Pastrami

[Douglas G. Wilson]

An item from Dave Wilton's Web discussion site (quoted here with permission
of the poster).

I recall the "pastrami" etymology was discussed here a while back. Maybe
this is of interest to some here.

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Why should Romanian "pastrama" be related to the Romanian verb "pastra"?
Just because they look alike? Remember, there are folk-etymologies in all
languages, not only in English. Perhaps when the word was adopted into
Romanian it was given the form "pastrama" rather than "pastirma" [or
whatever] simply to match the verb "pastra" [diacritical marks omitted
throughout my message]. Note that the apparent cognates have "t[vowel]r"
while Romanian alone has "tr[vowel]" (well, Moldavian has it too, but it's
essentially a dialect of Romanian) ... e.g., Albanian "pasterma", Bulgarian
"pasturma", Hungarian "pasztormany", Modern Greek "pastourmas", Armenian
"basturma", Lebanese Arabic "bastirma", Georgian "basturma", Tatar "bastyrma".

Now of course it's possible that the Romanian word was adopted into Ottoman
Turkish and spread throughout the Ottoman territory after modification.
However, J. A. C. Greppin's paper "The Etymology of _pastrami_" (J. English
Linguistics 21:125-6 [1988]) (upon which I am leaning heavily) makes the
following arguments against the Romanian/Latin origin:

(1) There is no productive "-ma" suffix in Romanian.
(2) Standard Romanian etymological dictionaries see "pastrama" as a Turkish
loanword.
(3) The word is attested in Hungarian much earlier than in Romanian (1626
vs. 1792).

A correspondent finds Turkish "pasdirma" meaning "dried salted beef"
supposedly from the 17th Century, but in an English translation dated 1834.

Note that the Balkan/Ottoman/Middle-East referent is not like our pastrami.
The modern Romanian-English dictionary translates "pastrama" as "pemmican".

Greppin points out that the conventional Turkish etymology of
"basdirma"/"pastirma" probably includes some folk-etymology too, since it
invokes a causative infix "-dir-" where a passive stem is called for
("bas-" = "press") ... makes sense to me, but Turkish etymology is not my
strong suit. Anyway, the word does not appear to be likely pan-Turkic but
rather of Ottoman/Anatolian origin, the language of ultimate origin
uncertain (says Greppin).

It would seem to me that one likely source for the Ottoman word would be
Byzantine Greek; so my casual amateurish thought is that perhaps "pastirma"
reflects in part some cognate of the Classical Greek "pastos" = "salted"
... I think Barnhart presented this or a similar hypothesis.

BTW the earliest (1792) Romanian citation is quoted from the Academy
dictionary as "pastrama care vine din tara turceasca" = "pastrama which
comes from the Turkish land".

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Do OED et al. currently favor origin from the Romanian verb "pastra"?

-- Doug Wilson