bishop

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 9:44 PM

> Why do you claim, Ed, that eis te:n polin > istambul involves rules jumping
> languages?   Wasn't the contemporary Greek pronunciation /i:sta:mbulin/?  It
> would simply be taken over as a meaningless phonetic string.

> Peter

[Ed]

I never said that: I said Konstantinópolis > Istambul was the consequence of
jumping languages, and that 'eis te:n polin' was a 19th century invention
(reconstruction, without any attestation) by linguists that thought that when a
word is loaned by another, very different, language, the same rules as in
language evolution should apply.

In Byzantine (and New) Greek 'eis te:n pólin' would have been (would be)
pronounced 'istimbóli(n)', with two i's and o instead of u. The Turkish
accent is on 'a' (Istámbul > Ger. Stambul), which shows that the I is
prothetic, while the derivation from 'eis te:n pólin' would have had the
accent on the 'u' (Istambúl). Even less than half a century ago, many
Classicists studying ancient Greek hardly ever bothered about the notoriously
capricious (to westerners, that is) Greek accent. To the Turks, all the
syllables of Konstantinopolis apparently formed a meaningless string, as I
noted before.

> Ed's original follows:

> 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