Re: historical pronunciation of sicilia

John Atkinson wrote:
"Trond Engen" <trondnet@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
phoglund@xxxxxx skreiv:
On Nov 7, 10:50 pm, Marc <marc.ad...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The Arabic word for Sicily is Siqi:liyya, and I was wondering, during what century did the c start being pronounced [tS] (or whatever it was pronounced after it was no longer [k])?

Sicilia was named after the Siculi, an Italic people speaking a
language related to Latin. Greeks colonized Sicilia and called it Sikylia, where y is the Greek letter ypsilon. Ypsilon was pronounced as an "oo" sound to start with, but became more like a German ü, and then more like i, in Greek. The name Sikylia was adopted into Latin as Sicilia, and then the -c- became [tS] along the rest of the soft c:s when Latin turned into Italian.

If the Arabic word is Siqi:liyya, I reckon it was borrowed from Greek.
The Maltese form is Sqallija, where the q is a glottal stop ['].

Its Old Norse name was Sikiley, presumably showing that it was borrowed from (East Mediterranean) Greek rather than (West Mediterranean) Romance.

In those days, the local language was probably closer to Sardinian than to Western Romance, and thus presumably wouldn't have undergone the change [k] >[tS]. (It still hasn't happened in the Logudorese and Nuorese varieties of Sardinian.) So it's not necessary that the Arabs and vikings got their versions from Greek.

In fact sicilian does have ki -> tSi. It even has some cases of ku -> ky -> tSy, though this one occurs later. *Possibly*, if the name had a -u-, the route may have been sikulia -> sikylia (at which point the other folks borrowed it as sikilia) -> sitSylia -> sitSilia.

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