Re: Dacian Dielina

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 15403
Date: 2002-09-12

--- In cybalist@..., alexmoeller@... wrote:
> The dacian word "dielina" put in discution by Piotr
> PIE *dhel > dacian dielina
> I tought about Dierna and Tierna where I supposed the greeks ,
> romans they have had not "tz". And now I look at the romanian
> word
> tzelina which means once a plant and once a kind of earth
> tzelina= latin Apium Graveolens asupposed to be loaned from
> neo-greek selinon
> tzelina= land which was never cultived, or which was let for
> long time uncultived, supposed to be a loan from bulgarian or
> serbian ( again, these south slavic) "celina"
> I look at terra, tzara, tzelina, tzãrâna all having as commont
> point "land"
> the verbs destzeleni= to make a land a cultivable land and
> întzeleni= a land which became uncultivable are just
> derivation from second sense of tzelina.
>
> But for the plant, it looks for me to be the same dielina as
> in dacian. Opinios?

1. séli:non is also Classical Greek, meaning 'parsley' (once A.
petroselinum, but renamed Petroselinum sativum). It is the source
of the word for 'celery' (A. graveolens) in English, French, German
and Russian at least - probably the source in most of Europe.

Incidentally, Greek 'petro:séli:non' is also the source of
English 'parsley' and the German word. Russian has 'petrushka'
meaning 'parsley', which looks like another derivative of the Greek
word.

2. 'dielina' is glossed as 'Bilsenkraut' in some sources. What
does 'Bilsenkraut' mean? I assume if does not mean 'celery'. Which
PIE 'dHel' root is it supposed to derive from?

3. The words from 'séli:non' has undergone many irregular changes.
English 'celery' comes from French 'céleri' (sc- in early spellings),
which in turn comes from Lombard 'selleri'. Other Italian forms kept
the 'n'. Russian has 'sel'derei', with an extraneous /d/.

Incidentally, what's the origin of the Italian word 'sedano',
meaning 'celery'?

4. Rom. tzelina < Gk. selinon requires an irregular derivation tz <
s. (Incidentally, is 'tz' the standard solution to writing t çedilla
in Latin + Latin-1?) A shift of gender in a word like this has many
precedents within Romance.

5. Dacian 'dielina' would, I believe, have given *(d)zelina in
Romanian. So in this case, the derivation would require irregular
devoicing and a change in meaning.

6. A Thracian form *tielin- would be ideal. We could even derive the
Greek séli:non from it! Unfortunately, 'ie' does not seem to occur
in Thracian. Moreover, it would not tie in with an IE root *dHel,
nor would a Thracian form *telin-, which could still explain the
Romanian, if only it existed. It doesn't, so Thracian provides no
explanation at all.

On the limited evidence I have, derivation from Greek séli:non seems
the more probable origin.

It would be interesting to know what the words for 'celery'
and 'parsley' are in Albanian, Bulgarian and Hungarian. It's
conceivable that the unetymological spelling with 'c' in
French 'céleri' has modified another language's pronunciation, and
that this change has been passed on to Romanian.

Richard.