Re: Celery - the Italian Connection

--- In cybalist@..., "Vassil Karloukovski" wrote:

> --- In cybalist@..., "m_iacomi" <m_iacomi@...> wrote:
>
>>> The irregular correspondence of Russian ts- to French s- had
>>> stuck in my mind since I first encountered the Russian word.
>
>> While Russian "tsokol" might be a late loanword from Italian,
>> I fail to see any conclusive evidence for Romanian & Bulgarian
>> /Telina/ being of Italian origin or influence. The /s/ -> /T/
>> innovation appears to be enough recent in Italian and it didn't
>> affect in any dialect the initial /s/ of the word for "celery".
>> For your hypothesis being true, Italian should have created the
>> form *zelino at some moment after Middle Ages, exported it somehow
>> in the Balkans just to Romanians and Bulgarians and then dropped
>> it with no trace, favouring a standard 'sedano' (from the same
>> Latin root) to replace it. This doesn't look pretty likely. :-)
>> Unfortunately, our (South)Slavic colleagues didn't brought (yet)
>> any light on the likeliness of Greek /s/ > Bulgarian /T/.
>
> the Bulgarian etymological dictionaries have no explanation
> for 'tselina'. That of Stefan Mladenov from 1941 omits it at
> all. The new one of the Bulg. Ac. of Sciences, published
> in separate volumes since 1971, hasn't reached the letter
> 'ts' yet.. :). But two linguists from soc.culture.bulgaria
> said that 'tselina' is regarded as a loan from Greek, subject
> to the II-nd palatilization.

Many thanks, also for saving my time. So there is no phonetic
difficulty for a Greek -> Bulgarian -> Romanian loan path, with
/s/ > /T/ happening in Bulgarian, as guessed.

Regards,
Marius Iacomi