--- In cybalist@... s.com, "Torsten" <tgpedersen@ ...> wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Farang
> http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Farangi
>
> I was wondering if perhaps it's the other way round, that the
> *frank- word is originally Iranian (Yazygian)?
I don't think so. Consider the following:
1) A word for 'Franks/Germans' is attested in Byzantine Greek as Frankoi (pron. <frangoi>, given that the "g" pronunciation of [k] is a standard phenomenon in Greek in the context n-k). In early Byzantine sources (from the 6th to 11th centuries), the use of this ethnic was extended, in conformity with the principles of late antique ethnology, to the whole of the former Germanoi, namely, to the western Christian peoples then living north of the Alps (roughly, the inhabitants of today's Germany, Switzerland, France, and Benelux).
2) The meaning of the Byzantine Greek ethnonym Frankoi changed by the end of the 11th century, at which time it came to designate the Normans of South Italy (whose previous homeland had been, after all, Normandy in what the Byzantines knew as 'Frankia'). This particular grouping of Frankoi penetrated Byzantine military service en masse in the course of the 11th century, when Norman mercenaries assumed a leading role in the Byzantine army.
3) After the beginning of the Crusades, the generic term Latinoi was increasingly employed by the Byzantines to denote people of Western European origin, yet the term Frankoi continued to be used by them to denote those groups of Crusaders who came from 'Frankia' and/or the Norman Kingdom of South Italy (who, among all Western European peoples, played a major role during the early Crusades). The term Frankoi now chiefly expressed the religious and cultural identity of such 'Franks', all of whom were Latin-rite Christians who accepted the spiritual jurisdiction of the pope.
3) The Frankoi (pron. <frangoi>) of the Byzantines then became the Faranji (var. Ifranji) of the Arabs of the Levant (Syria, Palestine and Egypt), who first confronted them during the early Crusades. Medieval borrowings into Arabic from languages with [g] often show up as Arabic "j". Moreoever, Arabic has no initial consonant clusters, hence the variation <faranj>/<ifranj> . In Syriac, the Aramaic language used in some Middle Eastern churches, the term was borrowed as Frang (meaning 'a European; Latin language or church'). The source of the loan -- Byzantine Greek <frangoi> -- seems clear enough.
4) Persian Farangi/Firingi 'a European' (> Hindi/Urdu Feringi 'Id.') is, thus, a loan from Arabic. The Arabs of the Levant came in contact with the Crusaders directly and they had to name those intruders, while the Persians weren't in any closer contact with Western Europeans than the Arabs were.
***R
Or maybe not, depending on when Levantine Arabic acquired /z^, dz^/ for early Arabic /g/, which now only exists in Egypt AFAIK
If Levantine Arabic had "jim" or "zhim" for "gim" before the Crusades, I'd say the term went straight from Greek to Iranian or via Turkish