Acceso usuarios
Wolfgang Schweickard
Fabrics from the English town of Worstead were exported to other European countries as early as the 14th century. Over time, the place name itself came to be used – according to common patterns of word formation – as designation for the fabrics (“draps appellés worstedes”). When the word was adopted into other European languages, different variants emerged. In French and Italian, alongside rare early reflexes of the English worsted, the dominant realizations were those with delabialization of the initial wo-, yielding variants like ostada, ostata, ostade, ostede. In the German-speaking regions, the original English forms soon receded from everyday usage as well, being replaced by phonographical and morphological adaptations such as vorstat or worsten and, more frequently, by popular re-formations like bursat/pursat.
