Was heading back to Pitesti yesterday and as I went down into the metro at Unirii I stopped at the covrigarie (pretzel stand) to get a pastry. A covrigarie usually sells pretzels (covrigi--the big doughy kind, not like chips) but generally you can get donuts or other things like that.
Here's the fun part: this particular covrigarie is called Simit's. Now it just so happens that I recently heard a man with a bunch of pretzels on his head in Turkey yelling simit! simit! simit! And it was on the side of the cart of another man selling them and other similar things.
And! Not only is this Turkish word hanging out on a sign in Romania, but it's had English grammar applied to it, not Romanian. It's Simit's, not simitului or simituri, depending on whether you're assuming the 's was actually meant as possessive or just supposed to have been plural.
And this is only the beginning of the overlap. There won't be too much, it won't be mutually intelligible, but there's a good list of cognates going. With my very very minimal knowledge of Turkish, I would like to humbly add to that list:
cearsaf--carsaf* (sheet)
musafir--misafir (guest)
dulap--dolap (wardrope)
habar--haber (news in Turkish, but in Romanian used more like idea/knowledge)
And I'm sure a whole ton of others. Yep, all kinds of fun :)
*please note that I'm writing both Romanian and Turkish words without the proper letters--feel free to pretend there's a chka on the bottom of more than one s and c.
No comments:
Post a Comment