A ramp by any other name

I came across the French word rampe this morning, which turned out to have some interesting ramifications.

First, while it can mean ramp or slope, as in the English, it is also used for what we might, in a house, call a banister. The slender posts topped with a hand rail to stop us from falling over the side and to give us something to hold on to, to pull ourselves up with. We also have the main courante, the French term for the hand rail in question. The running hand rather than the railing hand.

Second, our word banister is quite different, being a seventeenth century corruption of baluster, a short curvy pillar or sequence of same, as in balustrade. Usually topped or finished off with a hand rail or something of the sort. A relation of parapet.

According to OED, baluster is derived, because of its traditional shape, from the Greek for the blossom of the wild pomegranate. An allegation which I have failed to confirm online, with the modern Greek for pomegranate seeming to be pόδια, nothing like baluster at all.

I also thought to inquire about the relationship between marcher (to walk) and marché (a place to buy and sell). Among the various march words offered by Larousse we have both the one from which we had the Welsh Marches of medieval times and the information that walking is a Frankish word while buying and selling is a somewhat different Latin word. So a convergence or a conflation rather than a relation. While March the month is different again, being taken from Mars, the Roman god of war.

Reference 1: Maigret et le Fantôme - Simenon - 1963. Being the second story of volume XXIII of the collected works.