bishop

[petegray]

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'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