Talk:blat

"blat" must be the cognate of blé - is the Latin form "blatus" or "blatum"? And why did those languages reject triticum, while Spanish and Portuguese kept it? -PierreAbbat 04:54, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Okay, so it's Frankish. So why does Catalan use this word? PierreAbbat 04:56, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

The etymology of Catalan blat and French blé is uncertain. There are two theories: (1) from Gaulish mlato (Latin molitus); or (2) from Frankish blâd (fruit of the earth; cf. Russian плод). In any case, they are not from Latin. —Stephen 06:29, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

RFV discussion: December 2020

This entry has survived Wiktionary's verification process (permalink).

Please do not re-nominate for verification without comprehensive reasons for doing so.

---

blat

Etymology 2. Currently has no citations. Tharthan (talk) 21:25, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

GBS for e.g. "need blat" seems to yield plausible hits. Mihia (talk) 23:40, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

I can find LOTS of citations, but they all italicize the word. I read that as code-switching. I don't think it's English. Kiwima (talk) 01:02, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

That’s sad if it isn’t considered English. I am sure a lot slavaboos on the internet consider it English, and so have I, though I be a Slavophile of course. Also already used in glosses for foreign languages. This is a possible translation for Vitamin B / فيتامين و / بند «پ» / معارف‎ etc. It’s not code-switching, it’s description of something culturally specific, and highlighting a word also because of its register, a word only dropped with closed doors. Fay Freak (talk) 02:11, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Fine. I don't mind. If you feel strongly, just format up three good citations. Kiwima (talk) 02:29, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Done, btw what do people think about “code-switching” in book titles? Because Ms. Ledeneva’s first book has the funny title “Russia's Economy of Favours. Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange”, italics on the cover but not on the publisher page. The ”code-switching” argument is hard to construct for book titles as they need to appeal to monolinguals. I took to the book description too though for cite, not written by the author but about her. Fay Freak (talk) 03:11, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

I managed to locate and add three cites that don't use italics to the entry. :) I also added, to the citations page, one cite that uses an English rather than a Russian plural, and doesn't use italics in that instance, although Sauka does use italics elsewhere in the book; I also added a cite that uses both the singular and the plural repeatedly but seems to think it means "bribe"(?). (To the general question/topic, book titles certainly can and do use foreign words, especially if in italics.) - -sche (discuss) 08:52, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Btw: Karl-Olov Arnstberg, Thomas Borén, Everyday Economy in Russia, Poland and Latvia (2003), page 39, mentions that the word and concept exists in Latvian as Latvian blats, but "here I use the original Russian form because it has already been established in the anthropological literature and as a social phenomenon blat is fundamentally the same as blats." - -sche (discuss) 08:52, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Dude, it wasn’t italicized in the texts I quoted either. So what is this edit of @Kiwima? What’s with that italicization argument if those who bring it forward see italicized what has been unitalicized? Fay Freak (talk) 14:27, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Hmm! Fascinating: on Google Books, I see two copies of the text of the first Alena V. Ledeneva cite, one of the book itself [1], which our entry reads (in terms of the title, author, etc of the book we're citing) as if we are citing, in which the term is italicized, though it gives its ISBN as 0-521-627-437 hardback or 0521-627-435 paperback, bracketing the 436 you cited; and another [2] embedded in 2001, Helen F. Sullivan, Robert Harold Burger, Russia and Eastern Europe: A Bibliographic Guide, page 260, which does not italicize. (I'm also now noticing that between us we have three citations of Ledeneva; I moved the one I added off the page.) I see one copy of the second Ledeneva cite (the one about "an essential type of know-how of Soviet socialism") on Google Books, which indeed does not italicize the term. Curious but also somewhat telling that so many editions exist and go back and forth on italicization. - -sche (discuss) 20:03, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

RFV-passed Kiwima (talk) 20:00, 18 December 2020 (UTC)