Talk:đumbir

Etymology

@Palaestrator verborum, where did you get the etymology from? Deriving it via Hungarian gyömbér seems more likely to me. Crom daba (talk) 23:32, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

@Crom daba: From Petar Skok’s dictionary, 1971 edition. Actually he writes:

“đinđiber m = zinziber (Sabljar) »mirodija, kao papar«. Od ar. > tur. zenğebil, gr. ζιγγιβερις < pali singivera, sanskr. srngavēra »rogat«. Istog je značenja dumber (Belostenec) = dùmbîr, odatle na -ovac đumbirovac »lijek u kojem ima dumbira«. Taj je oblik iz madž. gyömbér. S prvim se slaže dunđiber, ali znači »ribizi, ribes rubnim«. U Jukićevoj narodnoj pjesmi dindefil je nekakva trava = dzendzefil (Srbija).”

He somehow avoids a conclusion about the Hungarian. “Taj je oblik iz madž. gyömbér” is a gingerly wording, it can be taken as “influenced by Hungarian”. Question is, how has the Hungarian form developed? I do not know anything about Hungarian phonology. But đumbir could have developed by contraction from dunđiber, the middle syllable being short and without tone letting the ⟨-đi-⟩ fall out, the /n/ assimilating to the /b/. Clearly the word has been borrowed from Ottoman as well, and they easily have flowed into each other, if we think about illiterate people just speaking after what they hear. And why can Hungarian borrow directly from Latin but not Serbo-Croatian? The Hungarian can as well be from Ottoman, the long /eː/ points to exactly that. However I cannot completely nix the notion that it is from Hungarian. Still it is insecure what we should write 😟:

1. Borrowed from Ottoman

2. Borrowed from Hungarian

3. Borrowed from both Ottoman and Hungarian

4. Borrowed from Latin, Ottoman and Turkish

But asking another thing could help: Since when do Serbia and Croatia know ginger? Because they get to know the Ottomans some centuries later than the Hungarians. In the case that then it came from Hungarian, the Hungarian word cannot be from Ottoman of course. Maybe one can attest the word as gloss in some early medical books or something. Palaestrator verborum (loquier) 00:10, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

Gernot Katzer who knows well the facts about spices writes too: “In einigen Sprachen des südöstlichen Mitteleuropa findet man einen stimmhaften Palatal DJ im Anlaut: Serbokroatisch und Makedonisch đumbir [ђумбир, ѓумбир], slowakisch ďumbier und ungarisch gyömbér. Wahrscheinlich besteht ein Zusammenhang, aber ich weiß nicht, welcher.” But Bulgarian has джинджифил (džindžifil) with the self-same sound in the beginning, and it is pretty obviously from Ottoman. And in Macedonian and Serbocroatian a Hungarian word has displaced the direct Ottoman loan? I have a completely new thought: Why isn’t the Hungarian form from Serbo-Croatian? So the word came from the East via the Ottomans, changed as described in Serbo-Croatian/Torlakian/Macedonian (question is also, which has it from which? Could be that Serbian has it from Macedonian or Torlakian, but these are poorly attested in the relevant times), then it got into Hungarian and Slowakian. Now that’s a new thought, I guess. Palaestrator verborum (loquier) 00:26, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

I'd parse "iz madž. gyömbér" as the form unequivocally deriving from Hungarian.

As for the idea of Hungarian deriving from SH, that occurred to me as well, but the problem is that đ usually represents front-vocallic g in Turkisms, but this word only has a z and a j (which would be adapted as dž).

At the same time, more northerly languages (Dutch gember, Romanian ghimber) share the velar like initial, haplology and rhotacizm with Serbian and these traits seem more characteristic of medieval Latin than SH-Ottoman contacts. Detail that's bothering me though, is the rounding of the vowel, perhaps this is some Hungarian sound law? @Panda10 what do the Hungarian sources say? Crom daba (talk) 01:19, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

According to the Hungarian source it's borrowed from Latin which is from Ancient Greek. --Panda10 (talk) 18:40, 8 November 2017 (UTC)