On 07/07/2004 07:08, Raymond Mercier wrote:
The last part is uncontroversial, I think. The uncertainty is over the first part of the word....
I was only trying to grasp the sense of Gerd's throw-away remark (which I hope he will explain), but I appreciate the difficulties you raise, especially the point about the Greek beta as the phoneme /v/ . That particular difficulty at least doesn't apply to the Ottoman b, if we look for a Turkish -bul < ÏÎÎÎÏ.
Google gives only three hits for "istimboli", one of which (http://linguistlist.org/issues/3/3-929.html) says:
An interesting historical case is Istanbul, whose name comes from the Greek phrase "eis ten poli" ("to the city" -- first "e" is epsilon, and second "e" is eta). That phrase tended to be pronounced "istimboli" and with dissimilation "istamboli". So when the Turks changed the name from Constantinople to Istanbul, they simply changed from a name with an obvious Greek derivation to one with a nonobvious Greek derivation.
This is a possible derivation. If this is Gerd's source, he failed to make the point that "istimboli" was not a Greek name of the city but a colloquial pronunciation of a phrase. And the source of that may be the following old German text, from http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/jon.west/get/hc0144_3.htm:
Constantinopel hayssen die Chrichen Istimboli und die ThÃrcken hayssends Stambol;
And according to http://www.fotoist.8m.com/ad.htm (in Turkish) this information comes the from 14th-15th century German traveller Johan Schildtberger. But I have my suspicions about this information. The Greeks had no problem with initial consonant clusters but the Turks did, so it is much more likely that the Turks added the initial I to a Greek word starting with ST, just as Spanish and French add initial E before such clusters.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
