Talk:pătrunjel

A more correct Dictionary entry now

Thanks, the current version of the Wiktionary entry is now more sensible than it was before I made changes to it, changes which were later arbitrated fairly by Chuck Entz. It didn't make sense for this word to be in the category "Slavic loan words" when there is nothing near a consensus that it is a Slavic loanword, or for it to be in the category "Hungarian loan words" when that is not even a viable theory. And it can't be both: which one is it? And who says these days it is either of those? No linguist has come forth to demonstrate that pătrunjel (which by the way has many variants in Romanian, which I want to include in the article soon, all variants are taken from a Romanian dictionary now available online), no linguist has come forth to demonstrate that pătrunjel cannot phonologically derive from Latin petroselinum. Nor have I seen an authoritative source that says "because the Romanian word for stone/rock is piatră, therefore pătrunjel presents an incompatibility". I don't believe it does. There are so many cases in linguistics where there are interfering reasons why one word changed differently from a kindred word, as I'm sure our more informed editors here know: interference from adjacent sounds, the sound context/phonological context, morphological context, interference from folk associations with other words, interference from adjacent languages (Slavic languages, or Dacian language, or a branch of Albanian etc.). A Slavic intermediary cannot as yet be ruled out as far as I currently know, nor can it be demonstrated to be the most likely scenario. While the derivation from the Hungarian form (which the Hungarians took from Medieval Latin after they converted to Catholicism and were thus introduced to Latin, and because it is a late literary borrowing, that is why the Hungarian form is as close to Latin as it is, it was not passed down from popular Latin centuries earlier and did not undergo any changes of that sort that inherited Latin words go through), I have seen no linguist/philologist since Cioranescu in 1966 posit that the Romanian word could derive from the Hungarian. And Cioranescu posits two possibilities in his book: from Czech or from Hungarian. So he is not consistent or firm, and has not demonstrated the phonological evolution in his book at all, nor does he give anything close to a sense that he had studied the evidence well enough. The Hungarian form does not look like it could be the source of the Romanian form. Look at it. The Czech form has more potential. But as long as I see no authoritative phonological analysis that shows the word cannot be derived from Latin, as long as I see all the new dictionaries not deriving it from a Slavic language or from Hungarian, then I will continue to rightly edit out any fantasies that the word is "probably" or "more likely" from Slavic or Hungarian. No, given what is known and what is not known, I honestly think it is most likely from Latin, as most Romanian words are, being a Romance language derived from Latin. 2600:1700:9BD0:2CF0:2039:208B:84AA:5C48 11:00, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

The Czech form was very likely a borrowing from a dialect of Romanian, spoken by the Moravian Romanians who were once quite numerous there. There are known cases where Czech has loanwords from those past Romanians. Isn't it curious that whenever a Slavic word is cited as a possible source for this Romanian word, they cite the Czech word? Why suppose that a Czech word entered Romanian, when few did? Why are no Serbian or Bulgarian words cited? Cioranescu and the others only cite a Czech word. 2600:1700:9BD0:2CF0:2039:208B:84AA:5C48 11:15, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

So does any source say that this Romanian word is both a loanword from Slavic and Hungarian? So that scenario is that the word went from Medieval Latin, to Hungarian, to Czech, to Romanian? Is anybody saying that? I'm sure the answer is no. The Czech word also does not look like it can derive from the Hungarian form. So it's not both a Hungarian and a Slavic loanword, and no one has demonstrated anything that it is from one of those. Cioranescu just cites a Czech word and a Hungarian word without showing how the Romanian word could have evolved from either one (and the Czech word and the Hungarian are quite different from each other, as I indicated above), he doesn't show the phonological evolution to support his hypothesis. He has not done the work. He has not shown he is even a linguist who would know how to do that. 2600:1700:9BD0:2CF0:CC0B:A68F:CBFA:C7CC 11:43, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

So I want to see authoritative sources cited correctly instead of taking sides on just one hypothesis out of several. And Cioranescu's dictionary entry speculation from 1966 doesn't even qualify as a hypothesis, unless he took his speculation from someone's earlier more detailed (but surely shoddy and out-dated also) work; in fact Cioranescu seems to cite in his entry that he did take the speculation from some previous speculators (whose last names don't look Romanian, so it appears that the speculation derives from works written in another language, a Slavic language or Hungarian). Also I would like to see whether any other Romanian words for any other plants have been confirmed to derive from Czech. If not, how can I take a Czech derivation for the Romanian word for parsley seriously? I also want to review which if any (I don't remember now) Romanian words for plants derive from Hungarian. And are those alternate names/words, or not. So there are a number of things to look into regarding the etymology of this word. Those who also are interested in ethnobotany and plant words are free to join. 2600:1700:9BD0:2CF0:347A:4F73:E64B:51E0 03:16, 10 March 2019 (UTC)