From: Francesco Brighenti
Message: 65042
Date: 2009-09-18
> --- On Thu, 9/17/09, Francesco Brighenti <frabrig@...> wrote:Ottoman Turkic (I don't know about earlier Turkic languages) had <frangi> 'a European; syphilis (because this disease came from the West!)'. If the word was the same in Seljuk Turkic, your hypothesis about the transmission of the word for 'Franks' to Persia may be correct. Yet, the term could have likewise been transmitted to Persia via the Syriac language of the Nestorian church, which, as reported in my earlier message, had the form <frang> 'Franks (= European adherents to the Roman church)' as well as <frangiya> 'the land of the Franks'. The Nestorian church was strong in Persia, Central Asia and China till the late Middle Ages.
>
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
>
> 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.