"Sour Cherry" in Polish and Turkish; American Pronounciation of "Salmon"
I stopped by a Mediterranean grocery store the other day, and I noticed something funny while in the juice isle. It appears that the Turkish word for something related to sour cherries (I think the word was visne, except that the s had a "tail" underneath it) is pretty similar to the Polish word for "sour cherry" (singular wiśnia; pl., wiśnie--Polish w is pronounced like English v.)
Is that a borrowing or just a coincidence? I assume that the two words don't actually share a prehistoric root of some sort because Turkish isn't derived from PIE, while Polish is.
Do any other languages have a term for "sour cherry" that's also similar?
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The following is just a silly anecdote:
Last weekend I ate at a restaurant that happened to have some kind of salmon dish as the day's special. The waitress, though, pronounced the first syllable of salmon in such a way that it actually sounded like two syllables to me.
The whole word ended up sounding almost like "se-ya-men"--at least to my ears.
Anyway, the point is that I initially could've sworn that the waitress said sea anemone, not salmon. It took me a few seconds to figure out my mistake. :) I do realize that it didn't help that my brain reversed the consonants a little bit and then added two syllables of its own at the end.
Your average Massachusetts speaker of English will do a "funny" thing to the first syllable of salmon, but I'm not used to the sal- getting quite that long.
Is that a borrowing or just a coincidence? I assume that the two words don't actually share a prehistoric root of some sort because Turkish isn't derived from PIE, while Polish is.
Do any other languages have a term for "sour cherry" that's also similar?
The following is just a silly anecdote:
Last weekend I ate at a restaurant that happened to have some kind of salmon dish as the day's special. The waitress, though, pronounced the first syllable of salmon in such a way that it actually sounded like two syllables to me.
The whole word ended up sounding almost like "se-ya-men"--at least to my ears.
Anyway, the point is that I initially could've sworn that the waitress said sea anemone, not salmon. It took me a few seconds to figure out my mistake. :) I do realize that it didn't help that my brain reversed the consonants a little bit and then added two syllables of its own at the end.
Your average Massachusetts speaker of English will do a "funny" thing to the first syllable of salmon, but I'm not used to the sal- getting quite that long.