Catalan etymology of paper? Probably not

Xavi Caballé mentions an oft-cited Catalan etymology of paper:

1249; del ll. papyrus, i aquest, del gr. pápyros ‘papir’, adaptat per via semiculta a una terminació catalana, d’on passà a les altres llengües europees

AFAIK the Enciclopèdia Catalana has never substantiated this. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie francaise says:

PAPIER n. m. XIIIe siècle. Issu, par l’intermédiaire du latin médiéval papirus, du grec papyros, « papyrus ».

The OED goes into more detail (my bold):

< Anglo-Norman papir, paper, papere, papire and Middle French, French papier paper, written document (13th cent. in Old French in a Picard source in an app. isolated attestation; subsequently from 14th cent.; also 15th cent. in Middle French as paupier), ult. < classical Latin papȳrus the papyrus or paper-reed of the Nile, also writing-material made of it (< Hellenistic Greek ...), probably via a northern Italian form, itself after post-classical Latin paperium (13th cent. in an Italian source), alteration of classical Latin papȳrus with remodelling of the ending after words in –erium, although transmission via Catalan paper (1240) is also possible.

If the EC’s version is to triumph amongst non-believers, some scholarship might come in handy. I wonder whether the originators of this meme haven’t confused the early European diffusion of paper, in which the Moorish mill at Játiva, Valencia may or may not have been important, with the later diffusion of northern Italian milling techniques presumably accompanied by the Latinate word.

It might be worth claiming to have invented the pizza. Everyone else has.

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