Discussion: kielbasa

is not in the American Heritage dictionary (which is the one I have). I noticed this years ago when I was checking whether the spelling is kielbasa or keilbasa, and it's just not in there. Weird. (And not wierd.)

I think the blessing thing is just that people get their food blessed, and somebody came up with a list of why various foods are symbolic of various religious things so that it will make a little more sense. Kielbasa supposedly represents the blood of Christ for reasons that escape me. And a lot of Poles are Catholic, and Poles really like kielbasa, so that's their big yummy treat on Easter after fasting during Lent, so it's the main thing that they want to have blessed.

I think the Poles mostly spell it kielbasy. Or at least the ones in New Britain do.

The client works here. And it seems the like the reviews that mention it spell it kielbasa.

Either way, my dictionary goes kidskin, Kiel, Kiel Canal, Kielce, kier.

jj - You need a new dictionary. Go for Webster's next time. It spells 'kielbasa'. But how on earth do you know all that other stuff?

@Charlie, that might be the plural

@jj, it almost has to be ie, since it's slavic and they like the yyeh sound, or nyet?

Hypothesizing: Poland was historically split between Russia and Germany. Germans pronounce words spelled with "ie" as "ee" (as in Niemann, for example; Leroy Neiman and Neiman-Marcus are anomalies not pronounced as the Germans do). Perhaps it originated in the part of Poland often controlled by Germany/Prussia.

Oh, I figured it was 'ie', and it is, but I was just checking. The dictionary was awarded to me in 1979 for excellence in high school academics. The next dictionary I acquire is likely to be a late 1940s edition of Funk and Wagnalls, whch is currently in my mother's bookcase, but she doesn't really want it. And I do, just because it's Funk and Wagnalls. But if I really need a reference, I can look things up online.

The name apparently comes from the Polish word for "sausage", and is actually spelled with an L that has a slash through it and ought to be pronounced kind of like a W. Other similar words came from the equivalent names for sausage in other Slavic languages.

How do I know all that stuff? A combination of the fact that my head is famously stuffed with useless information, and some googling.

Sausage is "kolbasa" in Russian. With stress on the final syllable and the 'o' sounding a lot more like an 'a' than an 'o'.

Couldn't "kielbasy" just be the plural?