Palatschinke(n)

[Peter A. McGraw]

--On Tuesday, February 12, 2002 10:49 PM -0500 Mark A Mandel
<mam at THEWORLD.COM> wrote:

> On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Peter A. McGraw wrote:
>
> #I don't know whether there has been an article devoted specifically to
> #Palatschinken, but the dictionary evidence leaves it unclear whether folk
> #etymology was involved in the borrowing of Hungarian palacsinta into
> German #as Palatschinke.  Peter Richardson and I once exchanged
> recollections of #the first time we saw "Palatschinken" on an Austrian
> menu.  Both our first #thoughts had been that it must be some kind of ham
> (Schinken), and I'm sure #many other Americans have made the same
> spontaneous folk etymology. *********
>
> Americans, yes; but would any native speaker of German do so? That's the
> important question here.
>

Exactly.  And that's the question that was addressed in the rest of the
message, which followed the part excerpted above.  I guess my little
prefatory digression distracted from the main point of the message, which
was that it's difficult to determine whether or not Germans are making a
mental connection between Schinken and Palatschinken. Viz.:

"Kluge (Etymologisches Woerterbuch, 20. Auflage), after tracing the
Hungarian form from Latin placenta via Rumanian placinta (diacritics over
both a's), notes that Ruthenian placynta (hacek over the c) and Austrian
Palatschinke both derive from the Hungarian form and says the ending of the
German word may derive from the Slavic diminutive -inka.  He doesn't
mention that the Czech form is palacinka (hacek over the c).  Presumably
the folk etymology could have occurred in Czech, which then became the
source of the German borrowing.

"The fact that to my knowledge Palatschinken is always used in the plural
on restaurant menus hints at a possible folk etymological association with
Schinken.  On the other hand, it's die Palatschinke but der Schinken, which
would tend to work against a confusion between the two."

One thing I forgot was to agree with Mark's earlier observation that the
cluster tsch [tS] is rare in stem-initial position in German (there are all
of 23 words beginning with tsch- in the whole 9-volume Duden--most are
quite specialized loan words, six are Austrian colloquialisms, and one of
the loans, tschuess, ('bye!') is common in the colloquial standard).  So
the pattern [Vt+'SV] is much more familiar than [V+'tSV]--another factor
that would favor folk etymology here but still doesn't prove it.

Peter Mc.


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                               Peter A. McGraw
                   Linfield College   *   McMinnville, OR
                            pmcgraw at linfield.edu