when talking to that same friend.
@Christ McG: How about saucep’n?
In English, I’d be more likely to say ‘brothers & sisters’.
Me too.
(Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to deify Chris.)
Sibling was an Old English word meaning ‘member of the sib or kinship group’. Both words were revived around the beginning of the 20C by geneticists and anthropologists, the former in a narrower sense than before. The first person on record to use sibling ‘Geschwister’ was Karl Pearson of Pearson’s r, the correlation coefficient.
(saved too soon)
Consequently, it is an artificial and technical word, not much used in ordinary communication, as noted above.
In French, it’s frères et soeurs, but in Spanish just hermanos, meaning either “brothers’ or ‘brothers and sisters’.
Russian doesn’t even have a technical term as far as I know (though there’s дети одних родителей ‘children of one set of parents’). They say братья и сёстры [brat’ya i syostry] ‘brothers and sisters’ (as in the title of the 1958 Abramov novel).
Anyone here whose house still has clabberds?
“we Yanks don’t have hussars, so that’s right out”
Well, not any more you don’t…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgefield_Hussars
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/New_Jersey_Butterfly_Boys_in_the_Civil_W.html?id=dMuKE9XQl78C&hl=en
And do you have clabbered milk in your clapboard house?
…Oh.
Did it escape the NORTH-FORCE merger somehow?
No, I think it shifted from /for+hɛd/ to /fo+rɛd/, followed by irregular shortening. It’s of OE age.
Doesn’t it need to rhyme with “horrid” so that the rhyme about the little girl who had a little curl works? Or do you have /ɑ/ in “horrid” too?
I do, yes. Some Americans have NORTH=FORCE, those who have changed all ambisyllabic /r/ to belong to the previous syllable only, but I’m not one of them. On the other hand, CLOTH=THOUGHT for Eastern Americans like me.
What? HuZAR? Who the devil spelled it in English with two esses, then? That’s just mean.
Scissors.
Scissors
And “chassis”, pronounced “shazzy” (but only in Australia).
dissolve, possess, Missouri
In Ireland, the -lace is “necklace” is often unreduced, as in “shoelace”. I still dislike the “neckless” pronunciation.
ss can even be [ʒ], for some speakers, in “fission”.
and [ʒ] for all(?) speakers in scission, re~, and ab~
Similarly ti is [ʒ] in “equation”.
I’ve noticed that I have two pronunciations for “equation” – when it means the act of equating, I use [ʃ], but in the more fully nominal senses, like in math or chemistry, I use [ʒ].
@Lazar: I do that too.
And it’s not etymological or anything either. It’s completely random.
It was borrowed from (Northern) German, where it’s spelled Husar and pronounced with [z]. So that’s all explicable, it’s only the doubled s that’s random. Hussar is an etymological doublet of corsair, but with a borrowing path of Italian > Serbo-Croat > Hungarian > German > English instead of Italian > Occitan > French > English. Both are ultimately < Latin cursare ‘journey (v.)’ < currere ‘run (v.)’. So from traveling we go to traveling for plunder, and then on the hussar side to being a light Hungarian horseman, doubtless notorious for plundering.
That’s what I mean.
Well, it’s better than Arbwyth > Trade24 > Cherguelen > Triskweline (Sjandra Kei units).
Wow, I’m really surprised that hussar is /həˈzɑːɹ/! I first learned of the horsemen from historical fiction novels, so I just spelling-pronunciationed it to /ˈhʌsəɹ/. Am I that unusual for doing this? How many uncorrected people like me must exist for it to count as a real pronunciation from a descriptivist standpoint?
Also, Wiktionary claims the path was Hungarian to French to English, and that the former two languages pronounce the middle fricative unvoiced. You guys are the experts so I’ll believe you over Wiktionary, but can you point me to a source for the etymology from German (and/or add it to the Wiktionary page)? Thank you!
The NORTH-FORCE merger is completely absent from the latest Dr Who series, I just found out. The main characters lack it in any case.
That /k/ was borrowed as /h/ before a back vowel indicates a suitably old loan, AFAIK.
A very good question.
Am I that unusual for doing this?
Not at all; most Americans who know the word probably do the same thing.
How many uncorrected people like me must exist for it to count as a real pronunciation from a descriptivist standpoint?
As David M. says, a very good question. Lexicographers must have discussed it, but I’m not aware of any clear answers. I suspect making such decisions is more of an art than a science.
That /k/ was borrowed as /h/ before a back vowel indicates a suitably old loan, AFAIK.
Well, the Serbo-Croat is supposed to have /g/…
The Russian form is гусар, with /g/, for what it’s worth, but that doesn’t really prove anything – IIRC, Russian г was /ɦ/ or thereabouts until (historically) recently, and even English /h/ ended up borrowed as г (as in, say, Гарри “Harry”).
doubtless notorious for plundering
А гусарам и корсарам
Отдаю почти задаром…
(from the White Knight’s poem in the Yakhnin translation of Through the Looking-Glass)
That /k/ was borrowed as /h/ before a back vowel indicates a suitably old loan, AFAIK.
It seems so. kala becomes hal, kota ház, but kivi stays kő. However, puu becomes fa and pääsky fecske.
Sarah: This is Wiktionary: Borrowed from French hussard, from Hungarian huszár (“cavalryman”), from Serbo-Croatian gusar (“highwayman, brigand”), from Byzantine Greek χωσάριος, χονσάριος (khōsários, khonsários) or from Italian corsaro (“corsair”), from Medieval Latin cursārius (“pirate”), from Latirtn cursus (“running”), from currō (“run”). Doublet of corsair.
I cannot go beyond the French-Hungarian connection, but that connection seems to be well-attested. At one time French cavalry must either have included Hungarian mercenaries or hired Hungarians to train French units, members of which were then known as hussards.
The final -d in the French word is not etymological, it must have been added to the spelled form by analogy with other words ending in -ard (sounded as ‘ar’) such as bâtard, richard, and a number of other words of mostly Germanic origin, where the suffix is (at least in French) still productive with a somewhat derogatory meaning (as in modern chauffard ‘dangerous driver’, as opposed to chauffeur ‘driver’). As an adjective, hussard has a feminine form which I have only encountered in the phrase ‘a la hussarde’ , literally ‘in the hussar (way)’ referring to aggressive sexual behaviour.
That /k/ was borrowed as /h/ before a back vowel indicates a suitably old loan
No, too old: *k > *q > †x was never productive in Europe. Slavic loans in Hungarian allow ka-, ko-, ku- just fine, and even some of the Iranian and Bulgaric loans from the steppe period do (e.g. kard ‘sword’, komló ‘hop’).
What about hús ‘meat’? The current Farsi form is gosht.
Hús is of unknown etymology according to the etymological dictionary I consulted back when I was studying Hungarian.
What about hús ‘meat’?
That would be the other side of the ‘some of’. (Or, perhaps, east Iranian /ɣ/ being substituted as pre-Hungarian *x?)
French hussard probably accounts for the -ss- in the spelling, but it’s impossible as a direct etymon of the English word, which would have been /ˈhʊzərd/ if adopted earlier (like bastard), or /(h)uˈsar/ if adopted later. The actual pronunciation can only be explained by the German etymon Husar.
…which has final stress because of the long Hungarian vowel.
languagehat (2015): “it looks like my original impression was correct and the /v/ pronunciation is antiquated. I wonder why the OED lists it first in a 2003 revision?”
I’ve struggled to find any statement by the OED3 about whether their ordering of pronunciations means anything. All I could find was this, buried in the details of the U.S. English pronunciation model:
In other words, they decided to represent the cot-caught merger as an alternate pronunciation of individual words, but they want to avoid saying whether having the merger or not is more popular. Do they *also* want to avoid saying which is more popular for words like nephew that aren’t part of accent differences? That sentence sounds like it, but I’m not completely sure.
The OED2’s deadline was too tight to allow for updating pronunciations, and they specifically disclaimed reliability: “no exhaustive analysis of the currency, frequency, or distribution of alternative pronunciations is implied by their ordering.”
So maybe they just didn’t change the old edition’s ordering because they weren’t in the habit of thinking that the ordering mattered? Possibly they see the relative popularity of pronunciations as something that changes too fast for their time scale, so they don’t try to follow it in detail? If so, they should tell us up front!
It is frustrating that the historical OED *sometimes* updates the pronunciation order, e.g. for zebra, where the revised entry now shows “ZEBB-ra” first and “ZEE-bra” second for British English; those were the other way around in 1921, and they really did change places during the 20th century. And sometimes they don’t. Maybe it’s whim or luck, maybe the pronunciations are in some secret arbitrary order? Tell us, don’t make us guess!
The current Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary puts the pronunciation of nephew with /f/ first and /v/ second. So at least some part of Oxford is aware.
I found this page trying to find a reference to the word neve being an alternative word for nephew. There is a mention of this in the OED extract on your post. My husband saw it on a game show, it seems a bit obscure to me.
This is Wiktionary: Borrowed from French hussard, from Hungarian huszár (“cavalryman”), from Serbo-Croatian gusar (“highwayman, brigand”), from Byzantine Greek χωσάριος, χονσάριος (khōsários, khonsários) or from Italian corsaro (“corsair”), from Medieval Latin cursārius (“pirate”)
A different etymology of hussar was given here.
I don’t know which to believe? My instinct is to trust Xerîb more than Wiktionary.
A very sound principle (seriously.)
Don’t get me wrong: Wiktionary is a remarkable achievement, like Wikipedia; and the technofascists hate it, which is recommendation enough for any normal person.
But it’s dependent on what sources are available, and a weakness it shares with WP is that the quality control of sources is not brilliant. Even perfectly respectable and otherwise highly competent linguists have sometimes produced lamentable etymological work: cf
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/iuswrrest/api/core/bitstreams/807e532e-40fd-492f-a081-d18dce435c1d/content
Comparative linguistics is hard, and hard in a somewhat unobvious way that means that some very good linguists have tried their hand at it in blissful unawareness of how badly they’re going astray*. But unless you know almost enough about it to be able to do proper historical linguistics yourself, you have no good way of knowing that a work from an eminent scholar published by a respected specialist publisher may be virtually worthless.
And inevitably, when it comes to individual etyma, Wiktionary is no match for a capable scholar with good sources who is able to devote some time to running down all the evidence bearing on that one item.
* It reminds me of the equally unfounded belief of some “mainstream” novelists that if you can write a good novel, you can automatically also write a good science fiction novel.
It reminds me of the equally unfounded belief of some “mainstream” novelists that if you can write a good novel, you can automatically also write a good science fiction novel
And cf.: I just read a short story by the young Wodehouse, when he was trying his hand at mystery fiction. It’s quite bad.
Merriam-Webster.com now shows both /z/ and /s/ for hussar.
But it’s dependent on what sources are available, and a weakness it shares with WP is that the quality control of sources is not brilliant.
…as can be seen on the Russian Wiktionary article, which, apparently quoting Vasmer, derives the word from Hungarian húsz “20” with a story about how supposedly one in each 20 army recruits ended up in cavalry. AFAICT that etymology had been soundly abolished by now.
If the etymology given by Xerîb is correct, I do wonder what’s up with those supposed Byzantine terms… they certainly look connected, at least if they’re real, but he doesn’t seem to mention them one way or another.
Merriam-Webster.com now shows both /z/ and /s/ for hussar.
Actually, Merriam-Webster has included both -ZAR and -SAR pronunciations since at least 1966 in the Unabridged, and in the Collegiate since the 1973 edition. I think languagehat (May 24, 2015) must have meant to say that MW accepts only stress on the second syllable, not the first; he was replying to a comment about the spelling pronunciation “HUSser”.
Since 2015, some anonymous bungler has added the “HUSser” pronunciation to Wiktionary, even though no professional dictionary accepts it. It’s also the American pronunciation in Google’s “learn to pronounce” widget, which I suspect is just guessing from the spelling. Nice job breaking it, Google.
(Personally, I can tolerate first-syllable stress in hussar as long as the a is not reduced. It’s the reduction to schwa that sounds really ignorant.)
The /z/ pronunciation can be explained in the same way as scissors, dissolve, possess, Missouri as mentioned above, and dessert — as also observed by Keith Ivey. Summarizing from a Quora answer by Nick Nicholas and well-referenced Stack Exchange discussion: Jespersen and many other historians of English say that there was a voicing of intervocalic /s/ to /z/ between an unstressed and stressed syllable for lots of words in Early Modern English, which is when hussar was borrowed from French. So it happened within English, no need for German influence.
That process stopped before more recent loanwords like cassette (but I don’t know what accounts for brassiere, a 20th-century loan). And then some words have gone back to /s/ again, like discern and desist, and some never went to /z/ for some reason — Jespersen has examples — leaving a big mess.
It so happens that the OED just revised hussar in December 2024. Now that they’ve caught up to current scholarship, they agree completely with the origin given by Xerîb:
(1532 is also the date of the first English citation, in a translation from French. Siege of Kőszeg.)
The evidence from Latin (since there’s a shortage of written Hungarian from that time), and mention of the “20” folk etymology:
The Serbo-Croatian words with initial g- are now thought to be eggcornishly influenced by Italian corsaro rather than actually borrowed from it; the Byzantine Greek words are now thought to be borrowed from Slavic, not the other way around.
That’s impressively detailed — good for them!
Verner’s Third Law! *mad cackling*