European ‘cassock’, Tkc. ḳazaḳ and Per. kazaḡand. Relative chronologies and possible links

Abstract

The present article discusses three hypotheses that have been suggested to explain the etymological background of the English word cassock and its Romance sources, It. casacca and Fr. casaque, interpreting them alternatively (a) as a diminutive of Lat. casa; (b) as ultimately related to the word for ‘Cossack’ (≪ Tkc. ḳazaḳ ‘vagabond’), with the alleged semantic change ‘Cossack’ > ‘a kind of garment worn by Cossacks’; or (c) as a distortion of (or a back-formation from) MFr. gasygan, itself borrowed from Persian. The collected material allows to conclude that the three hypotheses do not provide an adequate explanation of the origin of the word. A modified variant of the third proposal is suggested in section 6.