Re: CHAT Stambul (was: A new version of Genesis)

On Jun 14, 2004, at 8:17 AM, Nik Taylor wrote:
> Ray Brown wrote:
>> On Sunday, June 13, 2004, at 06:26 , John Cowan wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> Still later, s- became perfectly fine: there is no synchronic
>>> evidence for
>>> prefixing in French today -- as opposed to Spanish and Turkish,
>>> where it
>>> is
>>> very much alive (though it's i- in Turkish, as in I-stanbul <
>>> Stambul <
>>> [Kon]stantinopoul[os]).
>>
>> Non, no - 'Stambul' is from northern Greek [stm='bul] = standard
>> modern
>> Greek [stim'boli]/stin poli/ = in the City/to the City.
>> The Byzantine Greeks, I believe, habitually referred to the capital
>> simply
>> as "the City".
>
> "In the City" seems a rather odd origin for the name of a city.  The
> Konstaninopoulos theory seems better to me for that reason.

I dunno, seems reasonable to me... I can see it happening in some
hypothetical Future English to the parts of Long Island (in NY) which
aren't part of New York City.  One day that area might end up being
called some derivative of 'Outontheisland', /&4@'Dal@n/ for instance.


-Stephen (Steg)
  "your whistling sounds like scary alien bees!"
      ~ why not to attempt tuvan throat singing in public

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