Re: Rom. tsarca - Lit. s^árka

> O sancta simplicitas! How many times do we have to get through this
> ritual? It's only ignorance that prevents you from having doubts. An
> example: Hung. szerda 'Wednesday' is BEYOND ALL DOUBT a loan from
> Slavic

Its older form szereda ['særædO]. Still extant e.g. in the name place
Csikszereda (transl. i. Rum. Miercurea Ciuc)

> (*serda > Pol. s'roda, Russ. sereda, Cz. str^eda) although it shows no
> metathesis.

BTW, any Slavic modern idiom with the variant <sreda>?

> The fact is, it COULDN'T show it in Hungarian, since
> Hungarian didn't tolerate any initial clustes at the time. Even if the
> Slavic source was /sraka/ or the like, Hungarian HAD TO borrow it with
> secondary metathesis (like in these cases) or (as an alternative
> strategy) with an epenthetic vowel, as in <király> from <kralj>.

Yes, it needed to add an auxiliary vowel in that case, either *szaraka
or *eszraka or *szereke. [OTOH, the dropping of the 2nd vowel
afterwards is usual --rak-- => --rk-- (cf. sarok => sarka, the
inflected form with genitival/possessive semantics) "angle, corner;
heel;..." / farok => farka "his/her/their tail"; farkaS "wolf"]

For the same reason, Stephanos => in Hungarian István ['iSt-va:n];
schola => iskola ['iSkolO]; <insert the Slav. word for "lard, bacon">
=> Hung. szalona ['sOlonO]; stabulum > Stall > istálló
& myriads of such examples.

> Piotr

George