croissant
n. a rich, crescent-shaped roll of leavened dough or puff pastry.
from Old French creissant, croissant [crescent] * see crescent
The words croissant and crescent illustrate double borrowings, each coming into English from a different form of the same French word. In Latin the word crescere, "to grow," when applied to the moon meant "to wax"; one could have the phrase luna crescens, "waxing moon." Old French croissaunt, the equivalent of Latin crescens, came to mean "the time during which the moon waxes," "the crescent-shaped figure of the moon in its first and last quarters," and "a crescent-shaped object." In Middle English, which adopted croissant in its Anglo-Norman form cressaunt, the first instance of our English word, recorded in a document dated 1399-1400, meant "a crescent-shaped ornament." Crescent, the Modern English descendant of Middle English cressaunt, owes its second c to Latin crescere. Croissant is not an English development but instead a borrowing of the Modern French descendant of Old French croissant. It is first recorded in English in 1899. French croissant was used to translate German Hörnchen, the name given by the Viennese to this pastry, which was first baked in 1689 to commemorate the raising of the siege of Vienna by the Turks, whose symbol was the crescent.
老上海人也许没那么多闲情逸致去琢磨这个从回教突厥军到维也纳之围再通过德语法语传到英语的“新月”概念，还是拿中国人熟悉的羊角来命名，只知塞纳河的柔波，不晓维也纳城下的猎猎军旗。
[ 本帖最后由 沈小三 于 2008-1-7 11:11 编辑 ] |
发表于 2008-1-6 20:18:14
提升卡
置顶卡
沉默卡
喧嚣卡
变色卡
显身卡
楼主
发表于 2008-1-7 10:10:47
发表于 2008-1-7 19:08:44
