Peter Kirk a Ãcrit :
On 07/07/2004 07:08, Raymond Mercier wrote:
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.
French (for the last 5 centuries) no longer adds an initial E in front of ST (see : stop, start, sport (*), stage, stature, station, etc.), historically (in Old French) this was true (estable [stable], estamper [to stamp], estat [state, station], esterlin [sterling], estrange [stange, stranger]). Old French is before the fall of Constatinople and the end of the Hundred Year war (both in 1453 as all French-speaking schoolchildren learn).
Spanish still does (or a least did recently) see recent loanwords : esquà (ski) or esprint (sprint).
P. A.
(*) English word derived from an Old French word "desport / deport " (entertainment), see deporte in Spanish and desporto/desporte in Portuguese (but esporte in Brazil).
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