Considerations About Semitic Etyma in De Vaan's Latin Etymological Dictionary
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applyparastyle “fig//caption/p[1]” parastyle “FigCapt” Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019, pp. 35–156 © 2019 Ephraim Nissan - DOI https://doi.org/10.3726/PHIL042019.2 2019 Considerations about Semitic Etyma in de Vaan’s Latin Etymological Dictionary: Terms for Plants, 4 Domestic Animals, Tools or Vessels Ephraim Nissan 00 35 Abstract In this long study, our point of departure is particular entries in Michiel de Vaan’s Latin Etymological Dictionary (2008). We are interested in possibly Semitic etyma. Among 156 the other things, we consider controversies not just concerning individual etymologies, but also concerning approaches. We provide a detailed discussion of names for plants, but we also consider names for domestic animals. 2018/2019 Keywords Latin etymologies, Historical linguistics, Semitic loanwords in antiquity, Botany, Zoonyms, Controversies. Contents Considerations about Semitic Etyma in de Vaan’s 1. Introduction Latin Etymological Dictionary: Terms for Plants, Domestic Animals, Tools or Vessels 35 In his article “Il problema dei semitismi antichi nel latino”, Paolo Martino Ephraim Nissan 35 (1993) at the very beginning lamented the neglect of Semitic etymolo- gies for Archaic and Classical Latin; as opposed to survivals from a sub- strate and to terms of Etruscan, Italic, Greek, Celtic origin, when it comes to loanwords of certain direct Semitic origin in Latin, Martino remarked, such loanwords have been only admitted in a surprisingly exiguous num- ber of cases, when they were not met with outright rejection, as though they merely were fanciful constructs:1 In seguito alle recenti acquisizioni archeologiche ed epigrafiche che hanno documen- tato una densità finora insospettata di contatti tra Semiti (soprattutto Fenici, Aramei e 1 If one thinks what one could come across in the 1890s (see below), fanciful constructs were not a rarity. I have discussed phono-semantic matching in “etymythologies” (the term is Ghil‘ad Zuckermann’s) in Nissan (2012), whereas Nissan (2017) and Nissan and HaCohen-Kerner (2014) showed how they can be put to literary creative use. Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, an Israeli and Italian educated linguist (the son of the Roman-born artist Scipione/Ephraim Zuckermann), holds the Chair of Linguistics Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 36 Ephraim Nissan Cartaginesi) e popolazioni della penisola italiana (specialmente Etruria, Lazio, Cam- pania) nel corso del 1 millennio a.C, appare sempre più inspiegabile il fatto che non si sia riusciti finora a rilevare un congruo numero di interferenze lessicali semitiche nel latino arcaico e classico. Rispetto alle sopravvivenze di sostrato e alle voci di origine etrusca, italica, greca, celtica, gli imprestiti, sia pure tardi, di sicura origine semitica diretta nel latino, quando non vengono categoricamente esclusi come «Phantasiege- bilde», sono ammessi in numero sorprendentemente esiguo. and Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and is involved in the revival of Aboriginal languages. He has researched the modernisation by institutional planning of languages such as Hebrew into “Israeli” (Modern and then Israeli Hebrew), Chinese, Japanese, icelandic, and Republican Turkish. In his Oxford doctoral thesis and then in abook, he has shown how neologisation has sometimes camouflaged loanwords by exploiting phono-semantic matching (puns) as though the word was of native stock (Zuckermann 2000, 2003). Consider, in respect of spurious historical linguistics in the late 19th century, how G.S. Goodspeed (1898) reviewed (at times ironically) Semitic Influence in Hellenic Mythology by Robert Brown, Jr. (1898). The following excerpts that book review: “Three causes lie at the basis of the attempts constantly being made to find elements of community between the two great families of language spoken by peoples which have dominated the literature and life of civilized man: […] As for the latter, one must discriminate, or run the risk of falling into the clutches of the philological ‘crank’ whose grist of derivations, combinations, and analogies is so amazing, bewildering, and captivating that he who came to scoff may be forced to remain to pray for mercy deliverance. ¶ An especially happy hunting ground of this character is the language and literature of Greek mythology, in which Mr. Robert Brown, Jr., has been a diligent and delighted sportsman. The narrative of his adventures, the bags he has potted, the scalps he has taken, the happy way in which he has brought down game which Professor F. Max Müller has missed, and the strong indignation he manifests at the unnecessary mutilations caused by the clumsy shooting of Mr. Andrew Lang, in a field where he has been for some time lawlessly poaching — all this, and more, is set down in this book, in language which suggests the good old days of Salmasius, though tempered by the somewhat higher standard of controversial writing favored by modern scholarship. […] What lies beneath all this as Mr. Brown’s contribution to scholarship? ¶ Really it is somewhat difficult to estimate. He has certainly succeeded in showing the inability of both the comparative mythologists and anthropologists to solve all the problems of Hellenic mythology. He has, also, called attention anew to the significance of the oriental influence on Hellenic life. His book gathers up the results of the work of those scholars who advocate the thesis that Semitic religion strongly affected the early religion of Hellas. He has offered some plausible explanations from Semitic sources of difficult names in Hellenic mythology. He has made some interesting and important suggestions on the relations of primitive constellation figures, the signs of the Zodiac, and similar complex and abstruse matters. But the brevity of his discussions on all these subjects prevents the Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Considerations about Semitic Etyma in de Vaan’s Latin Etymological Dictionary 37 In the rest of Section 0 in that paper, Paolo Martino went on to exem- plify the paucity of admitted Semiticisms in sundry scholarly works. He then traced in Section 1 a history in three phases of the trend among some scholars to engage Semitic etymologies. Namely, in the first phase, individual etymologies lacked adequate contextualisation; in the second phase, prehistorical substrates were proposed by the way of such context- ualisation; and then in the third phase, with more critical sense, the con- tacts between couples of languages or cultures were considered, but when it comes to lexical borrowing into ancient languages of Italy from the East, the penchant has been, and still is (Martino claims) to maintain that there had been some Greek conduit: presentation of enough evidence upon any of them to enable the reader to form a competent and satisfactory judgment on the characters of his results”. One of the etymologies (not necessarily original ones) from Brown’s book was the explanation of the name of Herakles by deriving it from “Phoenician” “Harekhal”, glossed as “the Traveller”. But this is just a far-fetched Hebrew neologisation for the sake of the etymology, from the term (rakhil in ‘to go rakhil’, a cognate of régel ‘leg’) that denotes ‘gossiping around’. As for Dionysios, it was etymologised from “Sem[itic]” “Dagan-nisi” for “judge of men”, but this time the hypothesis is even more spurious, from Hebrew dayyan- ‘judge of’ and some conjectural cognate of Arabic nās ‘humans, people’ and Hebrew enosh ‘humankind’. Goospeed’s review of Brown’s book also listed these two consecutive entries (brackets in the original): “Perseus, Phœn. Barsav [cf. Heb. Esau], ‘the hairy’”, and “Andromeda, Phœn. Adam-math, ‘the rosy.’” Both are entirely immeritorious, to put it blandly. (Barsav is a neologism, mixing Hebrew and Aramaic, and is a compound that literally means ‘son of the canute’. As for Adam-math, it is an even syntactically outrageous compound that combines the personal name Adam as though it was derived from adom ‘red’, with math, a conjectural singular form of a literary Hebrew pluralia tantum noun for ‘men’.) Some other entries are even fraudulent, because by no stretch of the imagination do the etyma invoked exist in the lexicon of Semitic languages, nor can be formed by Semitic-language morphology. Goodspeed, who was affiliated with the University of Chicago, stated after the list: “The list is appetizing”. Not so. It is quite unappetizing for ones who possess the requisite competence. One of the entries in the list that Goodspeed reproduced is “Mykênai, Phœn. Makhâneh, the ‘camp.’” But apparently Brown was not deterred by the spurious correspondence of a Greek kappa to the consonant ḥ in Hebrew maḥāné. Goodspeed followed the list of Semitic etymologies proposed by Brown with these amused, not too committedly damning words concluding the book review: “The list is appetizing. It is the turn of Professor F. Max Müller and Mr. Andrew Lang to fall to and slaughter these innocents along with their bold sponsor”. Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 38 Ephraim Nissan Nella storia degli studi sui contatti tra lingue semitiche e latino si possono individu- are