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The Collins Concise English Dictionary gives the etymology of "pitta" as a Greek word for a cake; Jastrow's Dictionary of the Talmud (etc) gives פיתא pita as the Aramaic of Hebrew פת pat, a piece of bread (and the Encyclopaedia Judaica gives פַת becoming פִיתָה as an example of vowel transformation in Hebrew). The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology has nothing to say on the subject, neither does the Oxford English Dictionary (first edition).
Can anyone resolve this conundrum and tell me whether the English word really does come from Hebrew, or Greek, or the Greek from the Hebrew, or whether we're looking at two unrelated words that just happen to sound the same and have similar meaning?
[Update: More information on Balashon—thanks, Dave!]
June 15 2005, 22:40:26 UTC 6 years ago
As to whether the Greek came from the Hebrew or vice versa, I don't know, but wouldn't be at all surprised.
June 15 2005, 22:54:53 UTC 6 years ago
OED 2nd ed:
[ad. mod.Gr. {pi} {ghacu} {tau} {tau} {alpha} , {pi} {giacu} {tau} ({tau} ) {alpha} bread, cake, pie, perh. f. Gr. {pi} {epsilon} {pi}
{tau} - {goacu} {fsigma} cooked, f. {pi} {geacu} {sigma} {sigma}
{epsilon} {iota} {nu} , {pi} {geacu} {tau} {tau} -, to cook, bake. Cf.
Turk. pide, Heb. pittah in similar senses.]
copy/pasted from lynx, so a bit ugly.
June 16 2005, 00:58:12 UTC 6 years ago
June 16 2005, 01:54:39 UTC 6 years ago
A quick flick through the Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary gives this:
piṭa
On the whole I'm reluctant to call that a 'root' for Pitta bread; spurious links and similarities are the daily diet of an etymologist, and I'd need evidence of a geographical distribution of the word, or plausible congeners in the Indo-panetic language family, leading from India to the Eastern Mediterranean.
Anyone out there know enough Egyptian or Coptic to make a stab at P'tah before we go any further? Or Babylonian, for that matter: an agricultural or culinary word occurring in Arameic might well have been first uttered in the fertile crescent when cereal cultivation began. Some words are old.