A quick flick through the Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary gives this:
piṭa
piṭa m. or n.
a basket, box L
a roof L
a sort of cupboard or granary made of bamboos or canes W
On the whole I'm reluctant to call that a 'root' for Pitta bread; spurious links and similarities are the daily diet of an etymologist, and I'd need evidence of a geographical distribution of the word, or plausible congeners in the Indo-panetic language family, leading from India to the Eastern Mediterranean.
Anyone out there know enough Egyptian or Coptic to make a stab at P'tah before we go any further? Or Babylonian, for that matter: an agricultural or culinary word occurring in Arameic might well have been first uttered in the fertile crescent when cereal cultivation began. Some words are old.
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Date: 2005-06-16 01:54 am (UTC)A quick flick through the Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary gives this:
piṭa
On the whole I'm reluctant to call that a 'root' for Pitta bread; spurious links and similarities are the daily diet of an etymologist, and I'd need evidence of a geographical distribution of the word, or plausible congeners in the Indo-panetic language family, leading from India to the Eastern Mediterranean.
Anyone out there know enough Egyptian or Coptic to make a stab at P'tah before we go any further? Or Babylonian, for that matter: an agricultural or culinary word occurring in Arameic might well have been first uttered in the fertile crescent when cereal cultivation began. Some words are old.