Well, "bishop" was taken directly from
provincial Latin into continental Germanic (no need to assume a complex
trajectory of borrowing), and its early form (*biskop-, with the regular
palatalisation of *-sk- in English and German) is not particularly odd. The
deletion of an unstressed initial vowel (aphesis) often operates in a somewhat
capricious fashion but is common nevertheless and hardly surprising if the
borrowing language has initial stress. True, we'd expect **piskop- rather than
*biskop-. However, if this single irregularity matters little, it is NOT
because we can rutinely ignore such phonological wrinkles in our derivations but
because there is plenty of other evidence, linguistic as well as
extralinguistic, that allows us to relate OE <bisceop>, OHG
<biscof> etc. to Romance *epíscopum very confidently. For one thing, all
these forms have precisely the same meaning and clearly represent an easily
borrowable word of culture. In a way, the etymology of "bishop" is
self-evident.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 4:51 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Croatians and the Carpathians
--- In cybalist@......, "Piotr
Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@......> wrote:
>
The problem is that an etymology based exclusively on
> might-have-beens
and an irregular phonetic resemblance ...
One good example of an
irregular phonetic resemblance is the way that Latin [episcopus] became
Anglo-Saxon [biscep] (English [bishop]). When a word is passed about between
several languages in a short time, that sort of thing
happens.