I recently ran across the Wikipedia article Qurabiya:
Qurabiya (also ghraybe, ghorayeba, and numerous other spellings and pronunciations) is a shortbread-type biscuit, usually made with ground almonds. Versions are found in most countries of the former Ottoman Empire, with various different forms and recipes. […]
There is some debate about the origin of the words. Some give no other origin for the Turkish word kurabiye than Turkish, while others have given Arabic or Persian. Among others, linguist Sevan Nişanyan has given an Arabic origin, in his 2009 book of Turkish etymology, from ġurayb or ğarîb (exotic). However, as of 2019, Nişanyan’s online dictionary now gives the earliest known recorded use in Turkish as the late 17th century, with an origin from the Persian gulābiya, a cookie made with rose water, from gulāb, related to flowers. He notes that the Syrian Arabic words ġurābiye/ġuraybiye likely derive from the Turkish.
A typical Wikipedia etymological mishmosh; can anybody say what’s most plausible? (Xerîb?)
Also, courtesy of Trevor Joyce, a brief YouTube clip in which Werner Herzog regrets having been forced at gunpoint to speak French.
I wonder if it’s related to several Russian/Slavic terms also dealing with some type of bread/pie/biscuit.
Kolob, Kolobok, Coulibiac- none of them really have convincing etymology.
Why not Persian?
From the link I learned that “Baku kurabye”, an “endangered but extant species” of Moscow’s confectionary stores of my days, was originally “Persian kurabye” until the Stalinist expunging of all “foreign” adjectives from the food names. This sweet was one of several semi-extinct ethnic sweet biscuits, notably including Yiddish-insipred zimmelakh and kikhelakh.
There’s an Indian sweet called gulab jamun. It’s great, like an intensely saffrony cheesecake in a crisp fried coating.
Wikipedia says gulab is from Persian gol (flower) and āb (water), referring to the rose water-scented syrup, and traces the recipe to Turkic invaders. So 15th century?
But then, maybe that’s not much help? There are lots of Middle Eastern sweets with rosewater in, and they might be completely unrelated.
“Baku kurabye”, an “endangered but extant species” of Moscow’s confectionary stores of my days
Moscow’s confectionary stores in my days (mid-2000s) still regularly offered курабье бакинское, and I’ve seen it sporadically later; I suspect that the lack of my recent encounters with it is just because I don’t visit confectionary stores much any more.
That said, the recent versions I’ve had were nowhere near as good as the tasty version from a decade as a half ago. And I’m sure that back in your time they were even better.
Kolob, Kolobok, Coulibiac- none of them really have convincing etymology.
…that’s колобок and кулебяка, right? I can’t figure out what the first one is.
I always thought that the колобок was somehow related to the “wheel” root, but in retrospect it does make sense that they could be related to each other, and кулебяка does sound like it could be Turkic. But I’d probably have to look up the accepted etymology first.
We discussed kołacz and its etymology before, with the regular wheel-word explanation.
http://languagehat.com/the-history-of-a-town/
I don’t visit confectionary stores much any more
Right, the sad truth. I was just musing about it yesterday after an Afro-Argentine tango friend confided about mean people causing problems with her baklava business (she apprenticed with the Greek friends in her younger years, and her baklava is incredible). Some White Americans pestered her with “Make African food, not Greek food” bullsh*t, while a bunch of aggressive Turkish commenters on the Instagram accused her of misappropriating Turkish heritage. And I was like, wish I could support you as a customer too, but I’m not young enough to buy baklava by a tray 🙁
That reminds me of the sad fate of the Cappadocia Restaurant which opened on Broadway in Astoria, NYC, in the summer of 1996. It served wonderful Turkish food but was run by Kurds who had had to flee Turkey; I got to know them and lent them a good history of the Kurds I happened to have. I decided to have dinner there in early December but found it closed with no obvious reason; the next day I called and got a “The number you have dialed has been temporarily disconnected” message. Eventually I asked at a nearby store and was told there had been a “bad fire”; they hinted, but did not outright say, that it had been burned out by local Greeks (it was then a largely Greek neighborhood) wanting to drive away the invading “Turks.” Just another reason to despise nationalism.
@hat
In a case of a restaurant fire that is not accidental, there is also the possibility of (a) insurance fraud by owner or (b) failure of owner to pay protection (or help the protector launder money, hide stolen items, etc). While in case (b) in a “Greek” neighbourhood the protectors might be “Greek”, the arson would be done strictly for business reasons.
Sure, all those are distinct possibilities. I loved Astoria, but it had a lot of unsavory stuff going on if you pulled up the rug a bit.
Eventually I asked at a nearby store and was told there had been a “bad fire”; they hinted, but did not outright say, that it had been burned out by local Greeks (it was then a largely Greek neighborhood) wanting to drive away the invading “Turks.”
My enemy’s enemy is indistinguishable from my enemy. Because I’m an idiot.
Pretty much what happened to Saladin, whom WP calls the most famous Kurd in the world. Except he managed to die in his bed.
My money is on ghurayyibah, a diminutive of Arabic gharibah, “marvelous, extraordinary.” It is often flavored with rosewater, orange blossom water or a mixture of the two, but the salient thing about this shortbread is its delicate texture, not a rosewater flavoring (which it shares with countless other Middle Eastern sweets). The Turkish form would then be explained by metathesis.
BTW, this pastry appears in Greek pastry shops under the barely recognizable name kourambiedes (though doubtless fairly recognizable to Language Hat readers).
If the Arabic etymology is not right (and I suspect it has a strong claim), then we can at least say that in Arabic it gravitated towards an association with the Arabic root. Because a simple borrowing would not have ended up gh-. Not my linguistic bailiwick, but looks more likely to have been borrowed from Arabic into languages that don’t have gh than vice versa.
FYLSC has gurabija, and I love them!
In Algeria they’re ġʷṛaybiyya – one of my favourite sweets, though a bit dry. The Arabic etymology seems reasonable, but I’d want to check the medieval cookbooks before reaching any conclusions…
Lameen — I find no mention of this pastry in the medieval cookbooks, which suggests that ghreybeh is probably a relatively recent development. No shame in that.
BTW, in case anybody was wondering about the k in kurabye, the form gurabye was also used in Ottoman.
“gulab” = “rose” traveled far – here it is in thai: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suankularb_Wittayalai_School
A typical Wikipedia etymological mishmosh; can anybody say what’s most plausible? (Xerîb?)
Here are some random notes to add to what has been said above. Two views of the development of Turkish kurâbiye were noted:
It’s harder to motivate some aspects of the first view—why would an original Persian گلابی gulābī or Turkish كلابيه gülâbiye “confection flavored with rose water” end up with a ġ- and -r- in Arabic? Particularly when we consider that Persian گلاب gulāb “rose water” came across fine as Arabic جلاب jullāb, julāb (cf. English julep). It’s not like Arabic is completely intolerant of loanwords that have no transparent root derivation—on the contrary, the language is full of such words from Persian and Turkish, particularly in the culinary sphere. Why should gülâbiye have cried out for accommodation and been folk-etymologized to the root ġ-r-b? In addition, we can note that Modern Repubican Turkish has ku- with a back vowel in the modern form kurabiye anyway (and Azeri has back qurabiyə too…). This back vowel would have to be explained as colloquial vowel-harmonic alteration in this scenario. This is not out of the question, but it is an extra step—in the other scenario, the back vowel just comes for free. I’d be interested to know Nişanyan’s reasons for changing the etymology in his dictionary. (Building on this… Could the كلابيه gülâbiye “wafer, cookie” in Meninski be a learnèd alteration of an earlier ġurābiye, kurābiye, after gülāb “rose water”, so commonly used as flavoring for sweets in the Near East?)
I think the second view is reasonable—Turkish kurabiye could be an irregular alteration (influenced by the many Turkish nouns in -iye < Arabic -iyya?) of Arabic ġurayyiba “shortbread cookie”, found in variant forms around the Arab world. In form, Arabic ġurayyiba is the feminine of ġurayyib, the regularly-formed diminutive of ġarīb “foreign, strange, unusual, rare, exotic, marvelous, extraordinary”. (Perhaps in Ottoman times, there could also have been mutual influence and reborrowing between Ottoman and Arabic, and reaccommodation to Arabic morphology, contributing to the variety of forms in Arabic.)
For parallels to the formation in Turkish -iye and similarly phonologically irregular colloquial adaptations of foreign words into Turkish, we can point to şehriye “noodle” (from Arabic šaʿr “hair”) and pişmaniye “Turkish-style cotton candy” (from Persian pašmīna “woollen; a kind of confection (cotton candy?)”, from pašm, “wool”).
For a phonological parallel to the otherwise unusual change of an Arabic ġ- into Turkish k-, we can point to Turkish kalabalık. This is from Arabic غلبة ġalaba “superior power, prevalence, predominance, ascendancy” (root ġ-l-b, “conquer, defeat, gain ascendancy”). Arabic ġalaba became colloquial Turkish kalaba “crowd, throng”, and with the addition of the Turkish noun and adjective suffix -lık, the common, everyday Turkish word kalabalık “crowd, throng” (< “a predominance by number or amount”) as a noun and “crowded, congested (as a street)”, as an adjective. (The usual thing is for ġ- to show up as Turkish g-, as is galiba “probably” from Arabic غالباً ġāliban “preponderantly, mostly, most often” from the same root.) Note also Azeri qərib “stranger” with q from Arabic ġarīb (cf. qurabiyə above).
For a semantic parallel to such a name ġurayyiba (“little exotic one, extraordinary little one, marvellous little one”) in confectionery, perhaps consider French nonpareille (English nonpareil) “pinhead-sized candies used in quantity as decoration; a chocolate drop covered with such candies”, but literally meaning “peerless, unequalled, without parallel”…
And for the use of ġarīb in Arabic in the description of food, and specifically for a cookie, it is interesting to consult Nawal Nasrallah’s 2007 translation, Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens: Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq’s Tenth-Century Baghdadi Cookbook (mentioned in an article linked to earlier this month on Language Hat):
One of the items called ġarīb in al-Warraq is found in the following:
Abū Samīn (literally, “Father of the Fat Man”?) was a professional cook in the palace kitchens of the Abbasid caliph al-Wāthiq (reigned 842–847) according to Nasrallah. The word ḫuškanānaj “shortbread, cookie” in this recipe is from an Iranian source equivalent to New Persian خشکنانه ḫušknāna “biscuit, cookie” (from خشک ḫušk “dry” and نان nān “bread”). Nasrallah translates the recipe for this ḫuškanānaj ġarīb as follows (p. 418):
This is patently a recipe for shortbread and what would nowadays be considered a kind of kurabiye. Can we see ancestor of kurabiye in the ġarīb of this ḫuškanānaj ġarīb? Nasrallah seems to suggest as much:
Or is this just coincidence? In any case, Nasrallah’s translation of this cookbook is really fun to read—I recommend it to anyone with an interest in the history of human institutions or a kink for experimenting in the kitchen.
From the Arabic root(s) ġ-r-b come an amazing number of derivatives with meanings as varied as “depart”, “west”, “the tree Populus euphratica”, “drinking cup”, “the two edges of a camel’s haunches”, “stranger”, both “marvellous” and “miserable”, both “crow” and “silver”, and words referring to the notions of both “black” and “white”… Here is the entry for the root in Lane’s dictionary.
The word ġarīb, “strange, foreign” and “a stranger, a foreigner”, from this root has many resonances, shading into “rare, exotic, marvelous” on the one hand, but particularly “forlorn, miserable, poor, wandering, longing for someone absent, all alone in the world” in Kurdish xerîb and Turkish garip—a word we’ve already encountered in Language Hat in the post The Garip Manifesto a few years ago.
For lagniappe: I particularly like this wonderful performance of a Turkish classic about the fate of the garip, the stranger, the foreigner, the wanderer, the forlorn.
Wow, thanks for that thorough response!
I remember that Father’s Lebanese graduate student called it something like buqrawiya, some 40 years ago.
And my maternal grandmother’s cousin was a great expert at baking them. Her husband was sickly, and so they had to move to the Crimea, where she learned the craft. In 1944, they were deported along with the Crimean Tatars (a Tatar is a Tatar, no matter Crimean or not) to Uzbekistan.
Always buqrawiya tomorrow, never today!
And it was the cousin who lived in the otrub, and her eldest daughter stayed with Grandmother’s when she started school, otherwise it would be too far to attend it.
Juha’s comments reminded me of a point that I didn’t add to my previous message:
If in fact Ottoman گلابيه gülâbiye “rose-water shortbread” is the original etymon of the forms in the Neo-Arabic languages and a quite late creation, then a problem arises when the word is borrowed into the Neo-Arabic languages—what to do with the Turkish گ /g/ sound in Arabic? This might explain the introduction of غ /ɣ/ as the initial—and then subsequent folk etymologizing and perhaps alternation of rand l (not unheard of in the Upper Mesopotamia linguistic area and cross-linguistically common) might explain the rest.
As an aside relating to food words and the problem of adopting foreign /g/ into Arabic… Egyptians can handle /g/ fine (written with ج jīm, pronounced /g/ in that variety), but the other varieties of Arabic need different strategies. And this is featured in a recent Burger King ad campaign:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1155486638870618115
The gist of this can be understood I think even if you don’t understand Arabic…The guys drive up to Burger King and begin arguing about the correct way to pronounce برجر “burger” in Arabic. The guy with the moustache wants to pronounce it as /burd͡ʒar/ as it is written with the letter ج jīm in the sign برجر كنج Burger King, which has two jīm‘s in it. The guy behind the wheel insists on an Anglicising pronunciation /burɣar/ with ghayn غ /ɣ/… They argue and are transformed into professors of Arabic philology, until they ask the drive-up window employee to settle the matter. But the employee says “It’s called a Whopper. Whopper!”—with a /p/ that poses even more problems for Arabic orthography and pronunciation.
The ad campaign continues with the proposal for the introduction of the letter ڃ with two dots in place of the ج for the name:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=480316989368894
(The letter ڃ is in use in Sindhi and other languages, as explained here in French and here in German.)
In Bulgarian it just means cookie :shrug:
I’m reading Kaverin’s Перед зеркалом, and I just got to this, in a description of Yalta circa 1923:
(A former lawyer is now selling kurab’ye and pirozhki.)
Recipe with photo:
https://women365.ru/recipes/pechene-kurabe-v-domashnih-usloviyah-recept
Just noticed a 1947 ad from the “Evening Leningrad” for “Oriental and Jewish sweets” “made with real sugar and butter” featuring kurab’ye, with the Facebook discussion mentioning several other sweets from this thread
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=3668788366514149&set=gm.3634930963212709
…what would the substitute for real sugar even be?
Saccharin, I guess.
That ad doesn’t say anything about “real sugar”; it says the pastries are made by highly qualified masters of sugar and butter.
Nowadays “real sugar” is on drinks cans for “the real taste” — as opposed to high fructose corn syrup. Neither is good for me, but I do think there is a difference in profile. (Sucrose peaks and fades faster, maybe).
Saccharin, I guess.
Nowadays there are more plausible and less dangerous sugar substitutes. Saccharin has in fact been illegal in the US for half a century.
Oh, yes, sucrose (called Saccharose in German) doesn’t taste the same as glucose + fructose.
“The sweetener has continued to be widely used in the United States and is now the third-most popular artificial sweetener behind sucralose and aspartame.”
I thought sucrose broke down into glucose + fructose in the mouth, but TIL it’s only in the duodenum. The amylase in saliva only breaks down starch. So it makes sense that the taste is different.
Reading that article on saccharin, it was never illegal in the US but there was a mandatory warning. Then it turned out that rats were a bad model for humans for this compound specifically, and the warning was withdrawn. But maybe it was actually banned for some years in the EEC (or individual European countries and/or the UK, since this was before common EU food additive rules).
On the other hand, cyclamate was banned in 1969 in most of the world, but was allowed again from 1989 in Denmark (and I guess the rest of the EU) but not the US. So that’s the other way around.
That ad doesn’t say anything about “real sugar”
But it is obviously implied. Grice etc.
But it is obviously implied.
It’s also implied that the food is edible. That doesn’t give you license to add “edible” to a translation.
I mean, when the comment has “made with real sugar and butter” (with quote marks) that very strongly implies that is what the Russian says.
It’s also implied that the food is edible.
I wouldn’t go that far… Anyway, when food is implied to be edible, it is not on Gricean grounds.
I mean, when the comment has “made with real sugar and butter” (with quote marks) that very strongly implies that is what the Russian says.
Yes, or at least it should. But there probably is a bit of cultural difference. “with sugar and butter” is as informative as “food is edible”. Or worse, someone might think that it is in a manner of warning about (un)healthy choices. In context of 1947 Soviet Union “sugar and butter” was something different. But I agree, highly knowlegeable and intelligent LH readers have to figure that out on their own. I think it is just interesting that “real” was an immediate reaction of Dmitry Pruss on that add, and so was mine.
Yes, that is interesting.
it says the pastries are made by highly qualified masters of sugar and butter
I don’t see any other context for this phrase in the ad. They obviously habitually substituted butter, using margarine and veg oil, and the ad for the premium foods was to convince the customers that these pastries were made from the real stuff. Did they substitute sugar? With treacle or molasses? I am not so sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did, too. Saccharine was widely used during WWII too, but not for baking, of course.
the ad for the premium foods was to convince the customers that these pastries are made from the real stuff.
No doubt, but that information has to be provided as a supplement, not silently added to the translation. Compare Rayfield’s turning Shalamov’s “не писатели, а читатели” into “the bosses, not the underlings” (see this post).
I imagined that my use of quotes “” indicated that I am trying to convey the gist of a snippet, rather than a thorough translation with footnotes 🙂 🙂 But perhaps it’s less common in English to use quote-unquote to mean “kind of like” or “in essence”
There is a lot more cool stuff in the comments there, but I didn’t have time to translate, only to point in the right direction. (My granny, an English translator by the way, also had to explain me the meanings of the names of the various diamond-shaped cookies, the ruddy ones and the silvery ones, semi-apologizing that she forgot Yiddish and couldn’t be 100% sure about the etymologies)
Googling קיכלעך returns lots of images, only one of which has diamond-shaped cookies. Not sure what gives, maybe the experts on the old traditions can set the record straight.
I imagined that my use of quotes “” indicated that I am trying to convey the gist of a snippet, rather than a thorough translation with footnotes ???? ???? But perhaps it’s less common in English to use quote-unquote to mean “kind of like” or “in essence”
Ah, yes, in English if you put quotes around something it’s supposed to be an exact quote (how would you indicate that in Russian?). I frequently got irritated with the authors I was editing for putting things in quote marks that weren’t actual quotes.
an exact quote
but both Russian and English use the word “literally” to mean, “not literally”, right? The mighty multitran suggests that Russian “в кавычках” translates as “scare quotes” … but in the same breath offers “quote-unquote” as a translation, too.
By the way we already discussed ingberlach and zimmelach here http://languagehat.com/zuckermutter-ingbus/ 8 years ago and I still don’t have a clear etymology (it seems to be from Zimt but then why it isn’t tzimmelakh in Russian?)
“Literally” can literally mean “literally”, of course, though this is naturally a confusing usage which should be avoided by careful writers.
but both Russian and English use the word “literally” to mean, “not literally”, right?
Yes, but it’s usually clear from context which is meant. If I talk about some country’s “democracy,” in quotes, it should be evident it’s scare quotes, but if I say “Plato wrote ‘[blah blah blah]'” it is, or should be, assumed that the [blah blah blah] stuff in quotes is what Plato actually wrote, not a summary. If you’re summarizing, say “Plato wrote that [blah blah blah],” with no quotes.
@dp
DWDS has for German Semmel
“entlehnt aus lat. simila ‘feinstes Weizenmehl’…auch auf Weizengebäck übertragen im Sinne von ‘Brötchen’. Die lat. Bezeichnung stammt wie griech. semídālis (σεμίδαλις) ‘feinstes Weizenmehl, Feinmehl’ aus oriental. Sprachen, vgl. syr. səmīdā, assyr. samīdu ‘feines Mehl’. ”
So I would hazard a guess your Yiddish Zimmelach is taken from the German or Latin, as the ‘oriental’ (and the Greek) etyma have a d, which you would need to lose as Latin did.
I’m not going to make a post of this, but it irritates me enough I have to complain about it, so I’ll complain here: the NY Times ran a story “Cynthia Lummis, a Bull-Coaxing Conservative, Heads to the Senate” and added the allegedly helpful information “Ms. Lummis — whose last name rhymes with hummus — […].” That’s fine if you happen to pronounce hummus to rhyme with Lummis, but it doesn’t help those of us who say /ˈhʊmʊs/. I feel for them, since there don’t seem to be any words that actually rhyme unambiguously with Lummis, but that’s no excuse for it.
“Bull-coaxer” sounds like another of those wonderful American insults we so value over here (our native repertoire going little further than “not quite the thing.”)
“You goldarned bull-coaxing conservative!”
I’d have thought Lummis is unambiguously enough spelled, without having to resort to an Ay-rab word.
Courtesy of RhymeZone,
From “Where Were You” by Vic Chesnutt:
From “Orange Aura Freestyle” by Sur5ILL:
I’d have thought Lummis is unambiguously enough spelled
Me too.
Certainly a bull-coaxing conservative seems more subdued and genteel than a “hog-castrating conservative” such as the new Senator’s colleague-to-be Senator Ernst of Iowa. (For those hattics unfamiliar with the fine details of American political campaigning, now-Senator Ernst broke out of the pack as a candidate during the 2014 election cycle with a television ad in which she explained that she’d learned the skill of hog-castrating as a girl growing up on a farm in southwestern Iowa and then suggested that that was excellent preparation for dealing with entrenched special interests inside the Beltway.) Plus even if it may be in fact equally hard dirty work, raising cattle for market may have a certain glamorous image than raising swine lacks.
“Hog-bollocker” has a ring to it. It sounds (though admittedly somewhat uncouth) generally approving in tone, like “sockdologer.”
One of the words where Early Romance /e/ (not /ɛ/) was borrowed as Old High German /e/ (not /ɛ/). It shows up as /ˈsømːɪ/ in my dialect, with /ø/ by L-umlaut of /e/ (as opposed to /œ/ from /ɛ/, e.g. /mœ/ Mehl, /fœ/ Fell), and the /e/ surfaces as such in the diminutive /ˈsemːɐl/.
Also, it looks like the second vowel dropped out on the Romance side (domina > donna, vetula > vecla…) so that the resulting /ml/ underwent West Germanic consonant lengthening… or Italian consonant lengthening perhaps (acqua, repubblica, Gubbio < Iguvium).
“…Die lat. Bezeichnung stammt wie griech. semídālis (σεμίδαλις) ‘feinstes Weizenmehl, Feinmehl’ aus oriental. Sprachen, vgl. syr. səmīdā, assyr. samīdu ‘feines Mehl’.”
A more precise explanation of the shape of Greek σεμίδᾱλις with its apparent suffix -ᾱλις was offered by Frank Starke in Untersuchung zur Stammbildung des keilschrift-luwischen Nomens (1990: 445, note 1601), combining suggestions from Erich Neu and Günter Neumann. In what follows I paraphrase Starke. There is a Cuneiform Luwian hapax noun zammitāti- (attested in the nominative zammitātiš) occurring in a ritual formula or spell spoken as part of a ritual intended to cleanse the ritual patron from sin. Zammitāti- is interpreted as “flour, meal” from context:
“Just as this flour has come from the grindstone, so let the patron of the ritual come out (free) from his sinful(?) offense”
For those unfamiliar with Cuneiform Luwian orthography, single intervocalic -t- originally writes /d/, so the phonetic match of the Greek δ to the first Luwian -t- in zammitātiš is exact.
The Luwian word would be a borrowing of Akkadian samīdu (“a type of groats” in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary), and specifically of the plural variously attested as samīdātu, sammīdātu, sumīdātu, summīdētu, simmīdātu, simīdātu. This plural also appears in Old Hittite texts as the Akkadogram SÍ-IM-MI-TA-A-TI. Luwian ⟨z-⟩ writes an affricate /t͡s/, but this is no obstacle to the proposal of its being a loanword from Akkadian, since the Akkadian phoneme transliterated s was an affricate /t͡s/ as well. The -ᾱλις of Greek is explained by the Luwian ending -āti- (i.e. /-aːdi/), which would have undergone phonetic changes in later Luwian.
For more on these changes, Language Hat readers can consult Yakubovich’s account in his article “The Luwian Language” at Oxford Handbooks Online (H stands for Hieroglyphic (Luwian)):
It is possible, perhaps likely even, that the Akkadian word reached Luwian through Hurrian mediation, which can account for the voicing of the -t- in the ending -āti-. And it is also possible that the Luwian word was in turn transmitted to Greek through the mediation of other Anatolian languages (Lydian?).
The chain of borrowings leading to the German word Semmel makes great sense, but how does it make the final leap to Yiddish? If זעמעלעך are supposed to be little white rolls, then why is this word universally used for cinnamon egg cookies instead?
@dp
The word applied originally to the grade of flour, i.e. “feines Mehl” and only then to what you made from it. So the borrowing could have used the earlier sense. Or maybe there were Zimmelach with yeast that were sweet rolls and unleavened “Passover” Zimmelach ????
Cf Swedish semla which has mutated from a wheat bun (as still in Finnish) to add cardamom and then a filling of almond mass and whipped cream. Traditional for Shrove Tuesday (fettisdagen), it was originally just a bun served with or crumbled into hot milk for richness, and then elaborated.
(Swedes really like cardamom in their baked goods. And semlor are now in season from just after the New Year until Easter or so, with some bakeries jumping the gun on October 1 already. O mores!)
(Saffron is the spice of choice for the Xmas season, though. Yearly imports to Sweden are in excess of 10 tons, out of a world production of less than 500 tons, and in December every checkout counter has a box of little half gram envelopes).
(Denmark diverged after the bun in hot milk stage, with sugar and cinnamon, and a fastelavnsbolle is now a viennoiserie bun with jam, sugar glace and optional whipped cream).
@DP: the same name often signifies quite different dishes in different languages. Compare Russian kotlety “meatballs” and German Kotelett “cutlet”, both loaned from French côtelette, which only have in common that they’re made of meat (and for kotlety, not even that is always necessary, as there are vegetarian options.)
Right, right. “В королевских подвалах остался один бульонный кубик и одна картофельная котлета” 😛
Not to mention vinaigrette which mysteriously turns into a beet and pickle salad… I should have been less surprised.
But in all of these cases of shifted identity, it is so interesting to figure out how and when the shift happened. Not the etymology as such, but the semantic history…
That’s true 🙂
The difference between -tt- and -t- pretty clearly started as an actual length difference, but, as you show, there’s evidence that it turned into a voice difference or even a Spanish-style plosive/approximant difference later, so neither the δ nor the λ is surprising.
German:
grüner Salat “lettuce”
Salat “salad, by default lettuce with vinegar”
Not to mention salada itself, originally salted greens.
manuha ‘in any way’
As distinct from mahuha ‘in an absurd way’.