I subscribe to an embarassingly high number of streaming services. I don't have much time to watch any of them (and in any case, I am an old man and I dislike everything except Matlock and look, it's on right now!) and so the only two justifications I can give myself for the expense are a) I get some of them for free or at a low cost b) it's all for research and learning. I am talking here of course about the dubs and subs various streamers provide, especially here in Europe.
In addition to the usual major languages, Netflix is doing a lot for Catalan, Galician and even Basque, as well as keeping Syrian voice actors who live in Turkey employed by dubbing all their Turkish production into Syrian Arabic. The European equivalent of Paramount+, Skyshowtime, provides subtitles in - among others - Albanian and Bosnian and if you are the kind of person who enjoys the slop that is now churned out under the name "Star Trek", you can watch it dubbed into multiple languages, including Norwegian, Slovenian and Romanian.
My favorite streamer is HBO Max. For one, the only way to watch Rick and Morty is in the original Polish and 90s nostalgia in Friends is so much better in Bulgarian which I am currently trying to learn. I also like to rewatch procedurals like The Mentalist. Lucky for me, HBO Max subtitles it in Bulgarian, and so I am currently on season 4. Yesterday I watched episode 19 where at one point, Jane's friend the magician addresses Jane as "dude". Bulgarian subtitles render this as пич [piʧ]. I chuckled - the word sounds like a Slovak vulgar term for feminine genitals and I am mentally 14 - and then today I looked it up.
It turns out the semantic range of the word is quite interesting and when it refers to human beings, it has four different senses in Bulgarian.
- (archaic, dialectal, vulgar) a male child born out of wedlock, bastard
- lazy and incompetent person
- (slang) a man who can be counted on, especially when it comes to something bad
- (youth slang) a stand-up guy
The dictionary gives the etymology as Persian pič پیچ "a plant shoot", in Bulgarian via Turkish. Now I seem to have misplaced my copy Junker-Alavi's dictionary, but all the other resources agree or give a more specific sense, "young wine". And then I checked a Turkish dictionary and it all got interesting: the Persian word appears in the Codex Cumanicus, a 14th century manual of the Turkic language spoken by the Cumans known as Cuman, Kipchaq or Tatar. The book is arranged in three columns with Latin terms and their Persian and Cuman equivalents.
Our word appears on fol. 50r of the Venice 1597 copy (Marziana Lat. Z 549) in the second part of the Codex where lexical items are arranged in semantic fields. Fols. 49v-50r contain a section titled "Defecta hominum" and this is where we find Persian pič as a translation of the Latin bastardus.
This of course complicates the etymology and history of the Bulgarian пич, since the fifth meaning the Bulgarian dictionary gives is that of "sprout, plant shoot", albeit only dialectally. Persian dictionaries give this word a secondary sense "turn, complication, intricacy" and this the main sense also given by Turkish dictionaries. The same dictionary also gives the sense "bastard" (in the purest Turkic as "veledi zina"), but only with a question mark, so possibly only because of Codex Cumanicus. And, as the entry in the Turkish dictionary points out, the sense "bastard" is not found in any Persian dictionaries. Redhouse's Ottoman Turkish dictionary, however, gives all three senses - "bastard", "sprout", and "complication" (and one derivation that sounds extra funny to me).
This is the most likely source of the Bulgarian meaning, where the "shoot" sense was preserved only dialectally. Whence the Persian entry in Codex Cumanicus still remains a mystery, one that Jane, Lisbon and the rest of the CBI time probably can't help with.
