Re: Celadon

On Sep 5, 2008, at 9:17 AM, Eldin Raigmore wrote:

> (Should this have a tag on it? What tag?)
> Etymology:
> Where did the word "Celadon" come from?
> If it came into English from French or Arabic or Sanskrit,
> how did it get into French or Arabic or Sanskrit (as the case may be)?
AHD says (and other dictionaries listed at etymonline.com say similar
things):

French, after Céladon, a character in L'Astrée, a romance by Honoré
d'Urfé (1568–1625), French writer, after Celadôn, a character in
Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Wikipedia says:

The term "celadon" for the pottery's pale jade-green glaze was first
applied by European connoisseurs of the wares. One theory is that the
name first appeared in France in the 17th century and is named after
the shepherd Celadon in Honoré d'Urfé's French pastoral romance,
L'Astrée (1627), who wore pale green ribbons. (D'Urfe, in turn,
borrowed his character from Ovid's Metamorphoses.) Another is that
the term is a corruption of the name of Saladin (Salah ad-Din), the
Ayyubid Sultan, who in 1171 sent forty pieces of the ceramic to Nur
ad-Din, Sultan of Syria.[2] Yet another is the word derives from the
Sanskrit sila and dhara, which mean "stone" and "green" respectively.



I can't find the etymology of Latin Celadôn/Greek Keladôn.