Talk:فوطه

Arabic or Persian

@Fay Freak, Metaknowledge, wouldn't the Arabic be more suitable as the first intermediary between India and West Asia rather than the Persian? That would explain the p > f. Mayrhofer references E. Rackow, Beiträge zur Kenntnis der materiellen Kultur Nordwest-Marokkos (1958) 31 Anm. 1f for the spread of the word, but I don't have access to it. Vahag (talk) 19:41, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

@Vahagn Petrosyan: Probably, though it does not explain the spelling فوته and I darkly remember some variation پ ~ ف of which I now only find پرتو (partaw) on Wiktionary with a variant that looks spurious; apparently it is instead that Sanskrit or whatever language descending from it does not have the sound so that Persian words with /f/ were borrowed with /p/, e.g. فرمان (farmān), and therefore conversely Indian words with /p/ were drawn to either. I have just ordered the book, possibly meagre and a rip-off for 54 pages + Abb. + 72 Tafeln but in as much scannable. Fay Freak (talk) 20:26, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

I too vaguely remember a p ~ f alternation within Persian. A sort of self-Arabization. Vahag (talk) 11:20, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

 @Vahagn Petrosyan, Metaknowledge: Reading Rackow till page 11 has added evidence. بُوجَة (būja) “Brautsänfte” (find out the idiomatic English or whether it exists so we can add Caucasian and Central Asian translations, I guess) has been found absent in Persian and therefore directly borrowed from Indo-Aryan into Moroccan Arabic—amongst other contenders, but this is semantically closely related to фата́ (fatá). Fay Freak (talk) 12:08, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

We will have a definitive answer once someone does a deep philology for Persian, i.e. find out when, where and in which context was it first attested. Vahag (talk) 14:33, 11 September 2022 (UTC)