As a fresh http://www.alphadictionary.com user i just want to say hi to everyone else who uses this site :>

The interesting name of a site – http://www.alphadictionary.com how you managed to get such beautiful name of the domain? Very interesting site though there is no couple of sections. But section this here very much even by the way.

I  wandered on a network 7 hours, have not left yet your forum! I think, I here shall stay for a long time!

Thanks for the info, http://www.alphadictionary.com!

I put the relevant Davidson excerpt up as a comment on the Goodword blog a little while ago, but it’s also in the longer post on our back-and-forth that’s at the top of Joe Pastry right now. I of course have no business entering into a debate on these terms. It’d be nice if Davidson had put HIS sources down in his piece on the subject, but alas he didn’t. Forgive me for being so argumentative on the subject, I’m married to a language PhD, so I’m used to at least trying to hold my end up!

Thanks again for your time and interest Robert. Very nice to meet someone of your obvious erudition and expertise. I contrasts vividly with my own lack thereof.

Joe,

Sorry about the comment at my blog. I have to approve each comment and for every well-intended one I get 10 pieces of spam.

David apparently got his information from the Wikipedia, filled as it is with what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness”, truth by ballot (http://www.alphadictionary.com/blog/?p=31). The last line of its etymology is:

“An alternative etymology traces the word to a cognate for pine pitch, which form flat layers that may resemble pita bread, and may thereby share an origin with pizza (Italian, “pie”).

I don’t see the point about tar forming flat layers. So does water and wine in that sense of “flat”. Who would think of an analogy between tar and bread?

We are, of course, speculating. We have no hard evidence, so we have to use the best available linguistic evidence and make an educated guess. Most Romance language etymologists think the Lombard origin is the best of those.

As for erudition and expertise–you should(n’t) taste my pastries.

“DL”

“The name has a common origin with pizza. In the early centuries of our era, the traditional Greek word for a thin flat bread or cake, plakous, had become the name of a thicker cake. The new word that came into use for flat bread was pitta, literally pitch, doubtless because pine pitch naturally forms flat layers which many languages compare to cakes or breads (English, cakes of pitch; French, pains de poix). The word spread to S. Italy as the name of a thin bread. In N. Italian dialects pitta became pizza, now known primarily as the bearer of savoury toppings but essentially still a flat bread. Ironically, in Greece the word pitta eventually followed exactly in the footsteps of the word plakous, which it had replaced, becoming the name of a thick cake.”

I don’t know what the real scholarship is here, but it seems unlikely to me that he’d refer to all these different terms for flatbreads and thick cakes if he wasn’t drawing on some sort of scholarly source.

Not at all a linguist,

- Joe