Iskemle, not Constantinople

[muckefuck]

I'll have to look again to confirm, but I believe somewhere in Lewis' The Turkish language reform : a catastrophic success (highly recommended!) he mentions something about Turkish iskemle "chair" being taken from "French". I found this curious, since I can't think of any piece of furniture with a French name remotely close to iskemle. Turning it over in my head, however, I was struck by the resemblance to German Schemel "stool"; could both stem from the same source?

In fact they do, but French was not involved. German Schemel is the outcome of a West Germanic borrowing of Latin scamellum, a diminutive of scamnum "bench". Advanced students will recognise in this the source of our own "shambles" (through a much-commented-upon semantic shift of "benches" > "tables for the display of goods, esp. meat" > "slaughtering benches" > "slaughterhouse" > "scene of ruin; mess").

But the Teutons weren't the only ones to find the lure of the word irresistible. Liddell and Scott show that the Latin scamnus was borrowed into Greek as σκάμνος, which they equate in meaning to σκίμπους "small couch; hammock". The regular neuter diminutive would be σκαμνίον, which survives into Modern Greek as σκαμνί "stool". And this--to come full circle--seems to be where the Turks loaned iskemle from. (The phonetics match up well once you allow for a shift of /a/ > /e/--either due to i-umlaut or a need to show the non-uvular quality of the /k/--and dissimilation of /n/ to /l/ after /m/ [cf. informal English "chim(b)ley" for "chimney"].)

The meaning of iskemle, incidentally, seems to be drifting a bit in Modern Turkish. The online dictionary I use defines it as "1. chair (without arms); stool. 2. small coffee table; end table." An image search still brings up mostly chairs (some with arms, the definition be damned), but a more eclectic and experimentally artsy selection than sandalye, the more common term. At least, I assume it's more common based on the fact that this is the title of the entry in the Turkish Wikipedia corresponding to "Chair", and iskemle does not redirect to it.

(And the etymology of sandalye? Wiktionary says "Arapça" [i.e. Arabic], but the only similar term in the Wehr dictionary is sandāl "anvil".)

Comments

[wiped.livejournal.com]

turkish 'sandalye' is most likely borrowed from persian صندلی 'sandali', which is the most common word for chair. it's derived from صندل 'sandal', meaning sandalwood, presumably the most common wood for making chairs at some point.

صندل itself is borrowed from arabic, which had borrowed it from hindi चन्दन / چندن 'chandan'. ('ch' becoming ص in arabic is fairly typical, cf. the persian name for china چین 'chin' becoming صین in arabic). چندن also exists in persian as an archaic word for sandalwood; hindi/urdu also have both 'chandan' and the arabicized 'sandal'.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

That makes much sense, especially given that the usual MSA term is كرسي kursī and this is a term of long standing.

Oh, and thanks for the tip about ṣād representing foreign /ʧ/. I'd long assumed that صین was from Latin Sinae, /s/ > /ṣ/ being found in some borrowings from Greek and Latin.