Linguistic bits

• monshu is cruising through the Brunetti mysteries of Donna Leon and every now and then he'll ask me about a bit of non-English. Most recently, it was a dish called turbanti di soglie, which Google Translate will tell you is "turbans of thresholds" but soglia is apparently a historically valid equivalent of sogliola, the standard contemporary term for "sole" (the fish).
  
  He wondered if this might be a Venetian term, but if it is, it's a regionalism rather than a dialect world, if that makes any sense. That is, the usual word for "sole" in the traditional dialect of Venice is apparently soja, but it may be the case that soglia has persisted in the variety of Standard Italian spoken there either because it's closer to the dialect word or because the Venetians disregarded the memo that the rest of Italy was switching to sogliola.
• In doing the research on this, I stumbled across this:
  
  
  Yes, you got that right: White guys in dreads performing reggae music in Venetian dialect. La vita la xe bea!
• I mentioned Aabenraa in my post about Frygtelig lykkelig, but I wasn't able to mention the convoluted history of its name. IN short (for those who can't read German), the name was originally Opnøraa "open breakwater stream" but Low Saxon merchants (who dominated the town during the days of the Hanse) misheard this as Apenrade ("open clearing"), which Danish-speakers later misinterpreted as Aabenrad "open row [of houses]". So here we have a Danish folk etymology of a German folk etymology of an originally Danish name.
  
  But the fun doesn't end there. In contemporary Danish orthography, å replaces aa. But the Nordic convention is for å to come at the end of the alphabet, whereas Aabenraa tops most alphabetical lists. The locals protested and eventually the traditional spelling was allowed as a local variant. Of course, going with the pronunciation current in the local South Jutish dialect (Affenrå) would've avoided the whole issue.