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Linguistic Coincidences (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, albeit indirectly - Italian borrowed it from Venetian sciao /stʃao/, that underwent the following sound changes:

Latin /kl/ ⟨CL⟩ → */kj/ → Venetian /tʃ/. Regular.
Latin /wu/ ⟨VV⟩ → Venetian /o/. Sometimes it fortifies to /vo/ instead, but there are other words where this happens (see e.g. pavonem "peacock" → paon)

Then Italian dropped the /s/ in the borrowing because, while /stʃ/ is a legal cluster in Venetian, it isn't in Italian.

The semantic shift might look weird, but it pops up also in Austro-Bavarian and German "servus!" (hello) and Polish "serwus" (hello). Wiktionary mentions that the German greeting is from Mediaeval "seruus humillimus, domine spectabilis"; or "[I am a] humble servant, o notable lord", odds are that Venetian "sciao" is the same.

Note that the purely native Italian cognate would be schiavo /skjavo/ "slave".

EDIT: Dieguito answered as I wrote this answer, but I'm keeping it for further info.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I like yours better, your answer is far more extensive with explanation of the whole word and comparison with other languages.

About the "sc" pattern [st͡ʃ]: it is very peculiar of the Venetian dialect but is not present in standard Italian: another example would be "mas'cio” (meaning "pig" or "male") from Latin "masculus" > *masclus > maschio (as in Italiano) > mas'cio.