bishop

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2001 10:23 AM

> There was discussion a while ago of the word "bishop", coming from Greek
> episkopos.    I think it was Piotr who said the loss of the initial vowel
> was not an issue, but the voicing of the "p" was uncommon.  (Pardon me if
> I've mis-remembered who it was!)

> It occurred to me that there is another example in the Italian bottega,
> Spanish (whence English) bodega, meaning shop or inn, from the Greek
> apotheke.

> Peter

[Ed]
A few comments:

1. These particular cases of voicing (of p) are not so frequent, but they
typically occur a) in languages like Spanish and Portuguese (and to a much
lesser degree: Italian, but still: soddisfare < satisfacere) that show a marked
tendency to voicing, and b) in Greek words that virtually nobody understood (I
mean their literal meaning in the original Greek), but that were very
intensively used by the whole population, thus making them very common words in
the receiving language. Those are potent factors to make the words conform to
phonetic practices (i.e. make them sound indigenous).

2. In some languages (Italian, French) there was an additional shift b > v in
the bishop-words (Vescovo, Evêque), while in Italian even the p of skopos was
voiced (and then became a fricative v). It seems to me that the voicing of the
p's only occurred if they were intervocalic (like the t-d voicing in American
English) since I don't know any cases of voicing of initial p in formerly Greek
words.

3. Bodega and bottega appear as boutique in French. Spanish also has botica,
closer to the original meaning of apotheke. I got the impression that a lot of
mutual copying has gone on, at different points in time.

3. In the same religious context, we have 'iglesia' , from Greek 'ekklesía',
also with voicing, but with a shift of accent. In Portuguese even 'igreja',
with additional voicing of the s(i) to zh.

4. We also have cattus > gat(t)o, and in a very different context, but under
the same constraints I believe, Konstantinopolis > Istambul, a far too complex
name for the invading Turks, who didn't understand a word of Greek. They just
kept the two syllables that caught most attention STAN-POL, plus voicing and
adding an epenthetic vowel to make it pronouncible to them. (Like 'e-special'
in Spanish). I wonder if they ever realized its true meaning (Christian emperor
Constantine's city), because otherwise they would probably have changed it.
Note that the reconstruction as a derivation from 'eis te:n polin' is a 19th c.
linguist's fable based on the mistaken idea that the same rules apply when a
word jumps between two unrelated (or perceived to be so) languages, as during
the historical evolution of the same language.

Ed. selleslagh