Bilse [Re: Dacian Dielina]

>Incidentally, Greek 'petro:séli:non' is also the source of
>English 'parsley' and the German word. Russian has 'petrushka'

Romanian "pãtrunjel", Hungarian "petrezselyem" /pe-tre-zhey-em/.

>2. What does 'Bilsenkraut' mean?

Hyoscyamus niger (poisonous: much hyoscyamin & scopolamin).
Eurodicautom says: (Engl.) "black henbane" and "hyoscyamus".

According to my German-German dictionary, Old High German
"bilsa, bilisa" < IE *bhel-. This dictionary does not contain "Bilse",
but I've heard several times that brewers used (still use?) that
word either meaning "worts" or "yeast" -- so... hence the name of
the famous city Plzen (Pilsen) in Bohemia.

More on this here:
http://www.sprachwiss.uni-muenchen.de/nnaw/bilsenkraut.htm

>(Incidentally, is 'tz' the standard solution to writing t çedilla
>in Latin + Latin-1?)

Sort of tradition -> earlier times re. telegrams and teletype
despatches (bec. of lacking fonts with diacriticals).

>It would be interesting to know what the words for 'celery'
>and 'parsley' are in Albanian, Bulgarian and Hungarian.

In Hungarian "zeller". It must be a loanword < Germ. Sellerie.

>Richard.

George