My contribution to this thread comes in two parts.
This is
part II.
So, what happened? Now, the discussion has focused on two words and their semantic transitions, a) bordel, and b) bardak.
The
semantic change of a) did not operate in Russian, but in French! French was such an influential language in pre-revolutionary Russia that whole passages in famous Russian novels were written in French and translated into Russian as footnotes. My grandfather learned French as his first foreign language in school (which he spoke in addition to his mother tongue German and his father tongue Russian). In spite of Pushkin etc., there was still something second classish about Russian during the 20th century – and a French gouvernante, massive invasion of French loanwords, not to mention a German wife
did little to revamp its status. If the change in question had come along in Russian, would then French have borrowed the new meaning from Russian?!... In French they said “Que-ce que c’est que ce bordel!” long before it appeared as slang in Russian.
So, the crucial question appears to be
how and where the semantic transition from “glass” to “brothel” operated. I don’t think I can solve this question, but a new path seems to impose itself.
I suggest we look at the word
b)
bardak as it notoriously changed. Turkish çay bardağı, “tea glass” – an
izafet construction containing the qualifier
çay and the qualified word
bardak (furnished with a compulsory possessive pronoun) - suddenly changes the material of the
bardak from
earthenware to
thin glass. Whoever has been to Greece or Turkey (or wherever in the region) has seen these glasses – as much in the shape of a female body as a guitar is. But a guitar doesn’t have a hole – at least not without strings attached... Instead of pouring tea into the glass, some drops of sun-flower oil (or the like) makes it the perfect
pars pro toto when the fiancée does’nt turn up.
Pars pro toto is a figure of speech in which the part of something is used to signify the whole. The implied four-letter word is, according to “Urban Dictionary” (on the web), a “Derogatory term for a woman.” I’ll come back to it.
Nun-Translator said:
[C]an you tell us how "glass" in Turkish became "prostitute" in Azerbaijani?
I don’t think this happened in
Azeri. Russian would be a much more likely candidate, but any non-Turkic language could aspire to this dubious honour. The semantic transition of French “bordel” from “maison de prostitution” to “grand désordre” seems more likely to have happened in the original language than a semantic transition of, say, French
verre from “glass” to “*prostitute”.
Bordel is already a negative word – it can’t get worse.
Verre, however, is
the French word for “glass”. How would it sound if a young son was scolded by his mother who said: “Don’t drink from the bottle, find yourself a ... prostitute!”
To sustain the hypothesis of foreign words being more likely to undergo this kind of semantic changes, Modern Greek γκεργκέφι would appear to be an instructive parallel. The word comes from Turkish gergef, “embroidery frame”, and does not mean anything else in Turkish. In Modern Greek, however, γκεργκέφι being a loanword, it has – in addition to its Turkish original meaning – also developed a slang acceptation which is a clear reminder of what the word for “glass” went through – or rather what went through the glass... The English correspondence to Modern Greek γκεργκέφι starts with a
c and rhymes with
blunt. You don’t need much imagination to understand the semantic transition.
Incidentally, Turk. gergef being of Persian origin, cf. kârgâh, has an indirect relation to ...
bordel. The first element is Pers. kâr, “work”, and the second
-gâh is a Pers. verbal suffix meaning “place of”. The word
kârhane in Turk. – literally:“work-house” - is an obsolete word for “a factory, a workshop”.
How did the latter become obsolete in Turkish?
With its modern Turkish phonetic and semantic development,
kârhane ended up as
kerhane, “brothel”!
Chazzwozzer said:
[The w]ord for the brothel is genelev.
Today, indeed! But
kerhane was the common Turkish word for
brothel before the euphemism (and neologism) “genelev” came along. I have seen no indications that:
Chazzwozzer said:
they [the Ottomans] called those places bardak, as a codename.
I doubt whether it is possible to substantiate such an idea. It is interesting, but rather fanciful.
In Azeri
kerhane has kept its old meaning of “factory”, a fact which has resulted in perennial jokes among Turks who travel to Azerbaidjan to visit a factory – but are told that this is a ... brothel.
Considering the influx of Russian Jews in Israel it is likely that they brought along the word бардак.
Words travel, but it is not always obvious
how they travel or
why they assume a new semantic garb.
End of part II.
