Talk:zelkova

Zelkova elusive
"Zelkova" has no entry in my Shorter Oxford Dictionary or my Macquarie Dictionary. It's not in most of the online dictionaries either. Babelfish cannot translate it to any other language. It is in the online Merriam Webster which gives its etymology as Georgian -> Russian -> New Latin (the genus name) -> English. Encarta states the 19th century as the time of the word appearing in English. The fact that the English word was borrowed from the scientific name probably explains why it is so often capitalized unlike most English common nouns. It doesn't give the Russian spelling but Googling in Russian I find "дзельква" and to a lesser extent "дзелькова". Can anybody verify this? (M-W seems to give two Russian spellings but only in transliteration). I'd also really like to find the Georgian spelling. I'm collecting citations for this word at Zelkova/Citations - I'm particularly interested in uses from well-known people or early uses. So far I've found it mostly in novels translated from Japanese and books on trees or bonsai.

I've also posted this message on Wikipedia. &mdash; Hippietrail 01:10, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

A story about looking for "zelkova"

 * I have some results after much library time:
 * Very few English, Russian, or bilingual dictionaries contain this word! It's more easy to find in recent Japanese dictionaries if you already know the Japanese words or characters. Looking up the characters in old Chinese or Japanese dictionaries yields descriptions rather than translations into English.
 * I finally found "zelkova/Zelkova" in "A Supplement to the OED volume IV Se-Z" whose etymology states that "Spach" cited zelkoua, tselkwa as local names in the Caucasus.
 * During a lot of Googling I noticed one or two places specify Georgian rather than just Caucasian but with no Georgian letters.
 * I looked through dozens of Russian dictionaries today. Old and new, monolingual, bilingual into various languages. Not one had an any entries starting with "дзе..."! Fortunately, Stephen G. Brown had already given me the results of his own Russian dictionaries.
 * I looked in several etymological dictionaries of Caucasian languages in English, German, and Russian. The closest I could get was that "tsel" is probably a root meaning "tree" and "kva" might be a root meaning "rock".
 * The library had a modest number of books on Georgian, but no dictionary.
 * Bringing all this information back to the internet and cutting and pasting several potential Georgian spellings letter by letter, I got hits for a couple of versions of "tsel" and "kva".
 * Finally I struck the only site on the internet which had both "ძელქვა" (tselkva) and "zelcova": http://www.gpadc.org/p_batsara.php - it also contains an inflected form "ძელქვის" (tselkvis).
 * Word-hunting is hard work! &mdash; Hippietrail 13:26, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

Citation which predates OED's by 10 years
Project Gutenburg has "Scientific American Supplement No. 417" of December 29, 1883. It contains an article entitled "The Zelkowas" by George Nicholson. It is 10 years earlier than the OED's earliest citation of 1893 by A.D. Webster. It is available at http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/gutenberg/etext05/8041710h.htm &mdash; Hippietrail 16:13, 3 May 2005 (UTC)