Considerations About Semitic Etyma in De Vaan's Latin Etymological Dictionary

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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 etymologies for Archaic and Classical Latin; as opposed to survivals from a substrate 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 number 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 documentato 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

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 contextualisation; and then in the third phase, with more critical sense, the contacts 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 tre momenti, caratterizzati da diversi orientamenti prevalenti. In una prima fase si sono istituite connessioni di ordine etimologico tra singole voci latine, etrusche, greche e termini attestati in lingue mesopotamiche, asianiche, accadiche, ecc., senza un adeguato ambientamento storico linguistico, successivamente è prevalsa la ten- denza ad inquadrare tali connessioni in un tessuto di solidarietà culturali e linguistiche preistoriche emergenti nei cosiddetti “sostrati” preindoeuropei e presemitici; un terzo momento, caratterizzato da più vaste cognizioni storico-linguistiche e maggiore impegno critico, è segnato da progetti di accertamento di riflessi linguistici di contatti preistorici e storici tra singole lingue e culture, ma in genere i più antichi orientalismi nel latino vengono spiegati nel contesto di correnti d’imprestito dal Vicino Oriente verso l’Italia antica mediate essenzialmente dal greco. Quest’ultimo orientamento sembra oggi in piena vitalità, accanto ad un filone di studi tipologici a volte non esenti da suggestioni genealogistiche. Si può osservare che proprio la distinzione tra relitti e imprestiti meriterebbe una maggiore attenzione, per un più puntuale ambientamento storico-linguistico e crono- logico di questi ultimi. [...]

In Section 3 of his paper, Martino (1993), having pointed out the chronology of Phoenician colonisation in the Western Mediterranean and then the presence of Carthaginian influence until Carthage was conquered by Rome,2 averred that Indo-European/Semitic convergences ascribable to a substrate, as well as a hypothetical “Nostratic” common background, are outside what can be observed. Moreover, he claimed, it would only be mar- ginally opportune to consider Phoenician contacts through visit to western markets in the pre-colonial Phoenician period.3 What is more, Martino pointed out, sometimes such lexical similarities one would ascribe to a substrate may instead have resulted from contacts in the Mediterranean

2 “I limiti cronologici dell’indagine sono tendenzialmente contenuti tra l’inizio della colonizzazione fenicia in Occidente (VIII sec. a.C.) e la conquista romana di Cartagine (146 a.C.), ma la scarsità di fonti antiche pone spesso la necessità di fare riferimento a documenti neopunici e a glosse tardolatine di sospetta origine punica. Le più tarde iscrizioni fenicio-puniche provenienti dall’Italia datano al I sec. a. C., ma non va dimenticato che il neopunico sopravvisse nelle colonie d’Italia almeno fino al IlI sec. d.C. e in Africa fino al VI secolo” (Martino 1993, p. 72). 3 “Restano ovviamente fuori del nostro campo di osservazione le convergenze tra lingue indoeuropee e afroasiatiche che si fanno risalire al sostrato, nel quadro di un’ipotetica comunione ‘nostratica’ o indomediterranea, mentre solo marginalmente è opportuno considerare il problema di eventuali riflessi linguistici della cosiddetta ‘precolonizzazione’, cioè della frequentazione commerciale fenicia degli empori occidentali tra il X e l’VIII secolo” (Martino 1993, p. 72).

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 39 with Northwest Semitic languages in the second millennium B.C.E., perhaps through a Mycenaean conduit, all the more so as there is evidence of Mycenaean and Cypriot as well as Phoenician presence in Sicily, Sardinia, and southern and central Italy in the later half of the second millennium B.C.E. indeed.4 The present study is structured as follows. The chapters following this introduction begin with Sec. 2, “Latin gāneum and malva as lexical reflexes of Semitic terms? With considerations about the claimed etymon being Hebrew mallūá ḥ”, which in turn comprises the following subsections: 2.1, “The entry for Latin gāneum”; 2.2, “The entry for Latin malva”; 2.3, “A discussion of Hebrew mallū́ aḥ, Aramaic mallūḥā”; 2.4, “The ancient Egyptian plant-name mnḥ and the etymological hypotheses for it, including the one involving Hebrew mallūá ḥ”; 2.5, “Grasses or shrubs growing in salty soils”; and 2.6, “The Hebrew name ‹ḥlmwt› or ‹ḥlmyt› of the mallow (Malva)”. Next, we have Sections 3, “De Vaan’s entry for paelex ‘mistress’, Saul Levin’s hypotheses for the same and for Latin asinus, and a nest of hornets: controversies”; 4, “Considerations about de Vaan’s entry apis ‘bee’”; 5, “Comments about de Vaan’s entry rēte / rētis ‘net’ and de Vaan’s acceptance of Rosén hypothesis relating Latin s(a)cēna to Hebrew sakkīn”; 6, “Concerning de Vaan’s entry for Latin simpu(v)ium and simpulum ‘earthenware ladle’”; 7, “Concerning Latin taurus and taura”; 8, “Concerning Latin virga”; 9, “De Vaan’s treatment of grānum ‘grain, seed’, and considerations about the same and about Latin far ‘spelt’”; and 10, “Further considerations: on some apparent lexical convergences of Indo-European (including Latin) and Northwest Semitic”. Section 10 in turn comprises these subsections: 10.1, “Latin fătuus ‘fool’”; 10.2, “Latin cubō ‘to lie down, recline; be lying’”; 10.3, “Latin rōs ‘dew’”; 10.4, “Merely look-alikes? Latin tolle!, Hebrew ṭol! ‘take!’”; 10.5, “Salvatore Debenedetti relating in the 1880s the

4 “Tuttavia, nel campo delle somiglianze lessicali tra voci latine e semitiche normalmente attribuite al sostrato, il dubbio che a volte si abbia a che fare piuttosto con interferenze del II millennio tra lingue semitiche di N-O e lingue i.-e. del Mediterraneo, magari con una mediazione micenea, rimane aperto. Il sospetto è motivato dai risultati della ricerca archeologica, che ha documentato una cospicua componente micenea (e cipriota) accanto a quella fenicia in Sicilia, in Sardegna e nell’Italia centro-meridionale nella seconda metà del IIl millennio In questa prospettiva le ipotesi sui miceneismi nel Lazio (Peruzzi 1980) si ambienterebbero in uno sfondo di traffici interetnici ai quali l’elemento semitico non fu estraneo” (Martino 1993, pp. 72–73).

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/ 40 Ephraim Nissan river names Arno and Arnōn, vis-à-vis some current thinking about Arno”; 10.6, “Fallacies concerning iĕcur ‘liver’ and καρωτόν, carota, ‘carrot’”; 10.7, “Latin maltha ‘mortar; cement’”, and 10.8, “Latin betulla ‘birch’ (< Celtic?), resembling by coincidence Hebrew bĕtūlā ‘virgin, maiden’, bĕtūlat-haššiqmā ‘the sycamore tree as long as no wood was cut away from it (as yet)’”, which in turn precedes Sec. 11, “Concluding remarks”.

2. Latin gāneum and malva as lexical reflexes of Semitic terms? With considerations about the claimed etymon being Hebrew mallū́aḥ

2.1. The entry for Latin gāneum

I have dealt with plant-names elsewhere, especially in a long study (a journal article of 170 pages: Nissan and Burgaretta 2017–2018) “On the Italian Botanical Glosses in Version B of the Life of Ben Sira” (based on medieval Italian dialectological data, we were able to zoom on a geographical area in central Italy, straddling the border of Abruzzo and Latium, as the area of origination of a Hebrew manuscript). Plant names in ancient Rome5 are the subject of Jacques André’s (1985) Les noms de plantes dans la Rome antique. Gardening and botany are the semantic areas of two entries in which de Vaan (2008) was willing to accept a Semitic etymon, namely, the entries for gāneum and for malva. Let us begin with the entry for gāneum:6

gāneum ‘tavern, eating-house’ [n. o] (Pl.+) Derivatives: ganea ‘tavern’ (Cic.+), ganeo ‘pub-crawler’ (Naev.+).

5 In contrast, the formation of plant names in Romance languages is the subject of Walter Geiger’s (1978) Phytonymic Derivational Systems in the Romance Languages. 6 De Vaan (2008, s.v.) cited, in the bibliography of the entry for gāneum, p. 582 in Vol. 1 of Alois Walde and Johann Baptist Hoffmann’s Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (1930, 1954); p. 267 in Jacques André’s 4th edition of Alfred Ernout and Antoine Meillet’s (1979) Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine; p. 74 in Émilia Masson’s (1967) Recherches sur les plus anciens emprunts sémitiques en grec; and p. 361 in Manu Leumann’s (1977) Lateinische Laut- und Formenlehre.

Probably a loanword. In form and meaning, one might connect West-Semitic *gann ‘garden’ (Ugaritic, Aramaic gn, Hebrew gan ‘garden’),7 whence also Gr. γάνος ‘pleasure-garden’ (on Cyprus), γάνεα ‘gardens’ (Hsch.); for the semantics, compare French restaurant and German Bier-garten.8

That is a possibility, but the semantic connection is not straightforward. Have we any evidence that the semantic shift already began to occur in Greek? If that is the case, there would be no need for there having been a small garden at some early taverns or eating houses in Repub- lican Rome. Can we expect some of them to have had a back-garden, or an internal courtyard with a garden? Were we talking about an eating house in a rural environment rather than about a small tavern run by poor people in a densely built urban environment, it would be unsur- prising that at least some customers would eat outside, in the garden or being able to look at a garden. This in turn (already in the Near East) would have been a manner of commodifying, for paying customers, the benefit of access to a private garden, intended for a household and at most their guests. At any rate, consider this passage from Denis Ribouillault’s9 (2018) “Hortus academicus: les académies de la Renaissance et le jardin”; the ideal of engaging with philosophy in a garden is at least as old as Plato’s Academy:

un idéal construit sur le modèle de l’Académie de Platon fondée à Athènes en 387 av. j.-c. Située aux abords de la ville, l’Académie tirait son nom du lieu pré- sumé où avait trouvé sépulture le héros Académos. Plantée d’oliviers et de platanes,

7 Gemination of the stem is evident, in Hebrew, from the inflected forms, such as gannī ‘my garden’, gannim ‘gardens’. 8 In Modern Hebrew, from German Kindergarten the semantic calque gan-yelādīm [ganyela'dim] was formed (literally ‘garden of children’), and from this, gannōn [gan'non] (a synonym). Note however that gan ‘garden’ is often used for short, instead of gan-yelādīm. A nursery rhyme begins with “Yónatán hakatán / ráts babóker el hagán” (i.e., “Little Jonathan / ran in the morning to the nursery”). Also note this pattern: I personally attended three different nurseries (for different age groups) in the late 1950s in the town of Ramat-Gan, and I knew them by the pattern ‘garden/nursery of ‹first name of the main teacher›’, so I knew I was attending or had attended the gán šel Ahúva, the gán šel Tmíma, and the gán šel Míryam, in that order. One can see then that the context suffices for disambiguating the sense of gan /gann/ in Israeli Hebrew. 9 Denis Ribouillault is an art historian from the Université de Montréal.

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/ 42 Ephraim Nissan

aménagée par des allées et pourvue d’un gymnase et de plusieurs autels, cette vaste enceinte sacrée était dédiée à Athéna, déesse de la sagesse. Lorsqu’il n’enseignait pas dans l’une des salles de cours attenantes au gymnase, Platon réunissait ses élèves les plus avancés dans une exèdre construite dans le jardin de sa modeste demeure, située non loin de là.10 Il y avait fait ériger un petit sanctuaire dédié aux Muses et placé une statue d’Apollon. La salle unique de la maison de Platon était ornée de deux peintures illustrant la vie de son maître Socrate. Elle abritait aussi ses rouleaux, un réveil matin qu’il avait lui-même conçu ainsi que des globes cé- lestes et terrestres, des cartes et une sphère armillaire. La recherche philosophique à l’Académie impliquait en effet un grand nombre de disciplines, notamment les mathématiques et l’astronomie. C’est dans le jardin académique de Platon qu’il fut pour la première fois prouvé que la terre était sphérique. On se moqua aussi, dans certaines comédies contemporaines, des recherches menées par Platon et ses disciples sur la classification des espèces animales et végétales. Pour beaucoup, il était incongru de philosopher sur des citrouilles! L’ensemble de ces activités, aux- quelles on peut ajouter la rhétorique, la poésie, la géographie et l’histoire, la gram- maire et la linguistique, la mécanique, la musique, la médecine et la météorologie, s’inscrivait en outre dans un climat social fondé sur l’amitié, qui se concrétisait lors de banquets organisés en l’honneur des dieux. De nombreuses scènes dans les dialogues de Platon font écho au cadre champêtre de l’Académie, comme les discussions du Banquet sur l’amour ou, dans le Phèdre (230 av. J.-C.), l’éloge du pays- age idéal (locus amoenus) avec le platane, la source, le sanctuaire et l’herbe douce, lieu propice à la détente du corps et de l’esprit et au dialogue philosophique. En effet, philosopher dans un jardin, c’était non seulement reconnaître le lien essentiel qui unissait l’homme à la nature et au cosmos, mais aussi les liens entre individus eux-mêmes (polis). Philosopher au jardin, c’était enfin nourrir le corps autant que l’esprit. On pouvait d’abord s’exercer au gymnase, mais le jardin attenant fournis- sait aussi un lieu de promenade, la marche étant considérée comme favorable à la réflexion philosophique. […]

In his big Nostratic dictionary, Aharon Dolgopolsky (2008, p. 624) included entry 641 for the supposed Nostratic root *gänħ▽ ‘side (of something), width’. (In Dolgopolsky’s notation, he used ħ for ḥ and besides, ▽ stands for an unspecified vowel.) He included data from the Kartve- lian (K) language family from the Caucasus, Hamito-Semitic (HS), Dra- vidian (D), and Altaic (A). For Hamito-Semitic, the data are from Arabic (as being part of WS, i.e., West Semitic), Jibbali (Jb for short, one of the

10 “Diogène Laërce, iv, 19. Voir Matthias Baltes, «Plato’s School, the Academy», Hermathena (Dublin), nº 155 (1993), p. 5–26” (Ribouillault’s note 2 in the endnotes).

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 43 modern South Arabian languages), ancient Egyptian (Eg), and possibly (through an admittedly “semantically doubtful connection”, which is what Dolgopolsky meant by the symbol ?σ) Iraqw (Irq for short), the latter being a language belonging to South Cushitic (SC). I reproduce only a few lines from that entry:

Whereas among derivatives of the Arabic root jnḥ one would mainly think of the name for ‘wing’ (cf. ancient Egyptian ʣnḥ ‘wing’: Dolgopolsky’s ʒ is like the Italian z in mezzo), note the derivative junḥ which Dolgopo- lsky (2008, p. 624 in entry 641) defined as “side, place at the side of a road (where people stop to rest)”. (There also exist another lexeme of the Arabic root jnḥ from which a verb is derived for ‘to walk quickly’, of a camel. Dolgopolsky included it on p. 632 in entry 648 for the supposed Nostratic root ‘to step, to climb’, whence the non-Anatolian In- do-European root ) Now consider that the Arabic phoneme /j/ (which Dolgopolsky, to avoid ambivalence, transcribed as ) has the phonetic value [g] in some dialects of Arabic. Moreover, note that Semitic /ḥ/ as a source in language contact sometimes was lost and replaced with some /e/-colored vowel; for example, (Masoretic) Biblical Hebrew ḥamōr ‘donkey’, plural ḥamōrīm (pronounced in Israeli Hebrew as [xa'mor], [xamo'rim]), as opposed to the Samaritan Hebrew pronunciation ēmor (plural ēmūrəm); I owe the Samar- itan data to David Talshir’s dissertation (1981, p. 313). Now, were we to argue that the Arabic term for junḥ which Dolgopol- sky defined as ‘side, place at the side of a road (where people stop to rest)’ could be an alternative etymological hypothesis for Latin gāneum, I must recognise that de Vaan’s hypothesis in his entry for that term is stronger. At any rate, bear the possibility I signalled in mind.

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/ 44 Ephraim Nissan

2.2. The entry for Latin malva

Let us turn to this other entry in de Vaan (2008):

malva ‘mallow-plant’ […] Probably a borrowing from a Mediterranean language, maybe Semitic: Hebr. mallūaḥ ‘name of a plant’. See also the vacillation in the vocal- ism of Gr. μαλάχη (also attested as μαλόχη, μολόχα) ‘mallow’.11

De Vaan in that entry did not mention that the etymology from mallūaḥ as first proposed by Vincenzo Cocco (1955), who is absent from the bibliography of de Vaan’s book. Cocco also proposed an etymological link to Georgian malokhi. It is fairly commonplace for semantic shift to occur when a plant- name or animal-name migrates to a different country with different fauna and flora. In the case at hand, consider that in the Near East, in many areas the soil is salty, and grasses and shrubs of halophytes (plants that tolerate salt) are found there. We are going to concern ourselves with the relevant plant-names in the remaining subsections of the present Section 2. It is important to realise that being a low plant of which parts are edible may have been a reason for a Northwest Semitic plant name whose Biblical Hebrew form we know to be mallūaḥ, to be applied to Malva. Mallows, too, are edible.

11 https:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malva states: “The word "mallow" is derived from Old English "mealwe", which was imported from Latin "malva", cognate with Ancient Greek μαλάχη (malakhē) meaning "mallow", both perhaps reflecting a Mediterranean term. The colour mauve was in 1859 named after the French name for this plant. […] Several species are widely grown as garden flowers, while some are invasive weeds, particularly in the Americas where they are not native. Many species are edible as leaf vegetables and commonly foraged in the West. Known as ebegümeci in Turkish, it is used as vegetable in Turkey in various forms such as stuffing the leaves with bulgur or rice or using the boiled leaves as side dish. Malva verticillata (Chinese: 冬寒菜; pinyin: dōngháncài, Korean: 아욱 auk) is grown on a limited commercial scale in China; when made as a herbal infusion, it is used for its colon cleansing properties and as a weight loss supplement. Very easily grown, short-lived perennials are often grown as ornamental plants. Mild tasting, young mallow leaves can be a substitute for lettuce, whereas older leaves are better cooked as a leafy green vegetable. The buds and flowers can be used in salads”.

The article “Common Names of Commercially Cultivated Vegeta- bles of the World in 15 Languages” by Stanley Kays and João Silva Dias (1995)12 has, on p. 146, this entry for edible, cultivated species of Malva:

Malva rotundifolia L. (and other species, e.g., M. verticillata) (EP) leaves and young shoots; (P) C. (Eng[lish]) mallow; (Chi[nese]) yuan ye jin kui; (Dani[ish]) liden katost; (Dut[ch]) kranskaasjeskruid, rondbladig kaasjerkruid; (Fre[nch]) mauve, m. ronde, m. à feuilles rondes; (Ger[man]) Malve, Kleinbluetige Malve; (Hin[di]) khubasi; (Ita[lian]) malva comune, m. domestica, m. piccola; (Jpn [Japanese]) fuyu aoi; (Por[tuguese]) malva; (Spa[nish]) malva, m. de hoja redonda, m. de flor pequena.

Given how risky etymology can be, and considering that we are interested in the etymology of the Latin plant-name malva, let me signal as a funny aside a Sanskrit term, malvá-ḥ ‘thoughtless, foolish, unwise’, and moreover, let me point out that Latin malus ‘bad’ also denotes ‘incapable’ or ‘weak’, according to the context. In contrast, the American Nostraticist Allan Bomhard (2018) began an entry as follows (on p. 1805 in the file = p. 1009 on the page, as it belongs to Vol. 2): 860. Proto-Nostratic root *mal- (~ *məl-):

(vb.) *mal- ‘to be favorably disposed towards, to care about, to be devoted to, to like’; (n.) *mal-a ‘goodness, pleasantness’; (adj.) ‘good, pleasant, pleasing’ A. Proto-Afrasian *mal- ‘(vb.) to do good; (adj.) good’: Semitic: Arabic malīḥ ‘good’; Ugaritic mlḥ ‘good, pleasant’; (?) Geez / Ethiopic malḥa, mallǝḥa [ ] ‘to do, to work’, possibly ‘to do good work’. Leslau 1987:343; Mili- tarëv 2008a:196 and 2010:74. Note: Both Leslau and Militarëv suggest derivation from Proto-Semitic *milḥ- ‘salt’; this is rejected here. [...] B. Dravidian: Tamil mālimi ‘youthful friendship’; Telugu mālimi ‘familiarity, love, affection’. Burrow—Emeneau 1984:429, no. 4826. C. Proto-Indo-European *mel-/*mol-/*ml̥- ‘(vb.) to be favorably disposed towards, to care about, to be devoted to, to like; (adj.) good, pleasant’: Latin (comparative of bonus) melior ‘better’; Lithuanian malonùs ‘nice, pleasant’, malõniai ‘pleasantly, nicely, good’. Pokorny 1959:720 *mel- ‘strong, big’; […]

12 Where EP stands for “edible part”, and P stands for “methods of preparation” (R for “raw”, C for “cooked”, and P for “preserved”.

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Paolo Martino (1993), in his article “Il problema dei semitismi antichi nel latino”, claimed on pp. 73–74:

Per una distinzione tra imprestiti e voci di sostrato è indicativa, a volte, l’arealità delle isoglosse: una voce di improbabile etimo indoeuropeo, attestata in un’area mediterranea vasta (greco, latino, Asia Minore, Vicino Oriente, ecc.) potrebbe essere relitto di un antichissimo termine di sostrato (Silvestri13 1982, 183), se invece può vantare connessioni indoeuropee, si può pensare al frutto di una “fusione” con un termine di sostrato (come nel caso della coppia lat. imber accad. imbaru, cf. Mayer 1964, 223) In questo quadro vanno certo collocati molti fitonimi.

I would like to premit to my discussion in the rest of Section 2 that I consider Latin malva to be the result of contact in Italy with speakers of Northwest Semitic who replaced the denotation of mallūaḥ because of the different natural environment, while retaining the feature that the plant is herbaceous and edible, while, unlike in the case of mallūaḥ, not a salty plant growing in salty mostly dry soil. The chronology may have been in the second half of the second millennium B.C.E., or in the early first millennium B.C.E., but I do not exclude that the lexical borrowing dates back to the Neolithic, with the spread of farming in the Mediterranean from the Northwest Semitic and Anatolian areas. Paolo Martino himself stated (1993, p. 74):

Ma gli stessi Fenici possono essere stati, in epoche protostoriche, veicolo di termini eteroglottici. greci, microasiatici, di sostrato. Possono sopravvivere nel latino fatti protostorici (della “precolonizzazione”) diffuse o veicolate dai Fenici, fra cui miceneismi o voci del fondo egeo-microasiatico. Una lingua ‘internazionale’ del II millennio sarebbe stata diffusa dai Micenei, con interferenze anche in area semitica. In altri termini, anche se non si può escludere che nomi di oggetti commerciabili e di recipienti risalgano all’epoca neolitica (Silvestri 1974, 199), è anche possibile che voci di sostrato, “parole viaggianti” designanti oggetti di vasto commercio, siano state diffuse proprio dai Fenici unitamente agli oggetti stessi, e che quindi il fenicio- punico sia la “fonte immediata” dell’imprestito. Potrebbe essere il caso di lat. fucus.14

13 Domenico Silvestri’s La teoria del sostrato: Metodi e miraggi was published in three volumes between 1977 and 1982. The first volume is entitled G.I. Ascoli e il suo tempo; the second, La teoria del sostrato nel quadro della linguistica storica; whereas the third volume is without any special title. 14 In fn. 18 on p. 74, Martino (1993) provided a survey: “fūcus, -ī, m. ‘fuco, sp. di lichene che s’attacca alle rocce del mare e serve a tingere in rosso: belletto (Lichen Roccella L.)’ è termine di antica attestazione (Plauto, Terenzio). All’ipotesi di un prestito da gr φῦκος (n.) ‘alga, lichene’ (Omero) pone difficoltà la corrispondenza lat. f = grφ in un prestito antico (cf. purpura), per cui s’invoca la consueta mediazione etrusca

Martino (1993, pp. 77–78, citing Ernout 1954)15 touched upon Latin malva:

Per i fitonimi non è indicativa l’epoca dell’introduzione della relativa pianta in Italia, a volte esattamente databile (come per il ciliegio coltivato) In genere, i fitonimi di origine orientale designano tanto la pianta quanto il frutto o il prodotto, essendo tali voci quasi sempre di attestazione alquanto tarda, si preferisce considerarli mediati dal greco (Ernout 1954, 39) Ma è anche vero che autori latini tendono a citarli nella forma greca per vezzo letterario o per formazione libresca, e che certi pro- dotti (frutti, aromi, condimenti) sono stati conosciuti per via commerciale prima dell’introduzione della pianta stessa. Rimane pertanto aperta la possibilità di un imprestito diretto, specialmente nei casi di divergenze formali o semantiche con la forma greca corrispondente. In questi casi è particolarmente arduo ricostruire le vie e i tempi dell’interferenza. A questa categoria di semitismi in greco e latino si deve applicare la stessa considerazione che Ernout 1954, 41 ritiene valida per molte coppie di voci (lilium/λείριον; ÀELQLOV; malua/μαλάκη; rosa/ῥόδον, ecc.) comunemente ascritte al sostrato: «Ces noms sont trop proches de leur correspondants grecs pour qu’on puisse les en séparer, trop éloignés aussi pour qu’on puisse les considérer comme empruntés directement du grec».

2.3. A discussion of Hebrew mallū́aḥ, Aramaic mallūḥā

It is essential to realise that the plant-name mallū́aḥ in Hebrew is a noun whose etymological sense is transparent: ‘salty’. Hebrew mālū́aḥ is an adjective whose sense is ‘salty’. The Hebrew plant-name mallū́aḥ occurs only once in the Hebrew Bible: “those who pick māllū́aḥ on the shrub”

(Ernout 1954, 51). Considerazioni extralinguistiche potrebbero suggerire l’ipotesi di un fenicismo: «Peut-être les deux mots [fūcus e φῦκος] ont-ils été empruntés séparément à la même langue — on admet généralement que le grec provient du sémitique, hébreu puk-, et apportés par les marins qui faisaient commerce du fard (car le nom du produit a du précéder celui de la plante comme ebur a précédé elephantus)» (Ernout, loc. cit.). L’ipotesi semitica (Lewy 1895, 47–8, cf. ebr puk ‘belletto per gli occhi’) è scartata da Chantraine (DELG 1231). Il vero tramite di questo fitonimo mediterraneo in latino e in greco può essere stata la lingua franca dei commerci, cf. DELL 258. Leumann-Hofmann-Szantyr I 162 accenna ad una «beidseitige Entlehnung aus einer Mittelmeersprache»”. I may add that Hebrew /puk/ is now pronounced [pux], but was probably pronounced [φux] in biblical times. 15 Aspects du vocabulaire latin by Alfred Ernout (b. 1879, d. 1973).

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(Job 30:4).16 In his biblical concordance, Solomon Mandelkern (1977 [1896], p. 675, col. 3, s.v. māllū́aḥ) gave a Latin definition, “halimus”, and followed it with a remark in Hebrew: “A kind of salty vegetable eaten by the poor in the East, whether raw or boiled”.

The entry in Jastrow (1903, p. 788, col. 1) for mallūaḥ ‹mlwḥ›.

The Hebrew plant-name mallū́aḥ also occurs in the early rabbinic literature; as such, it was defined by Marcus Jastrow (1903, p. 788, s.v.) as “a salt-plant, sea-purslane (Halineus)”. The plural is indicated there as mallūḥīn or mallūḥīm. The term occurs in the Babylonian Talmud in tractate Kiddushin 66a, as well as in Pesikta Rabbati 15, in the latter in a sentence which Jastrow translated as “whoever believes in him (the Messiah) is contented to live on salt-plants &c”. As for the occurrence in Kiddushin

16 More in full, English translations include: “Who cut up mallows by the bushes, and juniper roots for their meat”, and “They pluck salt-wort by the bushes; And the roots of the broom are their food”. Easton’s Bible Dictionary (Easton 1897, s.v. mallows) states: “Occurs only in Job 30:4 (R.V. [= Revised Version], ‘saltwort’). The word so rendered (malluaḥ, from melaḥ, ‘salt’) most probably denotes the Atriplex halimus of Linnaeus, a species of sea purslane found on the shores of the Dead Sea, as also of the Mediterranean, and in salt marshes. It is a tall shrubby orach, growing to the height sometimes of 10 feet. Its buds and leaves, with those of other saline plants, are eaten by the poor in Palestine”. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Bromiley 1989, s.v. salt-wort, authored by Ernest W.G. Masterman, whose entry from the 1915 edition was revised for the 1989 edition) states: “(malluach, a word connected with melach, ‘salt’, translated halimos; the King James Version, mallows): The halimos of the Greeks is the sea orache, Atriplex halimus, a silvery whitish shrub which flourishes upon the shores of the Dead Sea alongside the rutm (see JUNIPER). Its leaves are oval and somewhat like those of an olive. They have a sour flavor and would never be eaten when better food was obtainable (Job 30:4). The translation ‘mallows’ is due to the apparent similarity of the Hebrew malluach to the Greek malache, which is the Latin malva and English ‘mallow’. Certain species of malva

66a, the Soncino English translation (Epstein 1935–1948) rendered the relevant passage as follows (their brackets):

Abaye also said: Whence do I know it? Because it was taught. It once happened that King Jannai17 went to Kohalith in the wilderness18 and conquered sixty towns there. On his return he rejoiced exceedingly and invited all the Sages of Israel. Said he to them, ‘Our forefathers ate mallows19 when they were engaged on the building of the [second] Temple; let us too eat mallows in memory of our forefathers’. So mallows were served on golden tables, and they ate. Now, there was a man there, frivolous, evilhearted and worthless, named Eleazar son of Po‘irah, who said to King Jannai. ‘O King Jannai, the hearts of the Pharisees are against thee.’ ‘Then what shall I do?’ ‘Test them20 by the plate between thine eyes’. So he tested them by the plate between his eyes. Now, an elder, named Judah son of Gedidiah, was present there. Said he to King Jannai. ‘O King Jannai! Let the royal crown suffice thee, and leave the priestly crown to the seed of Aaron’. (For it was rumoured that his mother had been taken captive in Modi‘im.)21 Accordingly, the charge was investigated, but not

known in Arabic, as khubbazeh, are very commonly eaten by the poor of Palestine”. And indeed, that Arabic noun, ḫubbāza (which also means ‘bread-baker’ (f.)) is related to ḫubz ‘bread’. 17 King Alexander Jannaeus, of the dynasty of the Hasmoneans, who were both kings and high priests (a pairing of roles that the Pharisees disliked). Because of the geographical and temporal remoteness, narratives about Alexander Jannaeus as found in the Babylonian Talmud are considered not to be historical (if unsupported by Josephus), or at the very least to be legendary exaggerations (but in the case at hand, the text is a baraitha, i.e., a lectio extra vagans, text — presumably from Roman Palestine — not appearing in the Mishnah, the legal code compiled there in the very early years of the third century C.E., and upon which both the Babylonian Talmud and the Palestinian Talmud elaborate). A footnote to the Soncino English translation, reflecting older scholarship, ascribed the episode to an earlier king, John Hyrcanus. 18 Koḥalith in Transjordan, during a military campaign. 19 “The food of the very poor” (footnote to the Soncino English translation). Traditionally in Britain, it is the mucilage of marshmallows of the genus Althea (rather than mallows, Malva) that used to be employed in confectionary. 20 Literally, “raise them up”, i.e., provoke them in order to test them. The King was advised to provoke the Pharisees (including the Sages) among the invitees, by wearing the frontal plate of the high priest. This was in order to observe the reactions on the part of such invitees. 21 A footnote to the Soncino English translation remarks: “In the days of Antiochus Epiphanes; Modi‘im (Modim) was the birthplace of the Hasmoneans. As a son of a captive woman he would not be eligible for the priesthood” (because of the assumption that she would have been raped by her captors).

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sustained,22 and the Sages of Israel departed in anger.23 Then said Eleazar b. Po‘irah to King Jannai: ‘O King Jannai! That is the law even for the most humble man in Israel, and thou, a King and a High Priest, shall that be thy law [too]!’24 ‘Then what shall I do?’ ‘If thou wilt take my advice, trample then, down’.25 ‘But what shall happen with the Torah?’ ‘Behold, it is rolled up and lying in the corner: whoever wishes to study. Let him go and study!’ Said R. Nahman b. Isaac: Immediately a spirit of heresy was instilled into him,26 for he should have replied. ‘That is well for the Written Law;27 but what of the Oral Law?’28 Straightway, the evil burst forth29 through Eleazar son of Po‘irah,30 all the Sages of Israel were massacred, and the world was desolate until Simeon b. Shetah came and restored the Torah to its pristine [glory].31 Now, how was it?32 Shall we say that two testified that she was captured and two that she was not? what [reason] do you see to rely upon the latter rely upon the former?33 Hence it must surely mean [that her captivity was attested] by one witness, and the reason [that

22 Literally “found”, i.e., the charge was not proved to be true. 23 A footnote to the Soncino English translation contrasts the 11th-century glossa ordinaria by Rashi, “Rashi: under the King’s anger”, to an opinion by a modern scholar who rather understood: “in anger at the false accusation”. 24 The following is a footnote to the Soncino English translation: “There is probably a lacuna in the narrative, which may be supplied from Josephus. Ant. XIII, 10, – 6: The Rabbis sentenced him to flagellation, in accordance with the law of slander; but Eleazar urged that this was altogether inadequate in view of Jannai’s exalted position, and proved that they secretly held with the slanderer (Goldschmidt). — In fact, the status of a person is taken into account when bodily injury is sustained (B.K. 83b), but not for slander”. B.K. stands for tractate Bava Kamma of the Babylonian Talmud. 25 Destroy them. 26 I.e., into Jannai. 27 The Pentateuch. 28 “The whole of the Rabbinical elaboration and development of the Written Law, so called because it was originally not committed to writing but preserved by oral tradition” (footnote to the Soncino English translation). 29 Literally, “blossomed”. 30 MS Munich of the Babylonian Talmud adds here: “and through Judah ben Gedidiah”. 31 During the reign of Queen Alexandra, the widow of Alexander Jannaeus. 32 “How was the charge found to be untrue?” (footnote to the Soncino English translation). 33 A gloss in the medieval Tosafot states: “The Rabbis were extremely strict on the question of family purity, and therefore in such a case the former two witnesses could not be ignored” (quoted from a footnote to the Soncino English translation).

his evidence was rejected] was that two rebutted him; but otherwise, he would have been believed.34

In Targumic Aramaic, mallūḥā, whose plural is mallūḥīn (Jastrow 1903, p. 788, s.v.) occurs in the Targum (standard Jewish Middle Aramaic translation) to Zephaniah 2:9, where is translates Hebrew ḥārū́l, a plant of wastelands which is usually understood to be thorny and is usually translated as ‘nettle’. (Israeli botanists35 do not use the term ḥārū́l as a name for a genus found in the country.) The wording “those who pick māllū́aḥ on the shrub” (Job 30:4) inspired a somewhat cryptic (in the new context) modified wording in the confession of sins for the Day of Atonement ascribed to Rabbenu Nis- sim, who is also known acronymously as the RaN, this being Nissim ben Reuben Gerondi (?1310–?1375), who was one of the most important Spanish talmudists. His family was from Cordova, and settled in Gerona. It is thought he was born in Gerona indeed. He moved with his family to Barcelona, where he resided from then and was active as a rabbinic authority, even though he held no formal office.36 In the liturgical confession of sins ascribed to him, one finds the sequence: “we stiffened out neck, we spoiled out ways, we picked māllū́aḥ on the shrub, we have shut the mouths of the Sages so they would not rebuked us, we shut our hands avoiding giving to charity, we cursed our fellows by invoking on them divine ire, we were receptive to defamatory gossip”, and so forth. The species Atriplex hortensis is called garden orache in English. The genus Atriplex includes many desert and seashore plants.37 Moshe Raanan authored a Hebrew-language learned webpage38 in botany in relation to Judaism, in which he argued for the identification of the biblical māllū́aḥ with the plant species Atriplex halimus, known in

34 “This proves Abaye’s point” (footnote to the Soncino English translation). 35 Upon the evidence of the index of Hebrew plant-names in Feinbrun-Dothan and Danin (1991). 36 https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/nissim-ben-reuben-gerondi-x00b0 37 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atriplex 38 https://daf-yomi.com/DYItemDetails.aspx?itemid=7986

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English as the Shrubby Saltbush39 and now called in Hebrew māllū́aḥ qippḗaḥ (rejecting instead the identification with purslane, Portulaca, which is not salty). Raanan began his discussion by quoting from the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Avodah Zarah 3b, the following, which I reproduce as per the Soncino English translation (Epstein 1935–1948, their brackets, my braces): “R. Levi says: He who discontinues [learning] words of the Torah and indulges in idle gossip will be made to eat glowing coals of juniper {in Hebrew retāmīm, i.e., the genus Retama}, as it is said, They pluck salt-wort with wormwood {actually: māllū́aḥ on the shrub}; and the roots of juniper {in Hebrew retāmīm} are their food”. Therefore, what Rabbenu Nissim (or whoever else authored it) intended, in the liturgical confession ascribed to him, is: “we engaged in idle gossip instead of engaging in the study of religious literature”.40 In that same webpage, Raanan discussed what medieval biblical exegetes had written about the mallū́aḥ. For example, the Provençal exegete and grammarian Rabbi David Ḳimḥi (or Radaḳ, b. 1160?, d. 1235?), as a lexicographer s.v. mlḥ (the lexical root) explained that the mallū́aḥ is a noxious grass that only grows in salty soil, and that some maintain this is the ortiga plant (i.e., the nettle, urtica, but Raanan points out that its leaves are not salty, and that Urtica does not grow in the desert), and that some others maintain that these plants have a salty taste and are called ghasul in Arabic. Raanan pointed out that Atriplex halimus manages to get rid of excess salt by concentrating it in microscopic hairs on its leaves. Those hairs make the leaves whiteish, they reflect light, and this prevents drying.

39 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltbush By the name saltbush, not only Atriplex, but also some Australian species of Chenopodium as well as the North American species Sarcobatus vermiculatus are denoted in English. 40 Retama is a genus of bushes which comprises four or five species, and belonging to the tribe Genisteae (the broom tribe) of the subfamily Faboideae of the family Fabaceae of the order Fabales. The scientific name Retama is an adaptation (Quattrocchi 2012, p. 3186) of the Arabic cognate of the Biblical Hebrew plural noun retāmīm, or possibly Retama was derived from the latter. The genus was defined by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1838. The distribution of Retama plants is South- Mediterranean and Saharo-Sindic.

The species Atriplex hortensis, from Deutschlands Flora in Abbildungen by Sturm and Sturm (1796).

Hebrew-language hymnographers active in the Land of Israel during the Byzantine period reached an apex of sophistication with the liturgical poems by R. Eleazar b. R. Qillir or Kallir (also known as “the Qilliri”), active in the Land of Israel (until then Byzantine) around the time of the Islamic conquest,41

41 “Palestinian piyyuṭ [liturgical poetry] literature is divided by modern scholarship into a pre-classical and a classical period […] The latter is distinguished from 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/ 54 Ephraim Nissan and still displaying the cerebral, quite erudite style studded with intertextual references of Hebrew hymns that had developed during the Byzantine period, indeed deliberately more bafflingly riddling and wildly neologising than his predecessors. And yet, unlike his deliberate obscurity in most of his corpus, Kallir saw to it that his language and style was quite clear in a long poem (in fact, a sequence of concatenated poems) about the Ten Commandments, so everybody would understand (Mirsky 1990). In that sequence of concatenated poems (one poem per each of the Ten Commandments), Kallir wrote, at the end of the poem about “Thou shalt not kill” as follows (where ḵ is pronounced as [x]):

Beraḥ leḵā miggaḥălē reṯāmīm, Ăšūrēḵā taṣ‘īd betāmīm. Escape for thyself [a dative of affect] from glowing coals of Retama, Thy steps, step [them] in earnestness. In the Middle Ages, and still in the early modern period, books of prayers began to add explanatory glosses to the liturgical poems by the Byzan- tine-age hymnographers. The commentary to that poem by Kallir about the Ten Commandments as given in the Amsterdam Maḥzor (a book of prayers for the year’s holidays) rendered “glowing coals of Retama” with “Gēhinnōm”, i.e., Hell. However, Aharon Mirsky (1990, p. 132, fn. 34) proposed that the mention of reṯāmīm in the poem under consideration was motivated by the next commandment being “Thou shalt not commit adultery”, and that the metaphor was inspired by Proverbs 6:28–29, “If a man were to walk on glowing coals, would his feet not be scorched? Likewise he who comes to (i.e., has sexual intercourse with) the wife of his fellow”, and so forth.

former primarily by the use of rhyme and the consequent development of complex strophic structures, as well as by the employment of acrostic name signatures by the payyeṭanim. The borderline between the two periods is represented by the compositions of Yose ben Yose, the first payyeṭan known by name. His precise dates are unclear, but are […] Qillir represents the apogee of the Classical period, and appears to have been active around the time of the capture of Palestine by the Muslims in 638; see the appendix to this article” (Rand 2007, fn. 1 on pp. 9*–10*). Cf. Nissan (1999).

2.4. The ancient Egyptian plant-name mnḥ and the etymological hypotheses for it, including the one involving Hebrew mallūá ḥ

Gábor Takács is the author of Brill’s Etymological Dictionary of Egyp- tian, whose third and last volume (Takács 2007) comprises the Egyptian words with initial m-. On pp. 301–302, one finds the entry for mn“ ḥ (orig. mnḥj?) ‘Papyrus oder eine ähnliche Sumpfpflanze’ […] = ‘papyrus-plant’ […] = ‘Cyperus papyrus L.’ […] = ‘reeds, plants’ […] = ‘(*junger) Papyrus (Cyperus papyrus *antiquorum): *‘Jüngling’’ […] = ‘a less usual term for papyrus, the symbolic plant of Lower Egypt (may have denoted a certain type of papyrus, or perhaps specifically the tuber or stem of the papyrus plant, or the papyrus at a certain stage of maturity)’ […] = ‘Zypergras, Papyrusstaude’ […]”. That Egyptian term mnḥ as being a plant-name42 was first attested with a final j (mnḥj). In the scholarly literature, it was claimed (as the entry points out under “NB2”), it has been claimed as early as D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson43 in 1932 that the Egyptian word was preserved by Greek μνάσιον in Theophrastus, with Roquet in 1994 “(suggesting a correspondence of Eg. -ḥ- > Gr. -σ- on the analogy of Eg. wḥ3.t ‘oasis’ > Gk. ὄασις” (Takács 2007, p. 301). In the etymological section of the entry, Takacs (2007, p. 302) headed it with “Origin obscure:” before listing three competing hypotheses. The first of these was first proposed by H. Brugsch in 1882, and then by A. -Er man in 1892, and maintains that the Egyptian plant-name is an early loan from Northwest Semitic as represented by Biblical Hebrew mallūá ḥ which in turn is identified by one of the authors quoted with Linnaeus’ species Atriplex halimus, whereas Immanuel Löw (thus, a prominent expert of the Jewish flora) is quoted as identifying mallūá ḥ with Mesenbrianthemum

42 Note that another lexeme of Egyptian mnḥ denotes ‘to slaughter’, and yet another lexeme denotes ‘youngster’ and (as a verb) ‘to make young’. 43 D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson was born in 1860 and died in 1948. His contribution was fundamental for the lexicography of Greek bird names (Thompson 1895,1 19362) and Greek fish names (Thompson 1947). Moreover, his ability to also handle lexical data from ancient Egyptian enabled him to provide identifications in his study “On Egyptian Fish-Names Used by Greek Writers” (Thompson 1928). Moreover, see Silvano Boscherini’s study “L’Erbario di Apuleio e i precetti dei profeti” (2007), on the names of plants in Apuleius’ Latin text and their Greek and Egyptian roots.

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/ 56 Ephraim Nissan forskalii. Takács commented about this first etymological hypothesis for Egyptian term mnḥ by stating: “Improbable both semantically and because of Gk. -ν-”. Then, under “NB”, Takács remarked: “Hbr. mallūaḥ, along with Akk[adian] ma/ullaḫtu ‘ein salziges Gras’ […] and Ar[abic] mullayḥ- ‘sorte de plante (reaumuria vermiculata)’ […], derives from Sem[itic] “milḥ- ‘salt’”. [Reaumuria vermiculata belongs to the family Tamaricace- ae. It is halophyte, i.e., a plant growing in salty soil; Karker et al. (2016), who conducted their research in Tunisia on local plants, as the species is widely distributed in southern Tunisia indeed, gave their paper the title “Antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and anticancer activities of the medicinal halophyte Reaumuria vermiculata”.] The second etymological hypothesis listed by Takács for Egyptian mnḥ as being a plant-name relates the plant-name to the lexeme of Egyp- tian mnḥ as denoting ‘youngster’, and was made by R. Hannig, who “suggested an etymological connection with Eg. mnḥ ‘Jüngling, Bursche’”; under “NB”, Takács pointed out that in a text from Edfu, “the verb mnḥ ‘to make young’ is used in a pun on mnḥ ‘papyrus’ to parallel w3ḏ ‘papyrus’ vs. ‘child’ ~ w3ḏ ‘green or young’”. The third etymological hypothesis listed by Takács for Egyptian mnḥ as being a plant-name relates it to the masculine noun malī́ḥ in Saho, a Lowland East Cushitic language from the Horn of Africa; the Saho term is a plant-name. Takács stated: “Doubtful because of Gk. -ν-”. Besides, I wonder whether the Saho word may just be a loanword from Arabic malī́ḥ ‘good’. Under “NB”, Takács discussed a semantically much more relevant plant-name from another Lowland East Cush- itic language: an Oromoid language, Borana (also known as Oromo Bo- rana). In Borana, mell-ā denotes “a papyrus-like reed, found in swampy areas”. Takács claimed that this word “is only accidental (no trace of *-ḥ- in Orm.), cf. rather Eg. m3.t [< *ml.t] ‘das Rohr des Schilfs’” (the brackets are by Takács). Yet, he conceded: “In principle, Orm. mell- < *melḥ- is plausible”. Going back to Immanuel Löw’s identification of mallū́aḥ with Mesen- brianthemum forskalii: this is a grass with fleshy leaves. Its English name is Forskal Fig-marigold. Israeli botanists call the genus āhā́l (Feinbrun- Dothan and Danin 1991, pp. 121–122). It belongs to the family Aizoace- ae. The species M. crystallinum is known in Hebrew as ăhal haggeḇīšī́m [ʔa'hal hagvi'ʃim] (literally, ‘the ahal of crystals’), and in Israel it is found on the coastal plain, on sandy or stony slopes facing the sea. Its English

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 57 names are Ice Plant and Diamond Ficoides.44 In contrast, the species M. forskalii grows in the south of the country, in salty soil in hot deserts. Its distribution is in the so-called Sudanese climatic area (as opposed to the Euro-Siberian and Mediterranean climatic areas of the other two Israeli species of the same genus. It is also the only one, of the three species, such that the plants turns entirely yellow after flourishing). M. forskalii is called āhā́l meguššā́m by Israeli botanists (literally, ‘coarse, massive ahal’). The most widespread species in Israel, found in salty soil or where animal excreta are concentrated, is the species M. nodiflorum, in English Egyp- tian Fig-marigold, in Hebrew āhā́l māṣū́y [ʔa'hal ma'tsuy] (i.e., ‘common ahal’, literally ‘[commonly] found ahal’).

Mesenbrianthemum forskalii in flower.

44 I reproduce the two entries from the family Aizoaceae from p. 127 in Kays and Silva Dias (1995): Aizoaceae Mesembryanthemum crystallinum L. (syn. Cryophytum crystallinum) (EP) leaves; (P) R. (Eng[lish]) ice plant; (Ara[bic]) napat althalg; (Chi[nese]) bing hua; (Dan[ish]) is-middagsblomst; (Dut[ch]) ijplant, ijsplantje; (Fre[nch]) ficoïde, f. cristalline, f.

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In the Hebrew Bible, the plant-name āhāl (traditionally rendered with ‘aloe’) is always listed with balsamic plants (so the biblical name, other than the occurrence in the Book of Numbers, for which, see below, had a different denotation from the one used in Israeli Hebrew by botanists), and only occurs in plural forms, either ăhālīm (Numbers 24:6, Proverbs 7:17), or ăhālōt (Psalms 45:9, Song of Songs 4:14). The Hungarian scholar Immanuel Löw (1854–1944) excelled especially in clarifying the terminology of rabbinic and Syriac botany (in four volumes: Löw 1924–1934; cf. Löw 1903); he also managed to cover some of the fauna, from both rabbinic sources, and the Syriac literature (Löw 1906, 1912, 1969). Immanuel Löw’ Die Flora der Juden followed in Vol. 4 an index of Hebrew plant-names in the Bible with the count of their occurrences, and on p. 34 one findsḥ ārūl, identified with “Platterbse”, listed among such plant-names that occur three times in the Hebrew Bible (he counted together ăhālīm and ăhālōṯ as denoting ‘aloe’, among such names that are listed three times):

As indicated in the indices on p. 644 in Vol. 4 of his Die Flora der Juden, Löw referred to Mesembrianthemum in several places: in Vol. 1 on pp. 467, 600, 635 f., and 647 ff., as well as in Vol. 3 on pp. 186, 342, and 412, and in Vol. 4 on pp. 4, 28 f., 69, 78, 90, 117, 235, 238, 501 and 512. Whereas I have not found mention in Vol. 4 on p. 4, on p. 28 instead, in an index of Hebrew names of “Pflanzen der Bible”, one does find two entries: one for (ăhālīm, ăhālōṯ) “Aquilaria Agallocha Roxb., Aloeholz.**)”,

glaciale, herbe à la glace; (Ger[man]) Gemeines Eiskraut, Eisblume; (Ita[lian]) erba cristallina; (Por[tuguese]) folha de gelo, flor de gelo; (Spa[nish]) escarchada, algazul. Tetragonia tetragoniodes (Pall.) O. Kuntze (syn. T. expansa) (EP) tender shoots and leaves; (P) C,R. (Eng) New Zealand spinach; (Ara) is banekh; {recte: ispinakh} (Chi) fan xing; (Dan) Newzealandsk spinat; (Dut) Nieuw Zeelandse spinazie, Neuseeland- spinat; (Fre) épinard de la Nouvelle Zé1ande, tétragonne; (Ger) neuzeelander Spinat; (Hin) katela pulak; (Ita) tetragonia della Nuova Zelanda, spinacio di Nuova Zelanda; (Jpn) tsuruna; (Mal) kabak; (Por) espinafre da Nova Zelândia, tetragónia; (Rus) novozelandskij špinat; (Spa) espinaca de Nueva Zelandia.

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 59 and the other, as a hapax, (ăhālīm): “Mesembrianthemum nodiflorum L. Eiskraut (Numbers 24, 6) 1, 643ff.” That is to say, as opposed to identification with aloe in all other instances, it is only the occurrence ofă hālīm in Numbers 24:6 that Löw identified the plant with Mesembrianthemum nodiflorum. See Löw, Vol. 1, pp. 644–647. Löw also listed how Luther rendered plant names in his translation into German of the Hebrew Bible, and for ăhālōṯ as well as for ăhālīm one finds “Aloe” indeed (Löw, Die Flora der Juden, Vol. 4, p. 35). In Vol. 4 on p. 238, in a list of Modern Hebrew plant names, Löw indicated ‹ʔhl› (āhāl) as being the name for Mesembrianthemum. Löw, Die Flora der Juden, Vol. 1, p. 643, stated (my brackets): “Ich habe OLZ. 1918, 90 für biblisch und mišnisch ’āhāl die Bedeutung Mesembrianthemum nodiflorum L., Eiskraut, festgestellt. Auch für Num. 24, 6 ‘āhālīm [a typo for ’ăhālīm] gilt diese Bedeutung das weitausgebre- itete Lager wird mit der nach dem Regen erscheinenden Eiskrautdecke des Bodens treffend verglichen. ’āhāl steht für bōrīt Targ[um] Hiob 9, 30. Falsches hierüber MZs. 40, 139. Unten 646”. Löw quoted from a letter dated 25 September 1925 from J.J. Hess, identifying Hebrew bōrīṯ with Arabic ġāsūl. Löw, Vol. 1, p. 643, pointed out that in Arabic, Mesembri- anthemum forskalii is known as samḥ or semḥ, whereas the species M. nodiflorum is known as ġāsūl or mulleḥ (mark this), and the species M. crystallinum is known as ġāsūl or ġāsūl frenǵi (literally, ‘French/Frankish ġāsūl’). Hebrew bōrīṯ is usually identified with borax. Löw, Vol. 1, p. 644, referred to his discussion of the Mishnaic Hebrew bōrīṯ karšinnā in Vol. 2, p. 482, and then wrote:

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The German compound “spanische Barilla” denotes ashes of the genera Salsola and Salicornia:

38 Kohlensaures Natron, einfachsaures = NaO+CO2 + 10aq. 39 übrigens kann s diesem Salz wenn es geschmolzen wird heraus xstallisiren 1 40 Salz t 8 aq u selbst eines t 5 aq. Das ursprüngliche NaO+CO2 war enthalten

- 139 -

01 in der Asche der Seestrandpflanzen, die verschiedenen Arten Salsola Chenopo[deen] 02 Salicornia u.s.w. genommen wurden. Diese Asche, die spanische Barilla 03 Salsolinatium genannt enthält bis 30% Soda; aber das Salicor von der 04 Küste Narbonne enthält nur 15%. In der Normandie, Irland u Schottland 05 gewinnt man s verschiedenen Algen u Ficusarten 1 Asche den Vareck oder Kelp 06 welche nur wenige % enthält 4.5% aber in dieser schlechtesten Asche befindet 07 sich das meißte NaJd2. This quotation is from p. 253 in Wolfram Wendler’s 2004 doctoral dissertation in pharmacy, a page where he was reproducing line by line the end of p. 138 and then p. 139 of Heinrich Sänger, Pharmazie vorgetragen von Herrn Hofrath Wackenroder. Jena: Wintersemester, 1846). Footnote 756 to the word “Salicornia” states:

Bei beiden Pflanzen Salsola (Salzkraut) und Salicornia (Queller) handelt es sich um Sodalieferanten, dazu PIERER (1844), Bd 21, 263 und Bd 19, 188: „Salsola (sals.L.) Pflanzengattung aus der natürl. Familie der Chenopodeen, [...], in Spanien heimisch [...] in ihrer Asche Soda.“ und „Salicornia (sals.L.) Pflanzengattung aus der natürl. Familie der Chenopodeen, [...], aus deren Asche durch Auslaugen Soda gewonnen wird.“

Heinrich August Pierer (b. 1794, d. 1850) published his Universal- Lexicon in the 1840s in forty volumes (including six supplementary volumes, until 1854). Pierer was both the editor and the publisher.

For Immanuel Löw’s reference in his Flora to the “spanische Barilla” in Vol. 1, p. 644, refer to the treatment of the genus Salsola in the next subsection in this paper. Concerning mallūaḥ, Löw wrote as follow in in Vol. 1, p. 648:

The reference to Arabic ’ušnān (hence Israeli Hebrew ‘ašnān, by blending with Hebrew ‘āšān ‘smoke’, for grass of the genus Fumaria: see (Feinbrun-Dothan and Danin 1991, p. 214) is to “Herba Alkali”, used for its ashes, this being Anabasis articulata (Löw, Vol. 1, p. 647). Concerning Mesembrianthemum, Löw reproduced in Vol. 1, p. 646, a letter he had received from another scholar:

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Löw, Vol. 1, pp. 349–350, dealt with the 11th-century gloss of Rashi45 to mallūaḥ in Job 30:4 in relation to Aramaic qāqūlīn46 (according to a Sem- itic cognate, in the sigular it is qāqullā, thus with gemination) and with Rashi’s gloss to the Babylonian Talmud, tractate ‘Eruvin 28a, for pa‘pū‘īn or pi‘pū‘īn,47 which Rashi had glossed in Old French in the Hebrew script as ‹yyṭlyš› or ‹mwšʔ› for mousse. Löw remarked: “nicht ‘malve’”.

2.5. Grasses or shrubs growing in salty soils

Salty plants one of which must be the mallūaḥ are salty because they grow in salty soil, being halophyte plants:

45 Rashi is Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, or Isaacides (Troyes, Champagne, 1040 – Worms, 1105; in Christian sources: Rabi Salomon). He studied at the rabbinic academies Troyes, Mainz, and Worms. In 1070, Rashi returned to Troyes and founded his own renowned school there. Current scholarly discussions concerned specifically with Rashi include Dahan et al. (1997), Schwarzfuchs (1991), Sed-Rajna (1993), Malka (1993), Shereshevsky (1982), Kamin (1980), and Gelles (1981). 46 Cf. Jastrow (1903, p. 1409, s.v. qāqūlā): “a sort of cress used by the poor (cardamum or nasturtium”, citing an earlier publication by Löw). Cress proper is called in Tannaitic Hebrew šiḥăláyīm ‹šḥlyym› in the Mishnah, tractate Ma‘aserot 4:5. 47 Cf. Jastrow (1903, p. 1203, s.v. pi‘pū‘īn): “name of an herb, prob[ably] (καρδαμίνη) a kind of cress”.

A halophyte is a salt-tolerant plant that grows in waters of high salinity, com- ing into contact with saline water through its roots or by salt spray, such as in saline semi-deserts, mangrove swamps, marshes and sloughs and seashores. These plants do not prefer saline environments but because of their ability to cope with high salinity in various ways they face much less competition in these areas. The word derives from Ancient Greek ἅλας (halas) ‘salt’and φυτόν (phyton) ‘plant’. An example of a halophyte is the salt marsh grass Spartina alterniflora (smooth cordgrass). Relatively few plant species are halophytes—perhaps only 2% of all plant species. The large majority of plant species are glycophytes, which are not salt-tolerant and are damaged fairly easily by high salinity. […] Adaptation to saline environments by halophytes may take the form of salt tolerance or salt avoidance. Plants that avoid the effects of high salt even though they live in a saline environment may be referred to as facultative halophytes rather than ‘true’, or obligatory, halophytes. For example, a short-lived plant species that completes its reproductive life cycle during periods (such as a rainy season) when the salt concentration is low would be avoiding salt rather than tolerating it. Or a plant species may maintain a ‘nor- mal’ internal salt concentration by excreting excess salts through its leaves, by way of a hydathode, or by concentrating salts in leaves that later die and drop off. […] Some halophytes are: • Anemopsis californica (yerba mansa, lizard tail) • Atriplex (saltbush, orache, orach) • Attalea speciosa (babassu) • Panicum virgatum (switchgrass) • Salicornia bigelovii (dwarf glasswort, pickleweed) • Spartina alterniflora (smooth cordgrass) • Tetragonia tetragonoides (warrigal greens, kōkihi, sea spinach)48 The plant that in biblical and Hellenistic and Roman-age times was known in Hebrew as mallūaḥ has edible leaves, which are salty because the plant excretes salt through its leaves indeed. What we are concerned with are xero-halophytes, a kind of terrestro- halines that grow on dry or mostly dry land.

Halophytes can be classified in many ways. According toStocker (1933), it is mainly of 3 kinds, viz.

48 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halophyte

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1. Aqua-halines • Emerged Halophytes (most of the stem remains above the water level) • Hydro-halophytes (whole or almost whole plant remains under water) 2. Terrestro-halines • Hygro-halophytes (grow on swamp lands) • Mesohalophytes (grow on non-swamp, non-dry lands) • Xero-halophytes (grow on dry or mostly dry lands) 3. Aero-halines49

In Modern Hebrew, the masculine noun mallūá ḥ is used in order to denote the genus Atriplex (Ṣimḥē Ereṣ Yiśrā’ēl 1946, p. 12, §108). Of the 16 species of Atriplex found in Israel, most are local, but some are of Australian origin and were imported for pasture or as ornamental plants and escaped to natural environments. Of the genus Atriplex, the species Atriplex hortensis is a cultivated plant. The following is the entry from p. 137 in the article “Common Names of Commercially Cultivated Vegetables of the World in 15 Lan- guages” by Stanley Kays and João Silva Dias (1995):50

Atriplex hortensis L. (EP) leaves; (P) C. (Eng[lish]) orache; (Ara[bic]) el-hejaz; (Chi[nese]) shi yong bin li; (Dan[ish]) have-melde, melde; (Dut[ch]) tuinmelde; (Fre[nch]) arroche, a. épinard, a. cultivée; (Ger[man]) Gartenmelde; (Hin[di]) korake, surake, paharipalang; (Ita[lian]) atriplice; (Jpn [Japanese]) yama-hourensou; (Por[tuguese]) armoles, erva armoles; (Rus[sian]) lebeda sadovaja; (Spa[nish]) armuelle, a. de huerta. Like beets (of the genus Beta), Atriplex belongs to the family Chenopo- diaceae. Another genus is Agathophora, belonging to Chenopodiaceae, and which in Modern Hebrew is called melēḥānī́t [mlexa'nit] (Feinbrun-Do- than and Danin 1991, p. 181). Note the Greek etyma, related to ‘salt’, of a few genera, Halothamnus (Feinbrun-Dothan and Danin 1991, p. 175),51 literally ‘salt bush’ in Greek,

49 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halophyte 50 Where EP stands for “edible part”, and P stands for “methods of preparation” (R for “raw”, C for “cooked”, and P for “preserved”. 51 It belongs to the subfamily Salsoloideae in the family Amaranthaceae.

Haloxylon (ibid., p. 174),52 and Halotis.53 Halotis grows in salty deserts; it is rare in Israel, being typical of Transjordan instead (ibid., p. 181). The genera Arthrocnemum and Sarcocornia (Feinbrun-Dothan and Danin 1991, p. 170) are known in Modern Hebrew by the neologised compound ben-mélaḥ, literally ‘son of salt’. In Italian, Arthrocnemum is known by the names sopravvivolo, erba cali, and salicornia. “Le specie del genere Arthrocnemum sono comunemente chiamate salicornie in quanto molto simili alle specie del genere Salicornia, le quali differiscono però per essere piante erbacee annuali”.54 As for Sarcocornia, plants of this genus are known in English by the name samphires, glassworts, and saltworts.55 The genus Salsola, whose scientific Latin name is from an Italian noun whose etymology is semantically related to ‘salt’, belongs to the subfamily Salsoloideae in the family Amaranthaceae. In Modern Heb- rew, Salsola is called milḥī́t [mil'xit], a feminine name derived from mélaḥ ‘salt’. See Feinbrun-Dothan and Danin (1991, p. 175). The species Salsola soda is known in Italian by the name barba di frate. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salsola relates: “Jusqu’au XIXe siècle, ces plantes halophytes étaient utilisées pour fabriquer de la soude, utile pour faire du savon ou pour la fabrication du verre. On l’obtient après combustion de la plante. Les cendres contiennent alors 30% de carbonate de sodium (Na2CO3) ou « soude naturelle ». Après caustication de la cen- dre (ajout de chaux), on obtient la soude caustique”. In some countries worldwide, the species Salsola soda and Salsola komarovii are cultivated plants. The following is the entry for Salsola soda from p. 138 in Kays and Silva Dias (1995):

Salsola soda L. (EP) leaves and young shoots; (P) C. (Eng) salsola; (Chi) su da zhu mao cai; (Dut) soda kruid; (Fre) salsola soda, herbe au verre, soude commune; (Ger) Soda-Salzkraut (Ita) roscano, bacicci; (Por) salsola; (Spa) barrillap, eralejo.

52 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haloxylon explains: “Haloxylon is a genus of shrubs or small trees, belonging to the plant family Amaranthaceae. Haloxylon and its species are known by the common name saxaul”, from Russian саксаул (saksaul), whose etymon in turn is Kazakh сексеуiл (seksewil). “The genus Haloxylon is distributed in southwest and Central Asia, from Egypt to Mongolia and China (Sinkiang and Kansu), where it grows in sandy habitats (psammophyte)” (ibid.). The subfamily to which Haloxylon belongs is Salsoloideae. 53 Halotis belongs to the family Amaranthaceae. 54 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthrocnemum 55 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcocornia

Salsola komarovii Jljin. (EP) leaves and young shoots; (P) C. (Eng) barilla plant, Komarov Russian thistle; (Chi) wu chi zhu mao cai; (Dan) komarov-sodaurt; (Dut) Komarov loogkruid; (Fre) salsola de Komarov; (Ita) salsola di Komarov; (Jpn) okahijiki; (P or) salsola de Komarov; (Spa) salsola de Komarov.

The plant of the species salsola sativa.

The genus Nitraria of thorny bushes, which grow in the desert (it is found in southern Israel, in the Judaea desert, and in Transjordan) in wet salty soil or near water sources, and whose marture fruit is edible (it is both sweet and salty) is denoted by the neologised Israeli Hebrew noun yamlūá ḥ (Feinbrun- Dothan and Danin 1991, p. 396). The family to which Nitraria belongs is Zygophyllaceae. The root of the noun yamlūá ḥ is the same as for the Heb- rew name for ‘salt’, and the derivation pattern is one that if found in the Hebrew Bible in the name of the owl, but has become remarkably product- ive in Israeli Hebrew zoonymy and phytonymy. The pattern ya⌂1⌂2ú⌂3 was in all likelihood of general semantic application, but it has become specialised in Israeli Hebrew for taxa names from zoology and botany, and this has resulted in a dynamic of it being applied more and more in that semantic domain, thus reinforcing the semantic specialisation of the pattern.

2.6. The Hebrew name ‹ḥlmwt› or ‹ḥlmyt› of the mallow (Malva)

In Modern Hebrew, the name for the genus Malva is ḥelmīṯ [xel'mit] ‹ḥlmyt›, a feminine noun already found in the Mishnah, where it is spelled ‹ḥlmyt›, whereas for the genus Malvella, a neologised compound was introduced: bat-ḥelmīṯ [batxel'mit] ‹bt-ḥlmyt›, literally ‘daughter of Malva’, reflecting the scientific name Malvella being formed as a diminutive of Malva (Ṣimḥē Ereṣ Yiśrā’ēl 1946, p. 31, §§ 560, 562) Israeli botanists refer to the family Malvaceae by the name ḥelmīṯiyyīm [xelmiti'yim] ‹ḥlmytyym›. Some species of Malva grow in dumps, and also some of the salty shrubs or grasses which in the Near East motivated the Northwest Semitic etymon of Latin mallua for Malva also grow in patches of land not used for farming. Whereas traditionally, some read the Mishnaic word ‹ḥlmyt› as ḥelmīṯ or ḥilmīṯ, others read it as ḥallāmīṯ (in fact, the latter is the way selected by Ḥanokh Yalon (Jellon), the voweller of the Bialik Institute’s 1959 edition of the Mishnah whose commentator was Ḥanokh Albeck. The form ḥallāmīṯ is closer to the Biblical Hebrew form ḥallāmūṯ from Job 6:6. Whereas some identified the Mishnaic ḥ‹ lmyt› with the genus Anchusa,56

56 “The genus Anchusa belongs to the tribe Boragineae of the borage family (Boraginaceae). It includes about 40 species” (https:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Anchusa). In particular, the species Anchusa arvensis (L.) M.Bieb. is known in English by the names Small Bugloss, Bugloss, and Annual Bugloss. The species

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Nathan ben Jechiel of Rome57 (1031 or 1035 – 1106 or 1110), in his famous glossary, the the ‘Arukh, rendered the Mishnaic ‹ḥlmyt› as ‹mlba› for Italian malva, which denotes the genus Malva, which is also denoted by the English noun mallow. In the third-century Tosefta, tractate Kil’ayim 3:12, as per the edition of Moses Samuel Zuckermandel (1880), one finds the spelling ḥ‹ ylmyt› (with the variant ‹ḥlmyt›). In the Palestinian (= Jerusalem) Talmud, tractate Berakhot VI, 10b bottom, one comes across the spelling ‹ḥlymh›, which would plausibly suggest the word was ḥălīmā, but Jastrow (1903, p. 471, col. 1), in his entry for for ḥelmā ‹ḥlmh› or ḥilmīṯ ‹ḥlmyt›, claimed that ‹ḥlymh› should be emended to ‹ḥylmh› ḥelmā.

The entry in Jastrow (1903, p. 471, col. 1) for ḥelmā ‹ḥlmh› or ḥilmīt ‹ḥlmyt›.

In his translation into German of the Hebrew Bible, Luther rendered (Löw, Die Flora der Juden, Vol. 4, p. 35–36) “mallūaḥ Nessel” and “ḥallāmūt Totter”. Job 6:6 states: “if there is taste in the mucilage (rīr) of ḥallāmū́ṯ” (spelled ‹ḥlmwt›). In his biblical concordance, Solomon Mandelkern (1977 [1896], p. 398, col. 3, s.v. ḥallāmū́ṯ) defined the term in Latin as “vitellus”

Anchusa azurea P.Mill. is known in English by the names garden anchusa, Italian Bugloss (or just bugloss), and Large Blue Alkanet. “In Crete it is called agoglossos (Greek: αγόγλωσσος) and the locals eat the tender stems boiled, steamed or fried. Numerous cultivars [i.e., cultivated varieties] have been selected for garden use” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchusa_azurea), but in various countries it is known as a noxious weed. The Modern Hebrew name of the genus Anchusa is lešōn ha-šōr, i.e. literally ‘tongue of the bull’. 57 See on him https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_ben_Jehiel His father, R. Jehiel ben Abraham (apparently of the Anau family), was a rabbi and hymnographer. Nathan himself was taught in Sicily by Matzliach ibn al-Batzaq (who had himself been taught in Baghdad by Hai Gaon, the last of the Pumbedita Geonim), and then in Narbonne by R. Moses ha-Darshan, and perhaps also in Pavia and Bari in Italy. After Jechiel died about the year 1070, his three sons led Rome’s rabbinic college. All Nathan’s own children died very young. He completed the ‘Arukh in February 1101.

(for the yolk of an egg), then remarked in Hebrew that interpretations vary between the yolk of an egg, this being the opinion of the majority, and those who understand the term as a name for Portulaca (purslane).58 He added further hypotheses of his own, such as a hungry man waking up after having swallowed his saliva and not being satiated by this, and the possibility that Job was ironising by wordplay on one of his companions who in his rebuke of Job, had mentioned “visions of the night”. The wordplay involved is in that Hebrew ḥalṓm denotes ‘dream’. Note that in both the Hebrew of the Babylonian Talmud (tractate Avodah Zarah 40a) and in Modern Hebrew, the yolk of an egg is called ḥelmṓn ‹ḥlmwn›, transpar- ently because it is firmer (rootḥ lm) than the white of the egg. (In Targumic Aramaic the yolk of an egg is called ḥelmōnā ‹ḥlmwn›: this is how the Targum to Job 6:6 renders Hebrew ḥallāmū́t ‹ḥlmwt›.) Also note the connection, in international folklore (e.g., Celtic lore) between dreaming and recovery from an illness. I have pointed out elsewhere that this dovetails with the similarity of Hebrew ḥalṓm ‘dream’ and Hebrew heḥĕlī́m ‘he recovered (from an illness)’, ‘he convalesced’ (the etymological sense being: ‘he recovered his strength’, ‘he grew stronger’). Nissan and Shemesh have written (2010 [2012]):

In the section following this one, we are going to see that cross-linguistic, cross- cultural evidence suggests that trance (ranging from dreaming, to being subject to a seizure, or as induced by drugs) may have been conceived of, also in Hebrew culture in the days from Samuel to David, as an experience fortifying not only for the spirit, but also for the body: the latter is suggested by lexicological considerations in Heb- rew, thus positing an even more ancient stage in which dream or trance experiences were taken to be related to healing. It is Saul’s tragedy that in his case, his loss of

58 Purslane (Portulaca olearacea) is an annual plant with fleshy, succulent leaves. It belongs to the family Portulacaceae. The article “Common Names of Commercially Cultivated Vegetables of the World in 15 Languages” by Stanley Kays and João Silva Dias (1995) — which has entries for four cultivated species of Portulacaceae — has, on p. 148, this entry for Potulaca oleracea (where EP stands for “edible part”, and P stands for “methods of preparation” (R for “raw”, C for “cooked”, and P for “preserved”): Portulaca oleracea L. (EP) leaves and young shoots; (P) R,C. (Eng[lish]) purslane; (Ara[bic]) bighel; (Chi[nese]) ma chi xian; (Dan[ish]) have-portulak, po rtulak; (Dut[ch]) postelein; (Fre) pourpier potager; (Ger[man]) Portulak; (Hin[di]) kulfa; (Ita[lian]) portulaca, porcellana; (Jpn [Japanese]) tachi suberi hiyu; (Mal[ay]) jerami; (Por[tuguese]) beldroega; (Rus[sian]) portulako gorodnyj; (Spa[nish]) verdolaga; (Tal [Tagalog]) kolasiman.

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consciousness or his trance fit into the harm he is incurring, instead of enhancing his royal and thus superior status.

For one thing, what appears to be Saul epileptic seizure lasting for the rest of the day and then all night, in the text only happened after, to a lesser degree, the men he had sent to seize David also ‘prophesied’. And besides, Saul also ‘prophesied’ and became “another man” (a positive, empowering transformation) after he was anointed king. The men whom Saul had sent to seize David saw a group of other men, ‘prophets’ under Samuel’s lead, and were in turn also inspired by the ruach of God “and prophesied, they too”. So the episode of Saul baring himself and falling to the ground is only different because of its stronger intensity. The crescendo is somewhat similar to the sequence in what happens in 2 Kings, ch. 1, to the successive groups of soldiers sent to bring to the king the prophet Elijah. Nissan and Shemesh (2010 [2012]) then also stated, in Section 9, “Signifi- ers for Dreaming, vs. Recovery and Strength: Cross-Linguistic Evidence”, the following:

The post-anointment, first episode (the one involving Saul) of prophets who ‘[were] prophesying’ is rendered by Targum Jonathan with the Aramaic for ‘[were] giving grace’. According to the medieval gloss by David Qimchi59 at 1 Samuel 10:5, “their prophesying was songs and praisegiving to God, uttered by divine inspiration.” Thus, Qimchi’s gloss harmonises the singing with the usual sense of ‘prophecy’. That a state of trance may result in a sense of strength or recovery is tentatively suggested by the following considerations about the lexical derivatives of the Hebrew (and Arabic) root ḥlm, none of which however occurs in 1 Samuel: Hebrew chalom ‘dream’, chalam ‘to dream’. The Hebrew verb chalam ‘to dream’ is frequent in the Pentateuch, less so elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, but at any rate it is standard in all strata of Hebrew. But as an inchoative verb, hechelim for ‘to recover’, ‘to become strong’, ‘to be strong’. The verb hechelim, now standard in Israeli Hebrew for ‘to be healed’ and ‘to convalesce’, first occurs in Isaiah 38:16. (There also are a few derivatives for hard or relatively firm stuff, from stone to the yolk of an egg.)

59 The Provençal exegete and grammarian Rabbi David Ḳimḥi (or Radaḳ, b. 1160?, d. 1235?) is one the main Jewish medieval biblical exegetes; Christian Hebraists or apologetes, too, published sometimes his biblical commentaries. David Ḳimḥi was the son of Joseph Ḳimḥi (b. ca. 1105, d. ca. 1170), a grammarian, exegete, apologete, and poet, who left Andalusia in the 1140s (as an effect of the Almohade conquest, which because of the intolerance of the new rulers was a disaster for the Jews of the region), and settled in Narbonne.

Lexicographers tend to treat these terms under two different lexemes of the root, but actually chalam and hechelim being co-derivatives may be an attestation from Sem- itic of a semantic link shown with crosslinguistic evidence from Indo-European and Ugro-Finnic in Benozzo (2009, sec. 2: “‘dormire/sognare’ e ‘guarire’”, pp. 24–25, and sec. 3: “‘guarire’ e ‘comporre poeticamente’”, pp. 26–27), interpreted ibid. (sec. 4: “Il contesto preistorico: l’incubazione iniziatico-sapienziale”). Cf. Aaron and Mir- iam being reproached (Numbers 12:6) with the statement that all prophets, except Moses, only prophesy while in a dream.

A variant (‹ḥlmyt› ḥallāmīṯ) of the Hebrew word ‹ḥlmwt› ḥallāmūṯ also occurs in Mishanic Hebrew, in the Mishnah (ca. 200 C.E.), tractate Kil’ayim 1:8. Of the latter, the following is the now classical English Soncino translation (Epstein 1935–1948, their brackets, my braces):

It is not permitted to plant herbs in a trunk of a sycamore. It is not permitted to graft rue on white cassia, since that is [grafting] a herb on a tree. It is forbidden to plant a young figshoot in a cistus shrub for the purpose of providing shade for the latter, or to insert a vine-shoot into a melon in order that the latter might contribute its moisture to the former, since that is [grafting] a tree on a herb. It is prohibited to place gourd seed into the juice of a mallow {literally: into the mallow} for the purpose of preserving the former, since that constitutes [grafting] a herb on a [heterogeneous] herb.

In his dictionary, Marcus Jastrow (1903, p. 471) s.v. ‹ḥlmwt› ḥallāmūṯ or ‹ḥlmyt› ḥallāmīṯ provided this definition: “mucilaginous juice of mallows, used for the preservation of gourd seed”. In Modern Hebrew, ḥallāmī́t ‹ḥlmyt› is the name for the genus Malva ‘mallow’. In Ḥanokh Albeck’s commentary in the 1959 edition of the Mishnah published by the Bialik Institute in Jerusalem, Albeck identifiedḥ allāmīṯ with the genus Anchusa, but signalled that the ‘Arukh (i.e., the famous glossary completed by Nathan ben Jechiel of Rome in February 1101) and others have identified it with Malva instead. In the first volume (actually published in 1928) of Löw’s Die Flora der Juden (1924–1934), on p. 292 he identified the genus Anchusa with the biblical ‹ḥlmwt› (ḥallāmū́ṯ) of Job 3:6. In a footnote on that same page, Löw signalled the Akkadian proper name ḫi-il-la-mu-tu. I would like the reader to bear in mind that the Hebrew and Phoenician letter for ḥ represented two different historical Semitic phonemes,ḥ and ḫ, and that in Akkadian, ḥ had disappeared from the language’s phonology, whereas ḫ was retained. Arabic possesses both ḥ and ḫ, and upon the evidence of cognates, we know that the root associated in both Arabic and Hebrew with the lexical concept ‘to dream’ is ḥlm, not *ḫlm.

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From Löw’s discussion of the lexical co-derivatives or variants ‹ḥlmyt›, ‹ḥlma›, and ‹ḥlymh› on p. 293, we quote the following:

The reference to the Harkavy Festschrift is to a volume (Guenzburg and Markon 1908) edited by Baron David von Günzburg (1857–1910) and Isaak Markon (1875–1949) in honour of Albert Harkavy (1835–1919). As for the reference to Guisius, it is to the latter’s Anmerkungen in der Mischna (as the bibliography in Vol. 4 of Löw’s Flora described it), edited by Surenhusius, and published in six volumes in Amsterdam in 1698–1703. What I am aware of is entitled “Misnae pars: ordinis primi Zeraim tituli septem: Latine vertit & commentario illustravit Gulielmus Guisius. Accedit Mosis Maimonidis praefatio in Misnam Edv. Pocockio interprete”, published in Oxford (“Oxoniae: e theatro Sheldoniano”) in 1690, by which time Guisius was no longer alive.

William Guise (Guilelmus Guisius) (c. 1653–1683), was an English orientalist. […] He went to Oriel College, Oxford at age 16. He was Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford from 1674 to 1680, being granted an MA [Master of Arts] in 1677. He spent

the last years of his life in St Mary’s College, Oxford. […] He is known for his scholarly work on Zeraim, an order of the Mishnah, for which he produced a Latin translation and commentary. He made use of a wide range of Islamic literature, and particularly relied on the Arabic dictionaries of Fairuzabadi and Jauhari. It was published as Misnae Pars (1690), edited by Edward Bernard.60

The Mishnah (compiled in early years of the third century C.E.) is divided into six orders that each comprise several tractates. All tractates (except the first one) in Order Zera‘im of the Mishnah (and of the two Talmudim, the Babylonian and the Palestinian, which elaborate on the Mishnah paragraph by paragraph) are in branches of Jewish law concerning agriculture or agricultural produce. Löw continued his discussion of the early rabbinic term on p. 293 in Vol. 1 of his Flora, whereas on p. 294, he turned to how Anchusa is named in Syriac. On p. 290, he listed dialectal Arabic names for various species of Anchusa. In Vol. 2 of his Flora, Löw treated Malvaceae on pp. 226–245, and the genus Malva in particular on pp. 227–234. On p. 230, he identified Malva with Biblical Hebrew ‹ḥlmwt› and Mishnaic Hebrew ‹ḥlmyt›. He also signals that glosses from Romance transcribed into the Hebrew script are found in the Sefer He‘Arukh, the famous glossary61 by Nathan ben Jechiel of Rome (1031 or 1035 – 1106 or 1110), as ‹mlba› for Italian malva; and in Rashi’s glosses to the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Shabbath 35b, and to Job 30:4 (‹mlwwa› for Old French malve, and in the plural ‹mlwwš› for malves). On pp. 230–231, still s.v. Malva, Löw wrote as follows concerning Mishnaic Hebrew ‹ḥlmyt› and concerning rīr ḥallāmū́ṯ (spelled ‹ryr ḥlmwt›) in Job 6:6:

60 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Guise 61 It is a lexicon with entries and definition in Hebrew and Aramaic, as well as glosses from languages known in early medieval Italy. The current, much expanded edition is the one compiled by Alexander Kohut, Aruch completum (Kohut 1878–1892). The transcription ‹mlba› of Italian malva is found there, as Löw signals, at 3, 246b, and at 6, 391a.

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Löw’s reference to Pinsker is to Likkute Kadmoniyyot (i.e., ‘collected antiquities’) by Simcha Pinsker (b. 1801, d. 1864), published by Della Torre in Vienna in 1860, but with Russian governmental funding. It is a history of the Karaism, the religion of the Karaites62 (dat bnei dat mikra), and of their literature, based upon Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts.

62 The Karaites are non-rabbinic Jews, seceding in early Caliphal Mesopotamia, and still extant. Karaism as a religious denomination and faith community (at present numbering a few thousands) originated in the eighth century in the Abbasid Caliphate, producing their earliest literature there (in modern Iraq, their centre was in the town of Hīt). They only recognise biblical law, but not the authority of the Talmud. There were important Karaite communities in Egypt (up to modern times) and in medieval Spain (where, unlike in Egypt, relations with rabbinic Jews were bad), as well as in medieval Constantinople (there still exists a community of nearly eighty Karaites in Istanbul), and, from the 14th century to modern times, in Crimea, a major centre of the Karaites, like the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, especially Trakai in modern-day Lithuania (“Troki”), but also other cities of Lithuania proper. Crimean and Lithuanian Karaites have their respective dialects of the Karaim language, which is Kypchak Turkic and related to related to Crimean Tatar and Armeno-Kipchak. (In fact, the late tsarist and then Soviet policy of dejudaising the Karaites aimed at a Turkic myth of origin.) Other Karaites lived in Halicz and Kokizow in Galicia, as well as in Łuck and Derazhne in Volhynia. From the Middle Ages to modern times there also has been a small Karaite community in Jerusalem. Egypt’s Karaites moved to the State of Israel (where there are between 35,000 and 40,000 Karaites, by far most being of Egyptian or Iraqi Karaite descent; their centre is in Ramla). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaite_Judaism and see e.g. Nathan Schur’s (1992) History of the Karaites; Fred Astren’s (2004) Karaite Judaism and Historical Understanding; as well as the edited volume Karaite Judaism (Polliack 2004), and Karaite Studies, a volume edited by Philippe Birnbaum (1971). Also see Mikhail Kizilov’s (2009) The Karaites of Galicia: An Ethnoreligious Minority among the Ashkenazim, the Turks, and the Slavs, 1772–1945. Cf. Simon Szyszman’s booklet (1889) Les Karaïtes d’Europe.

By Kaftor, Löw meant Kaftor va-feraḥ.63 It is a book in Hebrew by the Provençal-born author Estori (Eśtori) ha-Parḥi (Isaac ben Moses), whose name is spelled ‹ʔštwry hprḥy› in the Hebrew script, and who lived in the late 13th and early 14th centuries (perhaps b. 1288, d. 1355). In the introduction to his book, Estori spelled his Provençal first name ʔ‹ yš twry›, apparently so that it would be read in Hebrew as Ish Tori, punningly in the sense ‘man of the Torah’.64 His family originated in Florencia in Andalusia, hence his Hebrew surname ha-Parḥi. This is because Spanish

In the late 19th century, the tsarist authorities agreed to free the Karaites from anti-Jewish legislation if they could prove they were already in Crimea at the time of the Crucifixion, and were convinced by purported evidence produced by Abraham Firkovitch (1786–1874). Tsarist Russia recognised the Karaites as being of Turkic, not Jewish origin. In the early 20th century, that theory was promoted by Seraya Shapshal, who reformed East Europe’s Karaism accordingly, aiming at cultural Turkification, even introducing ancient Turkic pagan elements such as the veneration of old oaks; the Soviet authorities only allowed the teaching of the Shapsalian doctrine. Nazi Germany considered the Karaites as being racially not Jewish, but nevertheless there were massacres of Karaites in the early stages of the Second World War. “German allies such as Vichy France began to require the Karaites to register as Jews, but eventually granted them non-Jewish status after getting orders by Berlin” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Karaites). Dejudaisation of the Karaites of Russian lands is the subject of a book by Roman Freund (1991), Karaites and Dejudaization: A Historical Review of an Endogenous and Exogenous Paradigm. 63 The title Kaftor va-féraḥ of that medieval book (the title being wordplay on its author’s name) literally means ‘bud and flower’, or rather, ‘knop and flower’ (as these alternated in the golden candlestick at the Temple of Jerusalem: the phrase occurs in that context in Exodus 25:33 and in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Menaḥot 28b), and is an expression of approval (in the sense “Well and nicely said”, as Jastrow 1903, s.v. kaftor, renders it), allegedly — according to Genesis Rabbah 91 — used by a particular Sage, Rabbi Tarfon (Tryphon), active in the Land of Israel in the first third of the second century C.E., something which is at present understood as having possibly been a modification (in order to avoid idolatrous reference) of the Graeco-Roman exclamation Castor and Pollux! Such an impact of Greek in Roman- age Palestine was examined by Saul Lieberman / Liebermann (19421, 19652). Also see Daniel Sperber’s article (2006) “Rabbinic Knowledge of Greek”. 64 Likewise, in the early modern and modern period, an Italian Jewish family in the Emilia region of Italy spelled (or others spelled it for them) in the Hebrew script their surname Ventura as ‹ben twrh› ben/ven Torah, ‘son of the Torah’. The Italian Jewish-born Rubino Ventura from Finale Emilia in the Duchy of Modena, who was a Napoleonic officer, as Jean-Baptiste Ventura went on to become a colonel in the service of Persia, and then a general in the service of the Sikh kingdom of Punjab

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/ 76 Ephraim Nissan flor ‘flower’ has the same denotation as Hebrew péraḥ. He was raised in Provence, and studied rabbinics in Montpellier from prominent rabbis, R. Jacob ben Makhir and R. Asher ben Yeḥiel. He also studied medicine. After the expulsion of the Jews from France in 1306 (as Provence, except the papal Comtat Venassin, already belonged to France), Estori moved to Barcelona, then to Toledo. He then resided in Cairo a few years (or perhaps several), before moving to Jerusalem. Being well disposed towards the philosopher and rabbinic legal and ritual codifier Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), certainly as early as Estori’s years in Provence (something possibly reinforced, I reckon, by his stay in Cairo, where there had been a line of communal leaders descended from Maimonides), Estori disliked it that in Jerusalem in his days, dislike for Maimonides was widespread

(where also Jean-François Allard, Paolo Di Avitabile, and and Claude August Court were serving), and governor of Lahore. “He spent his spare time in Peshawar exhuming Bactrian Greek and Kushan coins from Buddhist stupas in the Khyber Pass, making numerous excavations then sending the findings on to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Ventura). There exists a book by Maria Pia Balboni about him (1993).

Jean-Baptiste (formerly Rubino) Ventura (Finale Emilia, 1794 – Lardenne near Toulouse, 1858).

(Maimonides was controversial also in Provence). Estori then left Jeru- salem (Elitzur 1958/9), and resided in the town of Beir-She’an (known in Arabic as Beisān) in the southeastern Galilee, and earned a living as a physician. In that town, he would have been respected because of his learning and social role, and within the local small Jewish community, attitudes concerning Maimonides would presumably not have been their cup of tea. Having travelled through the Land of Israel during seven years, in order to see places with his own eyes, Estori wrote about the country: Kaftor va-feraḥ is a book comprising sixty chapters, in Hebrew, about the geography and antiquities of the land. He travelled in the country, ac- quainted himself not only with Arabic, but also with Arabic toponyms and plant-names, and tried to identify places with places named in the Hebrew Bible or Roman-age rabbinic literature. Of his 180 toponomastic identifications, most are now held to be correct. His other writings, which he mentioned in his book Kaftor va-feraḥ, were mostly in medicine, and are no longer extant. Estori’s book Kaftor va-feraḥ was first printed in Venice in 1549. An edition by Edelmann had appeared in Berlin in 1852, and an edition by Luncz in Jerusalem in 1899. Löw briefly indicated in his bibliography the existence of those editions. Fuller information is provided here: the Ven- ice editio princeps was entitled Sefer kaftor (without va-feraḥ), and was printed by Meir ben Jacob Frantz in 1549 indeed. (According to the Copac database,65 some folios are misbound, and some folios are wrongly foli- ated as per the Hebrew numeration.) In 1852 (but according to the data in Hebrew in the front matter, in the year 5611 Anno Mundi, thus in 1850/1), the publisher Julius Zittenfeld published in Hebrew the book “Caftor wa-pherach, liber in quo de ritibus Terram Sanctam spectantibus […] agitur”, edited by Hirsch Edelmann (b. 1805, d. 1858), as per the Hebrew script Tsvi Hirsh Edelman. That edition was reprinted in Jerusalem by Y.F. Grossberg in the year 5719 Anno Mundi (i.e., 1958 or 1959). Abraham Moses Luncz (b. 1854, d. 1918) was the editor of an edition in two volumes in Hebrew, published in Jerusalem (s.n.)66 in the years

65 The bibliographical database http://www.copac.ac.uk of scholarly libraries in the British Isles. https://discover.libraryhub.jisc.ac.uk replaces it from 2019. 66 But another Copac record indicated this was in Frankfurt am Main.

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5657 and 5759 Anno Mundi (i.e., 1896/7 and 1898/9), of — to say it with the French title page — “Caftor va-pherach: contenant toutes les lois re- ligieuses concernant la Terre-Sainte, la Topographe de tout le pays et ses divisions”.67 Löw’s reference to Musil is to Vol. 3 of Arabia Petraea by Alois Musil (b. 1868, d. 1944); the three volumes first appeared in 1907–1908, and were republished in 1989. The three volumes are concerned with southern Transjordan. The first two volumes are in topography (Vol. 1 on Moab, and Vol. 2 on Edom), whereas Vol. 3 is in ethnology. As for Georges Marçais, in full Georges Alfred Marçais (Rennes, 1876 – Paris, 1962), he was an Orientalist, especially acrive in art history (he also was a painter). He was the first to hold the chair in Archéologie

67 There also exists a German version, published by S. Zuckermann in Jerusalem in 1912) is a book of nearly 100 pages, “Die Geographie Palästinas von Estori haf- Farchi, bearbeitet, übersetzt und erläutert von L. Grünhut”, this being Lazar Grünhut (b. 1850, d. 1913), by whom also see the article “Der Raum des Tempels nach Estori hap-Parchi” — not “Die Geographie Palästinas nach Estori Farchi”, the way the paper’s title was cited by Yehudah Elitzur (1958/9) — in Vol. 31 (1908) of the Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins. By the way, note that a Farḥi family in Syria was prominent and politically influential in the 18th and 19th centuries. Lazar Grünhut (who is known in Hebrew as El‘azar ha-Levi Grinhut) was (to say it with https:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazar_Grünhut) “born at Gerenda, Hungary, May 10, 1850 – died in Petah Tikva [now in Israel], February 2, 1913) Hungarian rabbi and writer. He is especially renowned for his research [and] publications in the field of Midrash. Receiving his diploma as rabbi while a mere youth, he went to Berlin, where he attended the lectures of Dr. Israel Hildesheimer at the rabbinical seminary, as well as those at the university. He graduated (Ph.D.) from the University of Bern. For eleven years he officiated as rabbi at Temesvár, Hungary. ¶ In 1892, he moved to Jerusalem on invitation to be director of the Jewish orphanage at Jerusalem. There he was active in teaching and in Zionist political activism. He was active in the Mizrachi [national religious] movement and was their representative in the Zionist Congress”. Such midrashim that were researched by Grünhut included Kohelet Rabbah (on Ecclesiastes), Midrash Shir ha-Shirim, and Yalḳuṭ ha-Makhiri. Other editions of the Hebrew text of Kaftor va-feraḥ have appeared meanwhile, such as the one edited by Rabbis Avraham Yosef Ḥavatselet and Yeraḥmi’el Dobrovitser, published in Jerusalem in 1997; or then the edition (published in New York in two volumes in 1958 and 1963, totalling 977 pages) with a rabbinic commentary entitled Gan Yosef (i.e. ‘garden of Joseph’) by Joseph Blumenfeld. There also exists an edition (only the first part) which appeared in Jerusalem by Mosad ha-Rav Kuk in the year 5706 Anno Mundi (i.e., 1945 or 1946, but it was 1946), with an introduction by Yehudah Leib ha-Kohen Fishman, and a commentary

Musulmane at the University of Algiers. In 1929, he became director of the Musée des Antiquités et de l’Art Musulman d’Alger. In 1935, he moved to the Institut d’Études Orientales as its director.68

3. De Vaan’s entry for paelex ‘mistress’, Saul Levin’s hypotheses for the same and for Latin asinus, and a nest of hornets: controversies

Consider this entry from de Vaan’s (2008) etymological dictionary of Latin:

paelex, -icis ‘mistress’ [f. k] (Pl.+; also pēlex, pellex) Usually compared with OIr. oirech ‘a type of concubine’, Gr. παλλακή ‘concubine’, πάλλαξ ‘young woman’, Av. pairikā- ‘witch’. But Irish has -r-, Av. has *parikā-, and Gr. has a and ll, none of which match the Latin form. Within Latin, it seems more straightforward to derive paelex from *paed-Vk-s, to paedor ‘dirt’. But even this is only a guess which cannot be substantiated. Levin 1983 regards paelex as a borrowing from a Mediterranean language, maybe Semitic, in view of Hebrew plgš /pi(y)leɣeš/ ‘concubine’.

The Biblical Hebrew noun pilégeš (plural pilagšīm) is clearly a loanword; its word-form is foreign, and there is no co-derivative within Hebrew. The term is probably non-Semitic. The bibliography of de Vaan’s etymological dictionary only includes one entry by Saul Levin (1983), but it is important to consult, for possible language contacts of Northwest Semitic with Greek and Latin, his two books69 (Levin 1995, 2002); among his papers, also see Levin (1996 [1999]; 1982; 1988). More or less, I have found his lexical studies not infrequently cogent, whereas his claims about morphology are questionable. This is why I found Levin’s (1995) Semitic and

entitled Pirḥe Tsiyyon (i.e. ‘flowers of Zion’) by Yehudah Yeroḥam Fishel Perla; it was reprinted by Mosad ha-Rav Kuk in 1986 (the commentary is indicated in the cover title of the 1986 rpint as being by the “gry"f Perla”, which stands acronymously for “ha-Ga’on Rabbi Yehudah Fishel Perla”). 68 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Marçais 69 When he was convalescent, Levin was helped with the preparation of the index by John Pairman Brown, the author (1995, 2000) of Israel and Hellas, Beiheifte zur Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft.

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Indo-European: The Principal Etymologies70 more appealing than Levin’s (2002) Semitic and Indo-European, II: Comparative Morphology, Syntax and Phonetics, which I found rather unconvincing. Unlike in a book of his of 1971, Levin (2002) was concerned, as far as I understood it, with such phenomena that could be taken to be areal phenomena. Francesco Aspesi, who criticised Levin (1971) harshly (Aspesi 2004 [1978]),71 has been himself involved (quite interestingly in Aspesi 1984) in detecting such non-lexical linguistic areal phenomena that affect

70 The publisher’s blurb (actually by Saul Levin) of Levin (1995) states: “This volume presents the key examples of morphological correspondences between Indo-European and Semitic languages, afforded by nouns, verbal roots, pronouns, prepositions, and numerals. Its focus is on shared morphology embodied in the cognate vocabulary. The facts that are brought out in this volume do not fit comfortably within either the Indo-Europeanists’ or the Semitists’ conception of the prehistoric development of their languages. Nonetheless they are so fundamental that many would take them for evidence of a single original source, ‘Proto-Nostratic’. In this book, however, it is considered unsettled whether proto-IE and proto-Semitic had a common forerunner. But the IE–Semitic combinations testify at least to prehistoric language communities in truly intimate contact”. 71 In his article “Considerazioni sullo studio dei rapporti fra lingue camito-semitiche e lingue indeuropee” — along with briefly, harshly criticising how amateurishly the common roots of the Semitic and Indo-European vocabularies were collected by Linus Brunner (1969) — Francesco Aspesi stated (2004 [1978], pp. 10–11): “L’opera di Saul Levin, The Indo-European and Semitic Languages, del 1971, costituisce la seconda eccezione [to thirty years of neglect on the part of historical linguists of Semitic-IE relations]. Sicuri meriti di tale lavoro sono la scelta di operare con singole lingue attestate, anziché con entità come l’indeuropeo e il camito-semitico e il conseguente riconoscimento di alcune isoglosse significative fra lingue solitamente confrontate solo all’interno delle rispettive famiglie, cioè il sanscrito e il greco da una parte e l’ebraico dall’altra. Nel complesso però il libro in questione non può essere giudicato che negativamente. Non è questa la sede per mettere in rilievo alcune inaccettabili premesse metodologiche come quella che porta il Levin a trascurare la testimonianza del consonantismo e a mettere a base dei confronti per l’ebraico la prosodia e, in particolare, il vocalismo tramandatoci dalla tarda e contaminata tradizione masoretica [cf. Levin (1973)]. Voglio solo sottolineare come la paradossale conclusione di questa ricerca, cioè che l’ebraico biblico sarebbe una lingua indeuropea semitizzata, derivi anche dalla confusione del piano tipologico e di quello storico, confusione particolarmente dannosa nello studio delle affinità fra lingue ‘tipologicamente’ eterogenee, cioè appartenenti, per usare una terminologia tradizionale, a famiglie linguistiche diverse. ¶ Mi limiterò a un solo esempio: quando il Levin sostiene che il morfema di femminile dell’ebraico terminerebbe originariamente nella laringale ancora attestata dalla grafia e non più

Northwest Semitic as well as Indo-European languages of the Eastern Mediterranean (such as Greek), and ancient Egyptian. It is likely that what Aspesi has found all the more irksome in Levin (1971), is how Levin went about the task of comparing individual forms of languages such as Heb- rew, Greek, and Sanskrit,72 while shunning the practice of comparing Pro- to-Indo-European and Proto-Semitic:73 Levin (1971, p. 7) claimed “that a worthwhile comparison should not rest upon proto-IE and proto-Semitic,

pronunciata per poterne dimostrare l’identità con le terminazioni -ᾶ e -η del greco, trascura ingiustificatamente la testimonianza della originaria -t conservata nello stato costrutto ebraico e soprattutto nelle altre lingue camito-semitiche. Gli eventuali contatti diretti o mediati col greco possono aver solo rinforzato l’evoluzione -t (> -h) > -Ø, che d’altra parte si è separatamente verificata per questo morfema nell’egiziano della fine dell’Antico Regno (seconda metà del terzo millennio) e nei dialetti arabi rispetto all’arabo classico. I fatti comuni che caratterizzano la distinzione dei generi nelle lingue camito-semitiche e indeuropee costituiscono un’isoglossa morfologica di fondo e non possono quindi facilmente essere utilizzati per deduzioni di carattere storico. Devono essere oggetto, almeno per ora, soprattutto di una considerazione d’ordine tipologico e quindi indagati tenendo conto di tutte le lingue tipologicamente affini; in ogni caso non possono venire esaminati separatamente in due sole lingue (come fa il Levin col greco e con l’ebraico) con la pretesa di trarne conclusioni storicamente definibili sui loro contatti reciproci”. Concerning Levin’s emphasis on prosody, which Aspesi lamented, consider that Levin authored an article, “The Traditional Chironomy of the Hebrew Scriptures” (Levin 1968), about the cantillation marks of the prosody of the Hebrew Bible. Cf. Israel Yeivin’s book (1980) Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, M.B. Cohen’s book (1969) The System of Accentuation in the Hebrew Bible; and, on Masoretic cantillation marks’ impact on exegesis, Goren (1995), Kogut (1996), Carasik (2001), and also see Breuer (1992). 72 Saul Levin IN replied (1974) to a review in the journal Classical Philology with these words: “Professor Gordon Messing’s review of my book, The Indo-European and Semitic Languages, in C P, LXVIII (1973), 301, was unfortunately based on an advance copy with a defective title page, omitting the explanatory subtitle, An Exploration of Structural Similarities Related to Accent, Chiefly in Greek, Sanskrit, and Hebrew. As soon as I discovered the omission in the design of the title page, the publisher agreed to print up little stickers with the subtitle, and to mail one to each reviewing journal that had received an advance copy. But not every sticker reached its destination. At least one of Professor Messing’s objections to the book could have been forestalled, had he been aware of the subtitle and understood my intention accordingly”. 73 Carleton Hodge published several articles about Lislakh. In an obituary, Alan Kaye explained: “This was Hodge’s term for the ancestral proto-language of Proto- Afroasiatic and Proto-Indo-European based on Proto-Lislakh *lis- ‘language’ + *laxwos ‘people’. See Hodge (1978), (1979), (1981), (1982b), (1983a), (1984), and

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/ 82 Ephraim Nissan which have no objective existence”. In Cardona (1972), George Cardona of the University of Pennsylvania (not to be confused with Giorgio Rai- mondo Cardona of the University La Sapienza in Rome) offered a rather detailed criticism of Levin (1971), especially by refuting such selective morphological comparisons to Sanskrit as Levin had offered.74 Cyrus

(1987). Hodge also invented the term Lisramic for Afroasiatic (which replaced older Hamito-Semitic) based on PAA *lis ‘language’ + Proto-Egyptian rāməč ‘people’ (see Hodge 1972, 1975b, and 1983b). Neither Lislakh nor Lisramic ever caught on for various reasons” (Kaye 2002, p. 158). Kaye has opposed Nostratic fiercely (Kaye 1999). Kaye has also been harsh concerning Levin (1995), and Levin singled out Kaye in naming him alone, among critics, in the title of his response to the critics of Levin’s book (1995) in Levin (1996 [1999]). In his harsh review of Orel and Stolbova (1995), Kaye (1997) warned as well as conceded (ibid., pp. 366–367): “Of course, what is reasonable for one linguist might be unreasonable for another. I have little problem, e.g., in accepting the idea of PAA [i.e., Proto-Afro-Asiatic] *kan- ‘dog’ (#1425, p. 311) being related to PAA *kun- ‘dog’ (#1498, p. 327), since even proto-type [sic] languages can be assumed to have had dialects, just like present-day languages (this is but one reason why I prefer the term ‘proto-type’ language over the more traditional but inadequate designation ‘protolanguage’). This may be deemed the principle of reasonable cognation. However, no matter how tempting it would be to relate, say, Latin canis ‘dog’ (= *kan-) as a cognate in a larger phylum (e.g., PAA-Indo-European), this would, in my opinion, be pseudo-science in terms of today’s comparative method and its limitations (the possibility of borrowing is yet another matter entirely). The lexeme canis is happily, in fact, not utilized by Saul Levin in his Semitic and Indo-European: the principal etymologies with observations on Afro-Asiatic (Amsterdam: John Benamins, 1995), since — like Malay mata ‘eye’ and Modern Greek mati ‘eye’ — they are not cognates. After all, it is well-known that Persian bad ‘bad’ is not cognate with English bad, even though Persian and English are both Indo-European languages. […]”. Kaye (1997) concluded by stating: “Although it has been said many times before, the following still needs reiterating: in comparative linguistics it seems that anything goes, because there are no sanctions on poor or unreasonable comparisons”. In fact, being able to point out kana ‘dog’ in Wollamo, a West Cushitic language, is nothing to enthuse about in relation to Latin canis. Consider indeed the context of the term within closer languages, in Joseph Greenberg’s (1950a) discussion of Hamito-Semitic: “dog: Chad—Hausa (1) kare; Klesem (2) kere; Logone (2) kəle; Sukur (3) kirra; Muturuwa (4) kirri; Gidder (5) kra; Mandara (6) kare Cushite— Wollamo (W) kana; Kule (E) karo-; Saho (E) kare” (ibid., p. 60). 74 “While I have considered only a few of Levin’s suggested comparisons, I think they are representative. I also think he has not succeeded in establishing comparisons between IE and Semitic which can be justified in the procedures of comparison and reconstruction. Of course Levin explicitly rejects such usual procedures. He

Gordon’s (1975) evaluation of Levin (1971) was cautious, ambivalent, and noncommittal.75 The review of Levin (1971) that was the most damningly harsh because of the points it was making, was (as far as I am aware) the one by Robert Hetzron (1977). He began as follows (his brackets):

The author of this book committed a serious tactical error by publishing his daring hypotheses in the shape of a lengthy collection of short essays which, like a mosaic,

considers the notion of an ancestral proto-Semitic speech community a myth (p. 714). He concludes that the forerunner of Hebrew ‘seems to have been in contact with the remote forerunners of S[anskrit] and G[reek] as early as the age when the genesis of these two languages was joint’ (p. 717). And he tells us the object of this work is to show H[ebrew] and Am [Aramaic] have not only a Semitic heritage but also an IE heritage (p. 714). ¶ These are interesting and challenging theses. But to me Levin’s overlooking of important details of IE (I cannot speak of Semitic with authority) and the comparative method severely attenuates his conclusions” (Cardona 1972, p. 1490, my brackets). 75 Gordon (1975) began with praise for the man: “Professor Saul Levin is an outstanding linguist with complete intellectual integrity. The book before us is a magnum opus. It deals with linguistic relations between Semitic and IE (Indo-European). Levin wisely [N.B.!] refrains from operating with parent languages such as ‘Proto-Semitic’ and ‘Primitive IE’ but instead forms in Hebrew, Greek, Sanskrit, and to a lesser extent other languages. ¶ There are two ways in which languages can be interrelated. (1) The genetic (or tree trunk) relationship implies that two forms of speech are derived from the same parent stock (like two branches growing from the same trunk). (2) Linguistic alliance implies that two speech communities have interacted so intimately that features penetrated the other. Such features may include not only words (i.e. loanwords) but also grammatical and even syntactic elements. People have moved about so much since the Early Stone Age that numerous relationships exist among the strangest combinations of languages”. Then Gordon briefly explained quite generally the dubious standing of claims about Nostratic, while agreeing that the dual is a feature shared by Semitic and Greek: “The IE duals (as in Greek) and the Semitic duals (as in Hebrew) seem to be related in sound as well as meaning (see pp. 34–115 [in Levin 1971]). Moreover, those duals in IE and Semitic give every indication of being survivals rather than innovations in both sets of languages, where their use tends to diminish with the passing of time and where they have fewer case distinctions than the singular. The duals are definitely a feature spanning both families. But where do we go from here? Nostratic studies have produced a host of relationships, real or fancied, among ostensibly unrelated families. Most linguists, who deal with more limited problems, look askance at such hazardous topics”. Gordon himself deemed that “it is a fact that the time is not yet ripe for such investigations”. Then Gordon referred to his own experience with dealing with languages from the ancient Eastern Mediterranean: “I have worked on Egypto-Semitic, where the evidence is abundant

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are supposed to fit together into a picture showing a genetic relationship between Indo- European and Semitic. The essays themselves often deal with such minute details that they appear quite disproportionate to the magnitude of the author’s main contention. Dealing with the possibility of genetic connexions on this level may be nightmar- ishly complicated, because a large number of hypothetical intermediary stages, the successive branchings, have to be posited. The author objects to the reconstruction of proto-forms that can serve as a basis for comparison (5 ff.) on the grounds that such proto-forms or proto-languages can never ‘be more than a theory’ (5), that they ‘have no objective existence’ (7), and their reconstruction ‘would be premature and would encumber rather than facilitate the analysis of similarities and differences’ (6). Therefore, he finds it appropriate to compare forms as attested and recorded in the actual languages. For him ‘the language of the received texts in those manuscripts [Homeric poems, the Rigveda, the Hebrew Bible] must be taken to go indefinitely far back for we have no data about the language as it was earlier’ (11, cf. 347). This logic is quite astonishing. I cannot conceive why reconstructed hypothetical forms are not good enough for the establishment of reconstructed hypothetical relationships which have no more ‘objective existence’ than the proto-forms themselves. Lack of data on the earlier stages of a language does not mean that the earliest attested language goes ‘indefinitely far back’. The reconstruction of proto-forms is ‘premature’ only to those who have not had a chance to study all the major Semitic languages. If some reconstructed forms do ‘encumber... the analysis of similarities ...’, something must be wrong with this analysis. On the basis of Levin’s reasoning, Hungarian and Soddo (Ethiopian Semitic) may be related. The numeral ‘2’ is kettö in Hungarian and kitt in Soddo. Only reconstruction through comparison with related languages will show that the Hungarian word comes from something like *kakte, while the Soddo one originates in the well-known root klʔ followed by the feminine ending -t. For Semitic, Levin mainly uses Massoretic Hebrew (codified at a period when Heb- rew was no more spoken), with a little Aramaic and a tiny pinch of Arabic. In his

and relatively promising. Beyond a certain point, the comparisons are unconvincing to Semitists and Egyptologists alike. I have also worked on linguistic features that span IE and Egypto-Semitic in the Mediterranean within well-defined historical, chronological, and geographical limits. Such studies tend to alienate the scholars in the component fields and isolate the investigators whose ranging minds and broad knowledge attract them to bold comparisons. ¶ Such work must be done because the problems are real. Someday the level and state of linguistic and historical studies may provide a climate more conducive to positive and acceptable results. Meanwhile I am glad that Levin’s monumental has seen the light of day, and that he has turned his attention to other topics (p. x) that should lead to gratifying results without frustration”. The latter sentence can be read as espressing irony, and yet empathy.

innocent ignorance of Semitic as a whole, he manages to wave aside all the achieve- ments of comparative Semitics. Hetzron went on to show misunderstandings in Levin (1971) of some fine point in Hebrew historical linguistics (but it is about the dual, of which Levin was making so much), and some basic point about Arabic. Hetzron Concluded by remarking: “He also makes a number of points that deserve closer attention. Eventually, Hamito-Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) and Indo-Eu- ropean may be related, and the question should be examined in depth. Yet it is clear that in order to say anything serious on the topic, better method- ology, a more professional treatment of the problem is necessary”. It may be that Levin made things even more difficult for himself, because of his kindness to some other authors. He prefaced a book of over 700 pages (roughly the length of Levin 1971), entitled Hebrew is Greek and published in 1982 by Becket Publications of Oxford, and authored by the lawyer Joseph Yahuda, who had contacted him after the publication of Levin (1971). Levin was sent pages of the proof piecemeal, and had not seen the entire manuscript when he agreed, with some reluctance, to write the preface (or “introduction”), which he did gradually. Appallingly, a webpage of 2015 entitled “Hebrew is Greek – The ‘blocked’ book of Joseph Yahuda”,76 intent on extolling that book yet bereft of any scholarly facet, turns against Levin, revealing as though an untoward reason why he had not been enthusiastic about the prefacing task which in fact he had carried out (the brackets are in the webpage):

[For a better understanding as to why Professor Levin was not enthusiastic about writing the introduction, consider the fact that] the black Jew,77 Martin Bernal, has stated:

76 http://www.bristolgreeks.co.uk/index.php/heritage/gnosis/did-you-know/item/89- hebrew-is-greek-the-blocked-book-of-joseph-yahuda That webpage about Joseph Yahuda’s book states: “The introduction was written by Jewish professor Saul Levin, though no enthusiasm on his part was evident in his introduction.” 77 Martin Bernal was born in Britain in 1937, and is a Sinologist, specialised in the intellectual history of Chinese/Western exchanges around the year 1900. His Cambridge doctoral thesis is entitled Chinese Socialism before 1913. Martin Bernal’s father was the renowned British crystallographer John Desmond Bernal (1901– 1971), who also was a Marxist historian of science. Martin Bernal’s mother Margaret wrote an autobiography in her eighties, and his maternal grandfather belonged to a very wealthy family and was the famous British Egyptologist Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner (1879–1863). The background of John Desmond Bernal was Irish. Martin Bernal’s maternal grandmother has a half-Jewish background. Martin Bernal’s

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“Saul Levin was among the many Jewish individuals who worked on the publication of [my] book, Black Athena.” A book which has been deemed to be a disgrace and a discredit to serious scholarship by the vast majority of specialists who have read it.

Needless to say, whereas Black Athena (the series of three books by Martin Bernal) — e.g., Bernal’s Egyptocentric linguistic claims, but more generally, his claims about the place of Africa in the history of civilisation in the Mediterranean, as well as specific errors — has given rise to a legitimate controversy, it was conducted on more or less urbane lines, which is the case of a Dutch journal special issue (van Binsbergen 1996–1997) devoted to it, in which in particular Arno Egberts (1996–1997) provided a confutation of Bernal’s Greek-Egyptian etymologies of Athena (Linear B Atana, Doric Athānā, Ionic Athēnē) and Parthenōn. (In the United States and Britain, the debate was more vehement. But there are ways of being urbanely nasty or of being urbanely vehement.) At any rate, though controversial, Black Athena was not “a disgrace and a discredit”, and perhaps something as utterly naïve as to be entitled Hebrew is Greek is not either, at any rate as compared to the lines I have just quoted. The second volume of Black Athena (Bernal 1991) was more controversial than the first volume (Bernal 1987);78 the reason for this is explained in Section 6, “The Black Athena Debate” (pp. 44–50), of Wim van Binsbergen’s long introduction,

maternal family used to own a tea plantation in Malawi, and the family belonged to the British upper class. Martin Bernal visited the plantation as a boy, bore corporate responsibility for it as an adult, and then chose to get rid of it as he considered it an ethically unacceptable asset. His career was in the United States. 78 The last volume was Bernal (2006). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Athena states: “Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization […] is a scholarly work by Martin Bernal. He discusses ancient Greece in a new light. Bernal’s thesis discusses the perception of ancient Greece in relation to Greece’s African and Asiatic neighbors, especially the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians who, he believes, colonized ancient Greece. Bernal proposes that a change in the Western perception of Greece took place from the 18th century onward and that this change fostered a subsequent denial by Western academia of any significant African and Phoenician influence on ancient Greek civilization. ¶Black Athena has been criticized by academics. They often highlight the fact that there is no archaeological evidence for ancient Egyptian colonies in mainland Greece or the Aegean Islands. Scholarly reviews of Bernal’s work generally reject his heavy reliance on ancient Greek mythology, speculative assertions, and handling of archaeological, linguistic, and historical data”. “Critics voice their strongest doubts over Bernal’s approach to language and word derivations (etymologies)” (ibid.).

“Black Athena Ten Years After: Towards a Constructive Re-assessment”, to his thematic issue of Talanta (van Binsbergen 1996–1997). Saul Levin himself made himself into an arbiter (Levin 1964) in a controversy, the one concerning Michael Ventris’ decipherment of Linear B: as Antonio Tovar put it (1966, p. 364),

[H]e has consulted (so he confesses in his preface) some scholars who are well known for their reluctance to accept the achievement of Ventris (Jane E. Henle, E. Grumach, K. D. Ktistopoulos), and he intends to give proof of openmindedness by taking what he calls (p. 5) “an intermediate position”. He vaguely acknowledges Ventris’ results, but at the same time he lets a shadow fall on the whole, and fills the reader with suspicion against what, according to his book, is rather a series of more or less happy guesses mingled with uncertainties and arbitrary solutions.79

79 Tovar concluded (1966, p. 365, his brackets): “I shall not name the scholar who, in his zeal to deny Ventris’ achievement, came to accuse him of faking and concealing information, of having known the famous Pylos tablet Ta641 without confessing it. It is sad that after this accusation was proved false, and even after the use of Ventris’ decipherment in Kadmos (a journal initiated to undermine its prestige), Levin attempts to leave a shadow of unjust suspicion. When he says that ‘the favorable verdict [on Ventris’ transcriptions] has to be severely qualified’ (p. 244), or speaks of ‘the extravagant ingenuity of Ventris and his adherents’ (p. 246), he reaches the limits of tolerable criticism. Had Levin discovered one of those supposed (and a priori very admissible) non-Greek elements in Linear B, had he contributed some new knowledge of some precise criticism to the corpus of Mycenaean philology, it would be welcome. But I do not believe that darkening ‘the reliable Greek part of the Linear B corpus’ beneath the cloud of misplaced doubt is justified”. W. Edward Brown’s much shorter review (1965) of Levin (1964) was more cautiously critical, yet somewhat more damning (Brown’s unbracketed ellipsis dots, my bracketed ellipsis dots): “Professor Levin’s cool, dispassionate examination of both sides of the academic squabble over Ventris’ decipherment of the Linear B syllabary will probably irritate both sides, since his conclusions are decidedly middle-of-the- road. […] ¶ His method of verification is extremely rigorous, and in my opinion far too conservative. Although doubtless more caution should be exercised than has been in accepting some farfetched interpretations, Levin’s characterization of nearly the whole Linear B transcription as ‘an imaginary language under the guise of . . . an ancient one’ is drastically overstated. No ‘imaginary language’ could possibly come up with such startling coincidences as, e.g., the numerous names of spices and herbs in the Mycenae tablets. ¶ Probably the most valuable part of Levin’s study, however, lies in his refusal to accept the language of the inscriptions, especially those of Knossos, as purely and simply Greek. There is certainly a great deal more ‘Pelasgic’ in them than merely personal and place names; but I cannot accept the notion that the scribal language was a jargon in which even the syntactic structure of Greek was

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Let us revert to the lexicon, Levin, and Latin etymology. In both the Akka- dian language and Hebrew, a female ass has a name that is not just a modification of the name for the male ass. In Akkadian, a male ass is called imēru(m), whereas a female ass is called atānu(m). Likewise, in Biblical Hebrew (as well as in Modern Hebrew) a male ass is called ḥămōr (whose plural is ḥămōrīm), whereas a female ass is called āṯōn (whose plural is ăṯōnōṯ).80 In the standard pronunciation of Israeli Hebrew, ḥămōr is pronounced [xa'mor] or, often, [xa'moɣ], ḥămōrīm is pronounced [xamo'rim] or [xamo'ɣim], āṯōn is pronounced [ʔa'ton], and ăṯōnōṯ is pronounced [ʔato'not]. However, in the liturgical pronounciation of Baghdadi Jews, ḥămōr is pronounced [ḥa'mor], ḥămōrīm is pronounced [ḥamo'rim], āṯōn is pronounced [ʔa'θon], and ăṯōnōṯ is pronounced [ʔaθo'noθ]. In Ashken- azi liturgical pronunciation, ḥămōr is pronounced [xa'moyɣ], ḥămōrīm is pronounced [xa'moyɣim] or even, by some, [xa'meyɣim], āṯōn is pronounced [‘ʔosoyn] or [‘ʔoseyn], and ăṯōnōṯ is pronounced [ʔa'soynoys] or even [ʔa'seyneys]. Until the early 20th century, the traditional liturgical pronunciation of ăṯōnōṯ used to be [ʔado'nod]. An important etymology proposed by Saul Levin and which I find cogent is the Latin name for ‘ass/donkey’, asinus, being derived by Levin from Northwest Semitic. In Hebrew, ’aṯonoṯ (which would have sounded [ʔaθonoθ]) denotes ‘she-asses’ (an appreciated kind of mounts. Before he is chosen to be king, Saul goes around looking for his father’s she- asses: see chapter 9 in 1 Samuel). Levin (1995, pp. 119–124) proposed that ʔaθonoθ yielded in Italy asonos and then, by dissimilation, asinos. Levin claimed that this was an instance of late prehistoric borrowing. Had the borrowing been older, the s would have become r. That hypothesis made by Levin was not mentioned by de Vaan, who nevertheless looked to the Near East for the source of a loanword; de Vaan mentioned two rather poor candidates for that lexical borrowing into Latin

contaminated. What we need is another hoard of tablets, less formulaic than any we now have!” Michel Lejeune (1966) concluded his own fairly detailed review of Levin (1964) by stating: “Il y a, d’autre part une tentative de mettre en évidence, à côté du grec, une autre langue X: mais sans que Saul Levin puisse finalement en apporter un commencement de preuve”. 80 Presumably, no relation to Linear B Atana, Doric Athānā, Ionic Athēnē…

(as opposed to borrowing from Sumerian into Greek), even though the Luwian word is a possibility:

asinus ‘ass, donkey’[m. o] (Pl.+) Derivatives: asina ‘she-ass’ (Var.+), asellus ‘ass, donkey’ (Varro+), asinarius ‘connected with asses’ (Pl.+). The preservation of intervocalic s points to a recent loanword Most IE words for ‘ass’ are loanwords. Some scholars try to trace asinus and Gr. ὄνος back to *os(o) no-, but this is contradicted by Latin a- and by the lack of any trace of word-internal *-s- Greek. Possibly, HLuw. tarkasna- ‘ass’ and Sumerian ansu ‘ass’ contain the basis to which the Gr. and Latin words go back.

For previous discussions of asinus, de Vaan cited Walde and Hoffmann (1930–1954, Vol. 1, p. 72), Ernout and Meillet (1979, p. 51), Pokorny (1959, p. 301f.), Leumann (1977, p. 179), and Mallory and Adams (1997, p. 34). Levin’s book (1995) on the lexicon contains etymologies grouped under five chapters: nonverbal nouns and their inflections (pp. 13–130), verbal roots (pp. 131–296), pronouns (pp. 297–365), prepositions (pp. 366–400), and numerals (pp. 401–455). Leaving aside derived forms, it contains 13 pairs of nouns, 44 of verbs, 7 of pronouns, 7 of prepositions, and 12 of numerals. Levin (1995) was not spared criticism. For example, it was criticised by Gonzalo Rubio (1998):

The author chooses words for comparison from different Semitic and Indo-European languages just because of their alleged resemblance, such as Hebrew ʕayin and Old English eagan (gen. sg. of eage), ‘eye’ (38–40). However he is not interested in dealing with IE *okw- and Semitic *ʕayn- (Akkadian īnu, Arabic ʕayn), their etyma, and even less in establishing a regular set of correspondences, the basis of the comparative method. The same can be said about his comparing Hebrew bāʔ ‘he went in, came’ with Greek bâ ‘(s)he came’ (156–61), from baínō, which does not take into account IE *gwm- (Latin uenio, Sanskrit gácchati < *gwm-sk-) and Semitic √bwʔ […] sometimes he even chooses a case from the declension because this seems to better serve his purpose, […] Furthermore, some of these etymologies challenge not just the basics of historical linguistics but also semantics. The author talks about ‘displaced numerals’ (412–23) — i.e., they look alike but have different meanings — when connecting Indo-European ‘three’ (*treies) to Semitic ‘two’ […] Very few of the words L[evin] compares may actually be related, but they should be regarded as early loans or perhaps as Wanderworter or Kulturworter, such as the words for ‘bull’ (14–28), […]; for ‘horn’ (29–34), […], etc.; […] In some instances the author has moderated his previous positions, as when his linking Hebrew mālēʔ ‘full’ to Greek polú ‘much’ (179–87) is studied in the light of only a Nostratic reconstruction proposed by Illič-Svityč (187). […]

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It is obvious that L[evin] does know Latin, Greek, and Hebrew well. Moreover he is quite keen to display his erudition, especially by using original scripts (Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, etc.). But ultimately, this book does not deal with etymologies at all but with look-alikes. From the very beginning, the author himself declares the kin- ship between his approach and Alfredo Trombetti’s (viii). This book is, thus, a continu- ation of such a prescientific and merely intuitive way of searching for etymologies. […]

Supposedly “displaced numerals”, were being look-alikes a sufficient criterion, would affect the Italian numeral dieci for ‘ten’, vis-à-vis numerals for ‘five’ from some languages spoken in South Sudan which Joseph Greenberg enumerated (1950b, p. 158). Tongue in cheek, consider how handy “displaced numerals” can be, in the following situation which I con- cocted (concerning a mother boasting about her child’s grades at school):

Domanda: C’è al mondo da qualche parte, qualcuno che chiami il numero delle dita di una mano sola col nome delle dita di ambedue le mani? E se sí, dove? Risposta: Sí, nel Sud Sudan. I dinka chiamano il numero «cinque» dyeč, mentre i nuer lo chiamano dhieeč. I dongola però lo chiamano digi, i kenuz digiu, i dair disciu. I burun meridionali poi lo chiamano doi. (Mai sentito dire «ambedoi»?) Quindi, se una mamma orgogliosa del rampollo vi dichiara che ha tutti dieci sulla pagella, mentre ha tutti cinque, datele il beneficio del dubbio: bugiarda al 100% non è, se prima ha letto questa risposta ed ha fatto la riserva mentale («Io il voto glielo dico giusto, ma in dinka»).

Areas where some languages are spoken, in South Sudan and Kenya.

4. Considerations about de Vaan’s entry apis ‘bee’

In the rest of this article, we are going to make considerations about such entries in the Latin etymological dictionary by Michiel de Vaan (2008), were willingness was shown to either accept, or refrain from rejecting a Semitic etymology. Let us begin with the following entries:

apis ‘bee’ […] No accepted etymology. Vennemann 1998a [= 1998] proposes that apis is a loanword from Semitic, comparing Hieroglyphic Egyptian ’fj ‘bee’ This is conceivable.

Apart from the Egyptian term being unlike Semitic names for the honey bee (and ancient Egyptian is not a Semitic language), it must be said that Vennemann was not cogent. I argued that much in Sec. 7.9, “Honey Bee”, in my long study (a journal article of 278 pages: Nissan 2017–2018) about Vennemann’s Germania Semitica (2012) a bulky volume collecting several of his mostly already published papers. Pokorny (1959 at 116) and Devoto (1962, p. 868) have the Proto-Indo-European root *bhei- for ‘bee’. Basically, one would suppose, it is unnecessary to suppose that the lexical type arose in Atlantic Europe, especially as we find the lexical typeapis ‘bee’ in Latin. Vennemann is concerned with Germanic names for ‘honey bee’ (on pp. 518–519 in Germania Semitica).81 “The +bi- word for the honey bee […] occurs with an initial b- in all in all three Indo-European families that have the word, Germanic, Balto-Slavic,82 and Celtic” (518). Vennemann (1998), “Germania Semitica: Biene und Imme:83 mit einem

81 Such as German Biene (plural Bienen), Old High German bîa, Alemannisch Biine, in German dialects also beie, Middle Low German bîe, Low German bigge, Middle Dutch bie, standard Modern Dutch bij [‘bey], English and Scots bee (plurtal bees), Old English bēo (plural: bēon), Old Norse bý, Danish and Norwegian (in both the bokmål and nynorsk versions of the latter language) bie (plural bier), Icelandic Býflugur, Faroese bý. Cf. English honey bee, German Honigbiene. 82 Latvian bite, plural bites; Lithuanian bitìs, plural bitės; Old Prussian bitte. Also note Albanian bleta, which just satisfies the criterion of an initial b-. 83 Imme ‘bee’ is a feminine noun from the poetic register in German (plural Immen). Vennemann (1998) also discussed Old High German imbi and Old English ymbe, which denote ‘Bienenfolk’, ‘[swarm of] bees’. Vennemann (1998, p. 480) compared the first syllable to Proto-Semitic ʿ* amm- ‘people, crowd’ and to South Cushitic *ʾim- in the same sense, and on p. 482, fn. 48, to East Chadic *ʾim- or *ʾum- ‘bee, honey’, and even to English yum-yum! and the adjective yummy for ‘delicious, delectable’.

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Anhang zu lat. apis”, proposed that the Egyptian bj-t fem. ‘honey bee’ was “carried by Phoenicians to northwest Europe” (p. 518 in Germania Semitica, Vennemann 2012). Vennemann (1998) reasoned that Egypt was the first place where bees were domesticated. He claimed that the Egyp- tian bj-t fem. ‘honey bee’ was “carried by Phoenicians to northwest Eur- ope”. This is far-fetched. If anything, why wouldn’t they rather use a cognate of Hebrew dəḇōrā́ ‘honey bee’?84 (There are close Semitic cognates in the varieties of Aramaic and South Arabian vernaculars, and with some semantic change also in Arabic and Amharic. Moreover, along with the family of derivatives with an initial d- there is a family of derivatives with an initial z-, such as Syriac zebbūrā or zenbūrā ‘bee’, and Arabic zanbūr, plural zanābīr.) Besides (as I argued in Nissan 2017–2018), it seems to me too simple to assume that navigators brought the term to North Europe’s littoral, but

84 The Hebrew pronunciations of dəbōrā ́ for ‘bee’ and ‘Deborah’ vary: [dvo'ra] or [dvo'ɣa] is the Israeli Hebrew for ‘bee’ and ‘Deborah (the prophetess)’, but because of affective stress (frequent in Israeli Hebrew for first names), it is ['dvora] or ['dvoɣa] in order to refer to any other woman named after her. (The plural with the determinative article is haddəbōrīm.́ ) Liturgical pronunciations of Hebrew dəbōrā ́ include for example Iraqi [debo'ra] (among speakers of Judaeo-Arabic), [devo'ra] among Italian Jews (but [devo'ɣa] is more likely among the Piedmontese), ['dveyɣu] among southeastern (Rumanian) Ashkenazic Jews (as Hebrew ā > Ashkenazic Hebrew o is for them u, whereas Hebrew o > Ashkenazic Hebrew oy is for them ey), and so forth. The Samaritan pronunciation of the Hebrew word ‹dbwrah› ‘bee’ is dūbērå in the singular. In the plural with the determinative article (Talshir 1981, p. 307) it is addūbērəm. As explained by David Talshir (1981, pp. 109–110), in the Samaritan version of the Pentateuch bees are mentioned twice: in Numbers 14:45, and in Deuteronomy 1:44. The MSS of the Samaritan Aramaic translation render the occurrence (in the plural) in Deuteronomy with ‹mlya› or ‹dbrya›, whereas in Numbers, some MSS of the Samaritan Aramaic translation render the occurrence (again in the plural) with ‹znbwrya› or ‹znbryn› (which resemble the Arabic term). A marginal note to Numbers 14:45 in MS M states ‹ʿqrbwty[h]› (i.e., ‘scorpions’), side by side with ‹mlyh›, apparently as a co-hyponym of the lexical concept ‘stinging animals’ (Talshir 1981, p. 110). Talshir remarked (1981, pp. 202–203) that other scholars understood the Aramaic Samaritan translation according to its spelling ‹mlya› as Aramaic millāyā ‘words’, as though the Biblical Hebrew word (plural and with the definite article), ‹hdbrym›, was taken by the translator to be haddəbārīm ‘the utterances, the things said’, but Talshir instead interpreted ‹mlyh› as a loanword into Samaritan Aramaic from Greek méli and mélissa ‘bee’ (Talshir 1981, p. 203).

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 93 that is systematic in Vennemann’s approach when he discusses Semitic etyma, several of which I would rather assign to the spread of farming from the Near East. Perhaps, unless it is mere coincidence, we should also consider Latin apis ‘bee’, along with the Egyptian term, as a sister grouping of Semitic names for ‘bee’. We are not necessarily talking about domestic honey bees. If one is to concede any correlation, then those two correlated groupings were denoting wild honey bees, at the time the relevant vocabulary came into being. Militarev and Kogan (2005) have a Proto-Semitic entry (no. 66, very long, on pp. 96–99), *di/ab(b)ūr- ‘bee, wasp’ — note in particular, in the Arabic dialect of Oman, dabiyy ‘bees’, which “may suggest the suffixal origin for -r in the present root” (ibid., p. 97) — and they also have another entry (no. 62), *bur- ‘kind of insect’, with parallels in Berber (names for ‘cricket’ or ‘locust’), Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic (ibid., pp. 88–89). “Afrasian insect names with the biconsonantal element *bVr- exhibit a wide semantic variety (‘locust’, ‘kind of flying insect’, ‘ant, termite’), probably implying a reconstruction of more than one protoform” (ibid., p. 89). In the entry for *di/ab(b)ūr- ‘bee, wasp’,85 earlier authors are cited on p. 97, especially Diakonoff, suggesting that -b and -r may be treated as fossilized markers of harmful and useful animals” (ibid.) — too good to be true, I would say — and accordingly, Militarev and Kogan propose: “one could tentatively suppose that a biconsonantal nominal root *ḏVb- ‘fly’ has been extended with -b and -r to produce independent terms for “harmful fly” and a “useful fly” (i.e. ‘fly’ and ‘bee’) respectively” (ibid.). Militarev and Kogan’s hypothesis seems to me nearly as weak as As- pesi’s86 for the Northwest Semitic ‘bee’ lexeme of the Northwest Semitic

85 Arabic has dabbūr ‘hornet’. Israeli Hebrew dabbūr ‘hornet’ is a loanword, but also a co-derivative of Hebrew dəbōrā́ /dbora/ [dvo'ra] ‘bee’. Syriac debbōrā denotes ‘wasp’, vs. debbortā ‘bee’, which is also the sense of Jewish Middle Aramaic /dabbarta/ or /dborta/ (plural /dabbare/). In Soqotran, ídbeher ‘bee’. 86 I suspect that both Aspesi in his otherwise interesting and perceptive paper “L’ape e il labirinto” (Aspesi 2007) and, before him, Garbini (1978), were unduly carried away in their speculations concerning the name of the prophetess Deborah from the Book of Judges (even though Garbini may have been right about the etymological affinities of the name of the Canaanite general Sisera), and of Rebecca’s wetnurse Deborah, and especially the reconstruction as a myth of the battle on the river Kishon that saw Sisera’s rout, and his being killed while asleep by Jael. It is my impression that, out of eagerness to prove his point, Aspesi underestimated that spread in Semitic languages

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/ 94 Ephraim Nissan root ‹dbr›, but I reckon that the chronology befitting Militarev and Kogan’s hypothesis would belong to the Mesolithic and Neolithic, thus much earlier that Aspesi’s claims for an “Egeo-Canaanite” substrate. It may even be, I reckon, that in dabiyy ‘bees’ in the Arabic dialect of Oman would befit the Northwest Semitic ‹dbb› alloroot87 of ‹dbr› as per the lexeme denoting ‘speak’, and if so, we get some reinforcement for Aspesi’s connecting bees and prophecy through bees’ buzzing being taken to be mantic speech88 — hence, to Aspesi, the “valenze simboliche dell’utilizzo di tale nome come nome proprio di profetesse (la Μέλισσα di Delfi e la Debôrâ dei Giudici)”.89 Cf. Roscalla (1998), on the Greek symbolism of the bee.

of the cognate names for ‘bee’, especially if one also considers the Arabic (< Syriac) form zanbūr, which, I concede, may have resulted from the forms from the ‘bee’ lexeme of the Northwest Semitic root ‹dbr› (by attraction to a Northwest Semitic onomatopoeia for ‘buzzing’, which perhaps also motivated the ethnic Zamzummīm the way Barbaroi was in Greek). 87 Another lexeme of the Northwest Semitic root ‹dbb› (e.g. in Syriac; or ‹đbb› in Arabic and Ugaritic, or ‹zbb› in Hebrew) is associated with the fly, another buzzing insect. 88 In his article “Considerazioni etimologiche su ebraico nābî’ ”, Aspesi (1999) admitted phonosymbolism: “ronzio assimilabile a parole sussurrate?”, for Semitic names for buzzing insects. 89 Aspesi, fn. 19 in “L’ape e il labirinto” (Aspesi 2007). Cf. in his main text on the same and next pages: “Le mie successive indagini incentrate su alcuni elementi lessicali comuni al greco e all’ebraico e portatori di significati attinenti alla sfera del sacro, mi hanno consentito di meglio precisare la consistenza e la profondità di tale sostrato linguistico che preferisco ora definire ‘egeo-cananaico’. Di queste isoglosse, che costituiscono una costellazione di nomi afferenti a specifici culti e riti riferiti alla sfera della fertilità per i quali devo qui rimandare ai lavori che cito in nota e in bibliografia, la più rilevante, direi in qualche modo fondante, è quella che a mio avviso collega la base di gr. λαβύρινθος, precisata foneticamente come *dabur- in e considerazione della testimonianza micenea da-pu2-ri-to, proprio con l’ebraico d bîr, dove la base greca starebbe per “focus cultuale” (e l’intero termine per “labirinto” in quanto luogo di uno specifico focus cultuale”) e il nome ebraico per “focus cultuale del tempio di Gerusalemme”. ¶ Se la consistenza assunta dall’ipotesi di un sostrato linguistico-cultuale egeo-cananaico nel corso delle mie reiterate ricerche pare conferire una maggior concretezza alla mia più che decennale connessione fra dābār “parola ispirata, divina e profetica” e debôrâ “ape, profetessa” attraverso debaš/ *debar “miele”, questo stesso ambito di sostrato sembra consentire un collegamento in ebraico fra debôrâ e debîr, in considerazione delle relazioni fra ape e labirinto, inteso questo come specifico luogo di culto incentrato su di un sacro recesso, che si evidenziano nelle testimonianze letterarie e archeologiche dell’area egea, oltre

Vennemann asks: if the hypothesis of his concerning the bee word is correct, “the question arises why the words entered the language with +bh- rather than +b-, at least in Germanic where a representation with +b- would have yielded words with a root *pi-” (Vennemann 2012, p. 518). Venne- mann states that “[t]he only explanation [he] can think of is that the words were borrowed so early that speakers of northwest Indo-European were still uncomfortable with initial +b- as a consequence of the ‘labial gap’ and therefore preferred a representation with a phonetically similar phoneme, +bh-” (Vennemann 2012, pp. 518–519). Vennemann recognises that this “is a difficult explanation, however, because Proto-Germanic itself has several words with initial p-, all of them lacking Indo-European etymologies and thus probably loan-words” (ibid., 519). In note 48 on p. 528, Vennemann averred there is an alternative, namely, “the assumption of borrowing after the operation of Grimm’s Law. The difficulty in this case would be the

che nello strato intravedibile come egeo di parti del testo biblico che potremmo esse pure definire egeo-cananaiche, come in particolare l’episodio della profetessa Debôrâ. Tale ipotesi conferisce circolarità ai due collegamenti centrati sul pregnante nome ebraico dābār, quelli appunto di Torrance fra debîr e dābār e quello fra dābār e debôrâ, mettendone in connessione i due estremi”. Cf. on the first two pages ofAspesi (2016): “Nel corso di pluridecennali riflessioni al riguardo, ho definito un quadro di ipotesi, dotato a mio parere di sufficiente coerenza e verosimiglianza, che m’induce a ritenere che il termine greco λαβύρινθος sia stato coniato dai Micenei giunti a Creta alla fine del cosiddetto Tardo

Minoico I, nella forma attestata in lineare B come da-pu2-ri-to- (daburinthos), per indicare il “palazzo” di Cnosso, l’unico sopravvissuto nelle sue funzioni politiche, religiose e amministrative alla distruzione dei “secondi palazzi” databile alla metà circa del quindicesimo secolo. A questa affermazione, che potrebbe apparire di scarso valore euristico considerando che le uniche tre attestazioni ad oggi di tale termine nella documentazione in lineare B sono tutte provenienti da Cnosso, mi sento di poter aggiungere che con tale formazione nominale i Micenei abbiano voluto indicare il complesso delle evolutissime costruzioni cnossiane con cui erano entrati sorprendentemente in contatto come l’ambito architettonico di uno specifico luogo di culto ritenuto caratterizzante dell’intero complesso. A partire dalla denominazione autoctona di tale luogo di culto interno al “palazzo”, preso a prestito dalla lingua locale come dabur-, avrebbero così creato il neologismo daburinthos aggiungendo il suffisso-inthos che in greco comporta connotazioni di pertinenza e di localizzazione: l’intero “palazzo”, quindi, come ambito di questo focus cultuale. Il termine greco, che vive ancor oggi nelle principali lingue di cultura recando con sé una straordinaria carica di simbolismo, sembra avere così una sua precisa data di nascita, anche se la sua base pre-greca affonda nella preistoria linguistica”.

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/ 96 Ephraim Nissan fact that the bee word is not limited to Germanic”. In note 47 on p. 528 in Germania Semitica, Vennemann credits Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995, p. 524) for finding “the similarity of PIE *bhei- ‘bee’ to Egyptian bj.t (with the feminine gender marker -t) is striking” (their words), even though they did not explain out this similarity.

5. Comments about de Vaan’s entry rēte / rētis ‘net’ and de Vaan’s acceptance of Rosén hypothesis relating Latin s(a)cēna to Hebrew sakkīn

In Section 3.2.3, “Nomi di reti e di aspetti della pesca”, Mario Alinei stated (2000, p. 837): “la pesca di mare, e in genere la pesca specializzata, ini- ziano nel Paleolitico Superiore e diventano fondamentali nel Mesolitico. Di conseguenza, i nomi degli strumenti e delle tecniche della pesca e della navigazione sono fra i più interessanti per una rilettura in chiave di TC”, i.e., of Alinei’s Teoria della Continuità [dal Paleolitico]. The following is de Vaan’s (2008) entry for rēte / rētis ‘net’ (my added braces):

rēte / rētis ‘net’ [n./f., m. i]. Maybe original m. * rētis, pl.n. *rētia; thus Niedermann apud EM {= Ernout-Meillet 1979} 572. The sg. rēte would then be a back-formation. Schrijver {1991: 17f.} argues that the proposed connection with rārus must be given up on formal grounds. If BSl. forms such as Lith. rẽtas ‘rare, thin, slow’, rė̃tis ‘sieve’,

{…} are cognate, we would posit a root *ret-, not *reh1t- (Slav. has *-d-). But in view of the isolated position and the exclusively nominal meanings, rēte/-is might wel {sic} be a loanword. Rosén 1995 suggests borrowing from a Semitic source, cf. Bib- lical Hebrew rešet ‘net (for fishing and bird-catching)’, Ugaritic rθt ‘(probably) id.’.

The Lithuanian forms are tantalising. So do the Northwest Semitic forms, which are feminine nouns ending by a radical /t/. It may be that that third radical was incorporated into the triconsonantal root but had originally been a suffix; this would have happened during the long transition from bilateral to trilateral roots in Semitic, which Agmon and Bloch (Agmon 2010, Agmon and Bloch 2013) have proposed did happen during the very long period when agriculture emerged; their analysis of the lexical data is cogent, as they relate Proto-Semitic and material cultures of

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 97 the Mesolithic and Neolithic. Nets belong in cultures of the Mesolithic and Neolithic indeed. The noun réšet was not considered by Agmon and Bloch, whereas the Hebrew qéšet ‘bow’ — thus, the name for another concept that emerged in the Mesolithic: the earliest evidence is from among the Natufians of the Galilee, who also introduced the sickle (Agmon 2010, p. 30; Peterson 1988) — was considered by Agmon and Bloch indeed. The two nouns differ in the vowel of their phonemic Hebrew stem (based on their respective inflected forms): rišt- as opposed to qašt-. Listing Afroasiatic (AA) data, Agmon stated (2010, p. 46, fn. 26, with older radicals in boldface):

On the one hand, we have noted an AA reconstruction which does not include a Semitic augment: *bun > *ʔa-bun. Other notable examples (PAA>PS): *qis > *qaš-t ‘bow’ (DAE #323, 524), *lis >*liš-an ‘tongue’ (DAE #141 & 2147), *ngl ‘to reap’ > *mi-ngal ‘sickle’ (DAE #1949 & 2335), *kVl >*kal-b(?) ‘dog’ (DAE #2396 & 2516). On the other hand, AA languages do use similar augments, but not necessarily where Semitic has them. Likely, these augments were introduced before the split of the AA family, and continued to be appended afterwards. Incidentally, the CVC morphology of *qis may imply that the arc was conceived in the pre-Natufian period, in contrast to common wisdom that it is a Natufian invention (Peterson 1988).

In Agmon and Bloch (2013), Table 2 on p. 4 summarises Proto-Semitic (PS) hunting terminology, with all terms listed having a biconsonantal root. The row for the bow lists Akkadian qaštu, Proto-Semitic *qaš-t, and as references for Proto-Afroasiatic, HSED 1560 and DAE 524. A footnote to the table states: “In Semitic, ‘bow’ ends with a feminine suffix, -t, that is missing in AA”. In relation to proto-Afroasiatic, Agmon and Bloch stated on p. 3:

The hunter had little possessions which he carried along: bow (#2.3) with which to shoot (#2.4) an arrow (#2.1), a small bag (#2.2) for collected items, perhaps a water bottle. All these PS terms are 2c and all are attested in PAA. The prehistory of the bow is difficult to determine because most components (except arrowheads) are per- ishable. Ballistic arrowhead analysis concluded [36] that lithic projectiles emerged with the onset of the Upper Paleolithic (ca. 45,000 BP [i.e., Before Present]). Never- theless, the transition from atlatl to bow and arrow in W[estern] Asia is believed to have occurred in Natufian times (15,000–11,700 BP), when both weapons may have been in use [37,38]. The fact that PS *qaš-t, “bow”, is agreeably PAA, and there is no obvious linguistic trace for “atlatl”, suggests that Natufians have utilized predomin- antly bows and arrows and/or that the term for atlatl has undergone a semantic shift to indicate the bow.

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They were citing [36] = Shea (2006), [37] = Peterson (1988), and [38] = Bocquentin and Bar-Yosef (2004). In Yigal Bloch’s Table S2, being an “Etymological Appendix for Table 2” of Agmon and Bloch (2013), the row for the bow is 2.3, as follows:

Proto- Hebrew Aramaic Ugaritic Arabic Ethiopic Akkadian word *qaš(t) qešet qšat, qaštāˀ, qšt “bow” qawsun qast qaštu “bow” “bow” qeštāˀ “bow” “bow” “bow” (PS, 2c) (common), qšy (Sam.) “bow”; kšṭ “to shoot with a bow” (Syr.) where “2c” stands for “with a biconsonantal root”. For the Aramaic column, there is this footnote: The last verb is evidently denominative from qšat ‘bow’, in which the feminine ending -t was re-interpreted as the third radical, along with de-emphathization q > k and emphathization t > ṭ.” As for the Arabic column, there is this other note:

Arabic is unique among the Semitic languages in attesting a 3c base in the noun for “bow” (-t in other languages was originally the feminine suffix). It has been suggested that the form qaws in Arabic reflects a metathesis of the root qsw (PS *qšw) “to be hard,” viz., “hard to bend” (Rundgren 1990: 183–184). Then, both qaws and qsw < *qšw would be extensions of originally 2c forms.

Apart from the entry for rēte / rētis ‘net’, de Vaan (2008) was concerned with proposals by Haiim Rosén in other entries as well,90 and was willing

90 De Vaan discussed at some length another hypothesis by Rosén in the entry “com-, con-, co-; cum”: “Rosén 1992 distinguishes the perfective-valency prefixco- from the comitative-sociative postposition and prefixcum, cu, co-. He shows that in the oldest texts, co- does not contain the notion of ‘together’, but only perfectivizes the verb: concēdere vs. cēdere, complēre vs. plēre, colloquī vs. loquī, combibere vs. bibere, etc. Only from the end of the Republican era do we find co(n)- in the function of an adverb ‘together’: concadere (older concidere), compugnāre, etc. Also, the word-final nasal is absent in front of vowels, where we most expect it. Yet we cannot reconstruct a different preform for this perfectivizing co(n)-, such as *kwo, which would match Celtic forms. Attractive as this may seem, it does not explain why Sabellic does not continue a labiovelar stop, while it does show a final nasal. Also,

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 99 to accept Rosén’s etymology in the entry seco, -āre ‘to cut, sever’, when it comes to a dubious derivative:

The noun s(a)cēna [f.] ‘sacrificial axe’ (Andr., Paul. ex F.)91 is only attested in quota- tions by Festus and Paulus, and its form vacillates; still, the fact that it was borrowed into Celtic (OIr. scion ‘knife’) shows that it was alive during the Roman era. The solution put forward by Rosén 1994, viz. that s(a)cēna must be compared with Heb. śakkīn, Aram, sakkīn ‘slaughtering-knife’, is attractive. In Rosén’s view, both words are probably borrowed from an unknown third source.

Post-biblical Hebrew sakkī́n is standard for ‘knife’. In fact, the Hebrew and Aramaic words for ‘knife’ have a cognate in Arabic sakkīn (whose “broken plural” form is sakākīn), but otherwise they are isolated within the respective language and have no obvious cognates within Semitic, so quite possibly, they are a loanword. It must be said however that in his biblical concordance, Solomon Mandelkern (1977 [1896], p. 798, col. 4) may have been right to relate the Hebrew noun sakkīn (not śakkīn) to his third acceptation of the Biblical Hebrew root skn, which only occurs in a pas- sive imperfective verbal form, in Ecclesiastes 10:9: “He who splits trees, yissākḗn ‹yskn› [yissa'xen] in them”, i.e., will come in the way of harm, will put himself in danger. The post-biblical Hebrew word for ‘danger’ is sakkānā́ ‹sknh›. Perhaps this is the etymon of sakkīn after all?

6. Concerning de Vaan’s entry for Latin simpu(v)ium and simpulum ‘earthenware ladle’

De Vaan (2008) has this entry for a kind of vessel:

simpu(v)ium ‘earthenware ladle used in religious ceremonies’ [n. o] (Acta Arvalia, Varro+) Derivatives: simpulum ‘earthenware ladle’ (Plin.+). IE cognates: Gr. συπύη (-ύα) ‘box for keeping flour and bread’.

Latin q- should have been retained in initial position. Thus, it seems better to stick to the traditional etymology *ḱom, and to assume that com- and cum ‘with’ are the same words. […]”. 91 Paulus Diaconus, Excerpta ex libris Pompeii Festi de significatione verborum.

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Leumann [(1977)] suggests that simpulum is a remodelling of earlier simpu(v)ium, which seems likely. If so, the p in simp- cannot be explained from anaptyxis in *sem- lo-, and the etymological connection with the root *semH- ‘to scoop’ (thus Meiser 1998) must be dismissed. The form and meaning of Gr. συπύη are close enough to suggest borrowing from Greek, or from a Semitic language, from which Greek also took the word. Adoption into the Latin vocabulary would account for the introduction of the nasal.

The only Biblical Hebrew term for a bowl or cup that suits this claim,

sēp̠el, is spelled ‹spl› and pronounced séfel (the stem pf this segolate noun is /sipl‑/). This is tantalisingly close to simpulum; the nasal would have been introduced as Michiel suggests. Or perhaps we have two middle bilabials that differ by dissimilation from a geminated /p/ in some Semitic term in the derivationally possible word- form *sippul(um)?

Importantly, this matches extant Semitic derivational patterns. In his article “Noms de cordes en grec ancien: problèmes d’étymologie”, Michel Masson (1987) required that three conditions be satisfied, for a Semitic etymological hypothesis to be accepted: (a) the structure of the etymon being hypothesised should match Semitic morphological patterns; (b) corresponding forms of the etymon are documented (other than as loanwords) in various Semitic languages, with at least one of these documented forms belonging to the most ancient lexicons (Biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic, Akka- dian); (c) the adaptation of the Semitic etymon should be as economical as possible, and the pattern of each single hypothesised change should be supported by an identical treatment in other terms. In his lexicon Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period, James Hoch (1994) in §541 on p. 364 interpreted Egyptian ṯi2=pa=ra (occurring in a Ramesside inscription) by reconstructing the term as (my brackets): “*s̀ipla? N. ‘Large Drinking Bowl, Crater’. The word occurs in a list of booty from the Libyan war. Several words in the list are clearly Semitic, […] Cf. BH [Biblical Heb- rew], MH [Mishnaic Hebrew] [sḗfel] ‘large drinking bowl’; Amarna saplu ‘bowl’; Ug[aritic] spl ‘large bowl’, and in Akk[adian] transcription sà-ap-lu ‘(bronze and copper) cauldron’; Targ[umic Jewish] Aram[aic] [siflā] ‘bowl, basin’; Akk[adian] saplu ‘bowl’. The Akkadian word occurs in the context of booty or tribute, like the Egyptian example. The word appears to be built on the qitlu [derivational] pattern, as are the West Semitic words. […]”. Hoch ranked the entry “[5]”, for “Etymology certain”.

Again Hoch (1994), in §547 on pp. 367–368, interpreted by metathesis the Egyptian term ṯi2=ra=ba or ṯi2=—r=ba [sic] as “*s̀ipla? N. A Type of Vessel, perhaps ‘Large Drinking Bowl’. The word occurs as a household commodity”. Hoch tentatively related this word to §541, and gave §547 the rank “[3]”, for “Etymology questionable”.

7. Concerning Latin taurus and taura

De Vaan’s etymological dictionary includes this entry:

taurus ‘bull’ […] It is striking that Latin does not show the change of *-awr- > *-ar - as in parvum, and with -e- in nervus. This might indicate that taurus is a loanword post-dating the metathesis *-ur- > *-ru-, but Greek does not appear an obvious candi- date for the lending language, in view of the semantic field. The earlier history of the word is uncertain: there is no cognate in IIr. or Tocharian, whereas there are Semitic words for ‘bull’ which are conspicuously similar. Hence, it may have been an early loanword of the form *tauro- into the western IE languages.

Indeed, the term may have spread from the Near East with domesticated cattle. Without endorsing the Nostratic hypothesis, I would like to signal a convenient list of parallels in Dolgopolsky (1998, entry 41, pp. 43–44). It includes terms from Semitic, Mycenaean, Greek, Albanian, Latin and Italic, Celtic, Slavic, Baltic, as well as Finnish (tarvas ‘reindeer’), and Germanic. For the latter, Dolgopolsky lists Old Norse Þjórr, Swedish tjur, and dialectal Dutch deur ‘bull’. Next, in the same entry, Dolgopolsky included a list of Indo-European parallels of the steer word with the initial s- from Avestan, Middle Persian, and Persian, as well as from Germanic languages: Gothic stiur ‘male calf, bull’, Old Norse stiórr, Old High Ger- man stior, German Stier, Anglo-Saxon stēor ‘bullock, steer’, and English steer. This is followed with a list of parallels from Altaic for kinds of cer- vids (different by species and age), but also for ‘ox’ and ‘castrated ox’. Concerning the relevant entry in Aharon Dolgopolsky (1998), the rival Nostraticist Allan Bomhard claimed (1999, pp. 57–58, item 41): “*č[a] w[V]rV (or * čurV) ‘bull, calf’: this etymology is plausible, though not without problems. First, Dolgopolsky is surely correct in seeing Proto- Indo-European *ta ro-s as a borrowing”.

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As for the steer word, Bomhard claimed (ibid.): “It is difficult to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European antecedent of the other Indo-Euro- pean forms cited by Dolgopolsky, though *ste ros ‘steer’ or something very similar is probably the best that we can do. If this word is ancient in Indo-European and not a derivative of the root ‘to swell’, as some have maintained, then Dolgopolsky’s etymology can be accepted. In my opinion, *steu̯ros is not a derivative of . I would reconstruct Proto- Nostratic *tyhaw-r- ‘bull, steer’. The Altaic forms should be removed”. I would like to point out the following. In Latin, taură means ‘(ster- ile) cow’. Even though in present-day perception, a feminine derivative of the Latin (and Romance) name for ‘bull’ is somewhat awkward, just like deriving the feminine in Semitic from the name shor (Hebrew), tauro (West Syriac) and their cognates, for ‘bull’, nevertheless in Semitic, too, we find in Biblical Aramaic ‹twrh› tōrā, and in early Aramaic ‹šwrh›, for ‘cow’, and from Phoenician Θουρώ is known as a name for a goddess or divine cow. See a discussion of these Semitic and Indo-European terms in Levin (1995, pp. 15–17). In the first section of Mario Alinei’s “Etimologie latine e neolatine” (1977), he discussed the etymology of the Latin verb obtūrāre ‘to plug’, ‘to seal’, and proposed that the etymon is the lexical type that persists in southern Italy and Corsica in the verbs t(a)urare, t(a)urire, inturare ‘to cause the bull to mount the cow’. Alinei proposed that this semantic motivation fits in the pattern discussed by Rohlfs in his chapter “Sexuelle Tiermetaphern”.

8. Concerning Latin virga

Concerning de Vaan’s entry virga ‘shoot, twig, rod’, de Vaan acknowl- edged that old etymological claims are in crisis. “Only the Germanic forms in *uisk- are close enough to inspire some confidence in their connection with virga”. I would like to signal the Semitic root yrq (as in Hebrew for ‘green’) or wrq (as in Arabic for ‘leaf’). In order to get an idea of derivatives within Semitic, see, on pp. 2356– 2357 in Dolgopolsky (2008), root 2528, ‘branches, leaves of a

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 103 tree’, but he only found instances of that supposed Nostratic root in Ham- ito-Semitic and in Dravidian. (In his notation, ▽ stands for an unspecified vowel.) And of course, see root WRQ in David Cohen’s Dictionnaire des racines sémitiques. (1970-2012) The Arabic phoneme /q/ has the phonetic value [g] in many dialects. For Latin uirga, I suggest, perhaps we could look for some Semitic etymon *wirqa, which however would only make sense in the context of the Neolithic spread of farming from the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia to the northern shores of the Mediterranean.

9. De Vaan’s treatment of grānum ‘grain, seed’, and considerations about the same and about Latin far ‘spelt’

Let us first consider two entries from de Vaan’s etymological dictionary (2008):

grānum ‘grain, seed’ [n. ο] (Ρ1.+) Derivatives: grānārium ‘granary’ (P1.+), grānātus, -us ‘the production of a crop’ (Cato), grānea ‘pap made from pounded corn’ (Cato). Pit. *grāno-.

PIE *ǵrh2-no- ‘which has ripened, fruit, grain’. IE cognates: Olr. grán [n.], W. grawn, Co. gronen, Bret. greun ‘grain’ < PCl. *grāno-; Pashto zaṇai, zaṛai ‘kernel, seed’, OPr. syrne ‘grain’, Lith. žìrnis [m.], Latv. zir̃nis [m.] ‘pea’, OCS zrьno [n.], Ru. zernó [n,], SCr. zȑno [n.] ‘grain’ < BSl. *źirn-; Go. kaurn, OHG korn ‘grain’ < PGm. *kur- na-. There are two possible root etymologies: either *ǵrH-no- means ‘which has ripened’, and belongs to the root ‘to be(come) old, ripen’ (Skt. járanti ‘they let grow old’), or it means ‘which has been pounded, ground’ and belongs to a root ‘to rub, ground’. Yet in the latter case, the root would be without attested finite verb forms, and also, the semantics would be less evident: ‘grains’ and ‘seeds’ can be ground, but are not by definition. Hence, I prefer the former solution.

glārea ‘gravel’ [f. a] (Cato+) Might be derived from the same root as grānum via a dissimilation: PIE *ǵrH-ro- >*grāros ‘pebble, corn’ > deriv. *grārejos ‘of pebbles’ > diss. *gIārejos. But this depends on the original meaning of grānum: if this was ‘ripened, aged’, it is unlikely that glārea is cognate. […]

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Bear in mind that wild wheat was first discovered (by Aaron Aaronson, a botanist and World War I master spy) on Mount Hermon, in the Golan Heights. I find it likely that related terminology spread with the Neolithic spread of farming around the Mediterranean as well as from Anatolia to the lands north of the Black Sea. Whereas the Semitic stem of the name for ‘wheat’ is ḥinṭ-, such as in Arabic ḥinṭ and (by assimilation) in Hebrew ḥiṭṭā, consider the Hebrew name for ‘seed’, which is gar‘īn [gar'ʕi:n]. The Pashto term zaṛai ‘kernel, seed’ is probably in some relation to Arabic zar‘ [zarʕ] and Hebrew zéra‘ (the stem of whose inflected forms is zar‘-). According to Agmon and Bloch (Agmon 2010, Agmon and Bloch 2013), the transition from bilateral to trilateral roots in Semitic developed during the very long period when agriculture emerged. But then consider that [gar'ʕi:n] is likely to have corresponded, at the time of hunters-gath- erers when dozens plant species were collected for food, including many kinds of seed, to something whose biconsonantal root would have been, I reckon, gr. In fact, Dolgopolsky (2008) has on pp. 645–646 what he supposed was a Nostratic root, 659a, for which he only had data from Hamito- Semitic and Dravidian (but for which he was able to indicate similar roots, including in Proto-Indo-European), and of which I reproduce the bulk. In Dolgopolsky’s notation in the entry reproduced, braces {} enclos- es bibliographical references preceding a word. are bars between primary families of languages (Hamito-Semitic, Kartvelian, Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Dravidian, and Elamic). and are bars between secondary families (Anatolian IE, Narrow IE [i.e., “IE Proper”, a subfamily including all IE languages except Hittite-Luwian], Semitic, Egyptian, Cushitic, Chadic, Finno-Ugrian, Samoyed, Yukagir, Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusian, Korean). are bars between branches of families (e.g. Germanic, Balto- Slavic, East Cushitic, Central Chadic, Finno-Permian, Ugrian). is a bar between subbranches (e.g., Slavic [within Balto-Slavic], Iranian [within Indo-Iranian], Baltic Finnic, etc.). is a bar between etymological entries of different words of the same root or morpheme (reconstructed within a secondary family), or between different roots belonging to the same secondary family and going back to the same Nostratic etymon. are bars between reconstructions of different pN (pre-Nostratic) words or their variants within one Nostratic etymological entry. is a sign preceding bibliographical and other notes referring to a secondary family. is a sign preceding bibliographical and other notes referring to a primary family. is a sign preceding bibliographical and other notes referring to a

Nostratic etymon. ?? signals that the connection is highly doubtful. An isolated 2 subscript means that the Nostratic etymology at hand is based on two daughter-languages only. is a mathematical symbol from set theory; Dolgopolsky used it in order to denote “is a kind of ”. In reconstructions, is an unspecified front vowel. ▽ stands for an unspecified vowel.ʔ stands for either ʔ (the glottal stop) or h. are uncertainty brackets: when they enclose a letter, what is meant is that it is that letter or similar. In contrast, are uncertainty brackets: when they enclose a letter, what is meant is that it is that letter or nothing. ? indicates a questionable etymology, or that a word is a questionable cognate. a b stands for “b is borrowed from a”. In order of appearance in the text reproduced, the identities of the languages whose names Dolgopolsky abbreviated are as follows: HS is Ham- ito-Semitic, Ch is Chadic, WCh is West Chadic, Hs is the Hausa language (a major West Chadic language), Gw is Gwandara (a language of the Hausa group within West Chadic), Su is Sura (a language of the Angas-Goemay group within West Chadic), Sy is the Saya (Seya, Sayanchi) dialect cluster (within the South Bauchi subgroup of the Hausa-Angas-Bolewa branch of West Chadic), Ngz is the Ngzim language (within the Ngizim-Bade group of languages within West Chadic), CCh is Central Chadic, Zm is the Zime language (within the Masa subranch of Central Chadic), Msg is Musgu (within the Macro-Musgu subbranch of Central Chadic), ECh is East Chadic, Smr is the Sumray or Somray language (within East Chadic), Ang is the Angas language (within the Hausa-Angas-Bolewa branch of West Chadic), Fy is the Fyer language (one of the Ron languages within East Chadic), Mnd is the Mandara (or Wandala) language (which belongs to Central Chadic), Glv is the Glavda langue (of the Mandara subbranch of Gv is the Gava language (it, too, of the Mandara subbranch), Nkc is the Nakatsa language (of the Mandara subbranch), EDng is East Dangla (a language within Macro-Dangla, i.e., the Dangla group within East Chadic), Jg is the Jegu language (within the Mubi subbranch of East Chadic). S is Semitic, MHb is Mishnaic Hebrew, BHb is Biblical Hebrew, Ak is Akkadian, CS is Central Semitic, JA is Jewish Aramaic, Ar is Arabic. D is Dravidian, Knd is Kannada, Tm is Tamil, Kt is Kota, Kui is the Kui language (within Gondvana Dravidian), Kn is Kannada (a major South Dravidian language), Tl is Telugu, Prj is Parji (a Central Dravidian language), Gnd is Gondi (within Gondvana Dravidian). NaIE is Narrow Indo- European (i.e., “IE Proper”, a subfamily including all IE languages except

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Hittite-Luwian), OHG is Old High German, OSx is Old Saxon, NHG is New High German, Dt is Dutch, Gk is Greek, Al is Albanian, and Ht is Hittite.

Dolgopolsky (2008) is a posthumously published book of 3116 pages only available online: it is freely available at the website of the McDonald Insti- tute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. The fact that it uses an elaborate notation has limited its accessibility, but whatever one thinks of the Nostratic hypothesis, the lexical data collected there are a trove that deserves to be accessed by historical linguistics.

As for the semantic proximity of ‘grain’ and ‘pebble’, consider this entry — to which I can only do justice by quoting it in full — from a major work by another Nostraticist, Allan Bomhard (2018, accessible at his webpage at Academia.edu; his brackets, my braces; the entry starts on p. 1458 of the file, which coalesces four volumes by Bomhard, so the page is numbered 662 of Vol. 2, in the third edition, of 2018): 560. Proto-Nostratic root (vb.) *ɢar- ‘to crush, to grate, to grind; to melt, to dissolve’; (n.) *ɢar-a ‘the act of crushing, grating, grinding’; (adj.) ‘crushed, grated, ground, dissolved, melted, softened’

A. Proto-Afrasian *gar- ‘to crush, to grate, to grind’: Proto-Semitic ‘to crush, to grate, to grind’ > Arabic ǧaraša ‘to crush, to grate, to grind’, ǧarīš ‘crushed, bruised, coarsely ground; crushed grain, grits’; Hebrew gereś [ ] ‘groats, grits’; Amharic (a)gwärräsä ‘to make coarse-ground flour’. Murtonen 1989:142; Klein 1987:110; D. Cohen 1970–:192–193. Proto-Semitic *gurn- ‘threshing floor’ > Hebrew gōren {recte: goren} [ ] ‘threshing floor’; Ugar- itic grn ‘threshing floor’; Arabicǧ urn ‘(stone) basin, mortar; threshing floor, barn’; Sabaean grn ‘threshing floor’; Geez / Ethiopicg wərn [ ], gorn [ ], gurn [ ], gwərnā [ ] ‘threshing floor’. Murtonen 1989:141–142; Klein 1987:109; D. Cohen 1970–:188–189. Hebrew gāras [ ] ‘to crush, to pound, to ground, to mill; to make grits’; Aramaic gəras ‘to crush, to make groats’. Mur- tonen 1989:142; Klein 1987:109. B. Dravidian: Tamil karai (-v-, -nt-) ‘to dissolve in water, to be reduced from solid to liquid form, to wear away (as soil by the action of water), to become emaciated, to become gradually attenuated’, karai (-pp-, -tt-) ‘to dissolve in water (tr.), to melt, to liquefy, to extirpate’; Malayalam karakkuka ‘to melt, to dissolve’; Kota karg- (kargy-) ‘to dissolve, to melt (intr.)’, kark- (karky-) ‘to dissolve, to melt (tr.)’; Kannaḍa karagu, karaṅgu, kargu ‘to be dissolved, to melt away, to decrease in bulk, to become softened to pity or love, to pine away’, karagisu, karigisu, kargisu ‘to cause to be dissolved, to melt’, karaḍu ‘to melt’; Koḍagu kar- (kari-) ‘to be digested’, karak- (karaki-) ‘to digest, to dissolve’; Tuḷu karaguni ‘to melt (intr.), to dissolve, to liquefy; to become thin, affected, softened; to melt with pity’, karavuni ‘to be dissolved, melted, digested’, karapuni ‘to digest’; Telugu karãgu ‘to melt (tr., intr.), to dissolve, to liquefy’, karãgincu, karãcu ‘to melt (tr.), to dissolve, to liquefy’; Gadba karŋ-ēr- ‘to be melted’; Konḍa kariŋ- ‘to melt, to be dissolved’; Kuwi karangali ‘to be dissolved, to be melted’, karŋg- ‘to melt (tr.)’. Burrow— Emeneau 1984:120, no. 1292. For the semantics, cf. Old English meltan ‘to melt, to dissolve’ < Proto-Indo-European *mel- ‘to crush, to grind’ (cf. Gothic malan ‘to grind’, ga-malwjan ‘to grind up, to crush’; Latin molō ‘to grind in a mill’; Hittite [3rd sg. pres.] ma-al-la-i ‘to crush, to grind’ [cf. Pokorny 1959:716–719]). Kuṛux xarbnā ‘to give an extra pounding to rice for cleaning it from grains unhusked or spoiled’; Malto qarwe ‘to clean rice by pounding’, qarwre ‘to be bruised or hurt

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by falling’. Burrow—Emeneau 1984:120, no. 1295. Tamil kari ‘(vb.) to chew, to eat by biting or nibbling; (n.) chewing, eating by biting’, karumpu (karumpi-) ‘to eat bit by bit’, karuvu (karuvi-) ‘to nibble (as a rat)’; Malayalam karumpuka ‘to eat (as cows with the lower teeth)’, karampuka ‘to nibble, to gnaw’; Telugu karacu ‘to bite, to gnaw’. Burrow—Emeneau 1984:129, no. 1390. C. Proto-Kartvelian ‘to grind (coarsely), to gnaw’: Georgian γerγ- ‘to grind (coarsely), to gnaw’; Mingrelian γarγ- ‘to grind (grain)’; Laz [γarγ-] ‘to grind (grain)’. Klimov 1964:202 *γerγ- ‘to grind (grain)’ and 1998:223 *ɣerɣ-: *ɣrɣ- ‘to grind (coarsely), to gnaw’; Fähnrich—Sardshweladse 1995:388—389 *γerγ-; Fähnrich 2007:482–483 *γerγ-; Jahukyan 1967:61 *γerγ-. Proto-Kart- velian ‘coarse-ground flour’: Georgianγ erγil- ‘coarse-ground flour’ (Old Georgian γerγil- ‘ground grains’); Mingrelian γarγil- ‘coarse-ground flour’; Laz γarγil- ‘coarse-ground flour’. Klimov 1964:202 *γerγil- and 1998:223–224 *γerγ-il- ‘coarse-ground flour’. Proto-Kartvelian ‘to gnaw, to nibble’: Georgian γrγn- ‘to gnaw, to nibble’; Mingrelian γirγon- ‘to gnaw, to nibble’; Laz γirγol- ‘to gnaw, to nibble’. Fähnrich—Sardshweladse 1995:399 *γrγ-; Fähnrich 2007:497 *γrγ-; Klimov 1964:207 and 1998:235 ‘to gnaw’. D. Proto-Indo-European *ghr-en-t’-/*ghr-on-t’- ‘to grind’: Greek χόνδρος (< *χρόνδ-ρο-ς) ‘grain’, (in pl.) ‘groats of wheat or spelt: gruel made therefrom’; Latin frendō ‘to crush, to bruise, to grind’. Rix 1998a:182 *ghrend- ‘to grind’; Pokorny 1959:459 *ghren-d- ‘to rub over sharply’; Walde 1927–1932.I:656–657 *ghren-d-; Frisk 1970–1973.II:1110–1111; Boisacq 1950:1066 *oeher-: *oeher- en-d-, *oeher-en-dh-; Hofmann 1966:421 *ghrend(h)-; Chantraine 1968–1980. II:1268–1269; Beekes 2010.II:1643 (unexplained); De Vaan 2008:241 *gwhrend(h)-e/o- (< *gwhren-?); Walde—Hofmann 1965–1972.I:545–546 *ghren- d(h)-; Ernout—Meillet 1979:253 Lithuanian gréndu < *gwhrēndh-; Sihler 1995:163–164, §163a. Proto-Indo-European *ghr-en-dh-/*ghr-on-dh- ‘to grind’: Old English grindan ‘to grind’; Lithuanian gréndu, grę́sti ‘to rub’, grándau, grándyti ‘to scrape’. Walde 1927–1932.I:656–657 *ghrendh-; Pokorny 1959:459 *ghren-dh- ‘to rub over sharply’; Mann 1984–1987:384 ‘to crush, to grind, to tread down, to gnash (the teeth)’ (variant *ghrendh-); Wat- kins 1985:23 *ghrendh- and 2000:32 *ghrendh- ‘to grind’; Mallory—Adams 1997:247 *ghrendh- ‘to grind’; Orël 2003:141 Proto-Germanic * renđanan; Kroonen 2013:190 Proto-Germanic *grindan- ‘to grind’; Onions 1966:414 *ghrendh-; Klein 1971:323 *ghren-d(h)-; Derksen 2015:186 *gwhrend-; Fraenkel 1962–1965.I:167; Smoczyński 2007.1:197. E. Yukaghir (Southern / Kolyma) keriləš- (< *kerilə-) ‘to bite, to chew’, kerilə ‘flour made of fish bones cooked with fish fat’, keril’o:- ‘soft, tender’, (Northern / Tundra) kerile- ‘crushed’, keriles- ‘to make crumbs of, to break into pieces’, kerile- ‘to break (intr.)’. Nikolaeva 2006:208 —Nikolaeva notes: “The element -lə may be a derivational suffix.” Buck 1949:5.56 grind; 8.34 thresh. Bomhard—Kerns 1994:502–504, no. 351.

As for the semantic proximity of ‘grain’ and ‘pebble’, consider this other entry from a the same work by Bomhard (accessible at his webpage at Academia.edu): 32. Proto-Nostratic (n.) *bar-a ‘seed, grain’: A. Proto-Afrasian *bar-/*bur- ‘grain, cereal’: Proto-Semitic *barr-/*burr- ‘grain, cereal’ > Hebrew bar [ ] ‘grain’; Arabic burr ‘wheat’; Akkadian burru ‘a cereal’; Sabaean brr ‘wheat’; Ḥarsūsi berr ‘corn, maize, wheat’; Mehri ber ‘corn, maize, wheat’; Śḥeri / Jibbāli bohr ‘maize’; Soqoṭri bor ‘wheat’. D. Cohen 1970—:87; Klein 1987:82. Ber- ber: Ayr a-bora ‘sorghum’; Ghadames a-βar-ǝn ‘flour’; Ahaggar a-bera ‘sorghum’. East Cushitic: Somali bur ‘wheat’. Proto-Southern Cushitic *bar-/*bal- ‘grain (gen- eric)’ > Iraqw balaŋ ‘grain’; Burunge baru ‘grain’; Alagwa balu ‘grain’; K’wadza balayiko ‘grain’. Ehret 1980:338. West Chadic *bar-/*bur- ‘a kind of flour, gruel’ > Hausa buri, biri ‘a kind of flour’; Ngizim bàrbàr̃ í̃ ‘gruel flavored with the desert date ákɗà’. Orël—Stolbova 1995:56, no. 224, *bar-/*bur- ‘grain, cereal’ and 84, no. 344, *b[u]ray- ‘grain, corn’ (derived from no. 224, *bar-/*bur- ‘grain, cereal’). B. Dravidian: Tamil paral ‘pebble, seed, stone of fruit’; Malayalam paral ‘grit, coarse grain, gravel, cowry shell’; Kota parl ‘pebble, one grain (of any grain)’; Kannaḍa paral, paraḷ ‘pebble, stone’; Koḍagu para ‘pebble’; Tuḷu parel ‘grain of sand, grit, gravel; grain of corn, etc.; castor seed’; Kolami parca ‘gravel’. Bur- row—Emeneau 1984:353, no. 3959. C. Proto-Indo-European *bhar(s)- ‘grain’: Ossetic (Digor) bor ‘millet’; Latin far ‘spelt, grain’; Umbrian far ‘spelt’; Oscan far ‘spelt’; Gothic *barizeins ‘(prepared of) barley’; Old Icelandic barr ‘barley’; Old English bere ‘barley’; Old Frisian ber ‘barley’; Old Church Slavic brašьno ‘food’; Russian (dial.) bórošno [борошно] ‘rye- flour’; Serbo-Croatian brȁšno ‘food, flour’; Albanian bar ‘grass’. Pokorny 1959:111 *bhares- ‘barley’; Walde 1927–1932.II:134 *bhares-; Mann 1984–1987:66 *bhars- ‘wheat, barley’; Gamkrelidze—Ivanov 1984.II:872–873 *b[h]ar(s)- and 1995.I:770 *bºar(s)- ‘grain, groats’, I:836 *bhar- ‘grain’; Watkins 1985:5–6 *bhares- (*bhars-) and 2000:8 *bhars- ‘barley’; Mallory—Adams 1997:51 *bhárs ‘barley’; De Vaan 2008:201–202; Walde—Hofmann 1965–1972.I:455–456 *bhar-es-; Ernout— Meillet 1979:216; Orël 1998:16–17 and 2003:36 Proto-Germanic *ƀaraz ~ *ƀariz; Kroonen 2013:52 Proto-Germanic *bariz- ~ *barza- ‘barley’ (< *bhar-s-); Feist 1939:81 *bhares-; Lehmann 1986:62; De Vries 1977:27; Onions 1966:75; Klein 1977:71; Derksen 2008:57. Note: This term may be a borrowing. Sumerian bar ‘seed’. Buck 1949:8.31 sow, seed; 8.42 grain; 8.44 barley. Bomhard—Kerns 1994: 219, no. 24; Brunner 1969:27, no. 79. For the semantics, cf. the following meanings of the English word grain: (1) ‘a small, hard seed or seedlike fruit (as of wheat, rye, oats, barley, maize, or millet)’; (2) ‘cereal seeds in general’; (3) ‘a tiny, solid particle, as of salt or sand’; (4) ‘a tiny bit, smallest amount’; etc.

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10. Further considerations: on some apparent lexical convergences of Indo-European (including Latin) and Northwest Semitic

10.1. Latin fătuus ‘fool’

In the present study, we have discussed possible (Northwest) Semitic etymology mainly for individual entries as found in Michiel de Vaan’s (2008) Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages. It so happens that the terminology we have considered is terms for plants, animals, tools or vessels. It does not need be the case that lexical borrowing from Semitic into Latin (earlier than church Latin) was confined to such semantic categories. In fact, in a companion article, entitled “Remarks about Latin fătuus ‘fool’, ‘foolish’ and Hebrew pétī ‘fool’ (<√f/p.t.y/w)”, I hypothesise that (pace de Vaan’s conflation of Latin fătuus and fātuus in his etymological discussion, which, I reckon, would only begin to make sense if one is to concede that a person with mantic powers, thus fātuus, may be akin to a person whose behavioural or cognitive competence is below the expected norm because of having come in contact with supernatural powers),92 Latin fătuus may have resulted from some Semitic form *fatu, a plausible cognate of Hebrew pétī ‘fool’ once one considers the ancient phonology of the phoneme /p/ in Hebrew and other Northwest Semitic languages, and once one considers the nature of the third radical (y or

92 Consider how in Italian (and other European) folklore, somebody who has been in contact with the fairies is expected to be cognitively altered (and substandard: but an imbecile, rather than a fool) in how he relates with the world. Also think of the literal sense of the English (American [stɑːʳstrʌk] and British [(ˈstɑːˌstrʌk]) adjective starstruck, even though its usage (first occurring in 1938) is in the sense “particularly taken with celebrities (such as movie stars)” according to the Merriam Webster dictionary, or then, according to the Collins COBUILD dictionary: “If you describe someone as starstruck, you mean that they are very interested in and impressed by famous performers, or that they want to be a performer themselves”, and in British usage: “completely overawed by someone’s celebrity status”. consider this example from COBUILD: “Looking back I was naive and a bit starstruck” (from The Sun, 2008).

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 111 w) in the Hebrew and Northwest Semitic class of tertiae infirmae verbs. That is especially the case as the Hebrew term is part of a family of co-derivatives within Hebrew, whereas this is not the situation of Latin fătuus within Latin. Which social situation93 can we conjure up, for the acquisition of a loanword for the lexical concept ‘fool’? Paolo Martino pointed out (1993, p. 70):

Si sa che, già in età romulea, Roma e le altre città del Lazio erano «sicuramente poliglotte» (sono parole di G Maddoli, 1980, 54), anche se le componenti alloglotte non sembra che potessero esprimersi ufficialmente, come pare doversi dedurre, per i tempi successivi, dalla lex sacra del Comizio e dagli altri documenti ufficiali. An- cora nel 180 a.C., come sappiamo da Livio 11,42, ai Cumani veniva concesso di par- lare latino in publico, ed ai praecones di esercitare il ius vendendi in lingua latina. A Prosdocimi 1976 il merito di aver segnalato la rilevanza sociolinguistica di tale notizia.

10.2. Latin cubō ‘to lie down, recline; be lying’

There are a few instances where possible relation between some lexical item that appears in Latin as recorded in the historical period, and some lexical item in Biblical Hebrew, appear to be in some relation in prehistory,

93 Cf. Martino (1993, p. 72): “È lecito presumere che i forestierismi del lessico commerciale internazionale non siano penetrati che raramente nell’uso comune e ufficiale e quindi non abbiano avuto larga diffusione nei più antichi documenti scritti del latino che noi conosciamo. La nostra conoscenza del latino arcaico è certo limitata dalla natura dei documenti a noi pervenuti. E altresì opportuno sottolineare qui la particolare selettività del latino classico, non ancora lingua internazionale, condizionato dalle scelte stilistiche e lessicali degli scrittori. Dobbiamo invece ammettere, in linea di principio, che il latino popolare, specialmente il linguaggio degli scambi commerciali, dovette essere recettivo di forestierismi. La dimensione in cui si manifestano questi fenomeni è sempre l’oralità, il registro colloquiale, mentre la lingua scritta, più attenta alla tradizione normativa grammaticale e ortografica, è refrattaria all’assimilazione di forestierismi, soprattutto se essi, come nel caso dei prestiti fenici, presentano problemi di resa di fonemi estranei alla tradizione ortoepica e ortografica nazionale. Si pensi alla costante repulsione della tradizione grammaticale latina, ancorata alla testualità letteraria, per i cosiddetti ‘barbarismi’”.

PIt. is Proto-Italic, It. is Italic, Fal. is Faliscan, Pael. is Paelignian, SPic. is South Picene, Marr. is Marrucinian, MW is Middle Welsh, MCo. is Mid- dle Cornish, MBret. is Middle Breton, and PCl. is Proto-Celtic. As for the bibliography, WH I is Vol. 1 of Walde and Hoffmann (1930, 1954); EM is Ernout and Meillet (1979); IEW is Pokorny (1959); and LIV is the Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben. Die Wurzeln und ihre Primarstammbildun- gen, 2nd edition (unter Leitung von H. Rix ... bearbeitet von M. Kummel, Th. Zehnder, R. Lipp, B. Schirmer. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2001). In the entry for cubitus ‘elbow, forearm’ on p. 148, de Vaan claimed: “Even if cubitus were to be derived from a PIE root *kub-, the morphology would remain unclear. Furthermore, none of the possible root structures *kub-, *kubh- or *kudh- is regular in PIE. It seems much safer to assume that cubitus ‘elbow’ is a specific instance of the ppp. cubitus of the verb cubare ‘to lie down’. People lie down on their elbow if they sleep on their side, and the Romans even reclined when dining. It matters little whether

94 To de Vaan’s bibliography (not reproduced here) of this entry, add Levin (1993).

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 113 the original meaning was ‘forearm’ or ‘the elbow joint’. One may even suggest that the verb cubitare ‘to lie down’ (Pl.+) is not (only) a frequen- tative to cubare, but (also) arose as a denominative ‘to rest on the elbow’ to cubitus”. In Semitic, there was a transition from biconsonantic to triconsonan- tic lexical roots. Some affix became a radical letter. In Hebrew, škb is a lexical root associated with the verb ‘to lie down, recline; be lying’, which is also the denotation of the Latin verb cubo. As š- is used in Northwest Semitic as a preformative used to form a verbal conjugation from a lexical root, I have long suspected that the similarity is not merely a coincidence. The Proto-Semitic root plausibly formed as š+kb (whatever the vowels). It is tantalising that within Indo-European, the b of the Proto-Indo-European *kub- is only found in Italic and Celtic. The following is reproduced from Dolgopolsky’s Nostratic dictionary (2008, pp. 1062–1063):

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means “borrowed in the direction of ”. ?σ means “questionable on semantic grounds”. HS is Hamito-Semitic, S is Semitic, Mh is Mehri, Hrs is Harsusi, Jb is Jibbali (these three are modern South Arabian languages), JA is Jewish Aramaic, Sr is Syriac, Ak is Akkadian, BHb is Biblical Heb- rew, JEA is Jewish Eastern Babylonian (i.e., the Aramaic of the Babylon- ian Talmud), Htr is the ancient Aramaic dialect of Hatra, Ar is Arabic, Ch is Chadic, WCh is West Chadic, Hs is Hausa, Ngz is the Ngizim language, Buli is the Buli language, CCh is Central Chadic, Msm is the Misme language, ECh is East Chadic, Mgm is the Migama (Jonkor) language, EDng is East Dangla, Bdy is Bidiya, Jg is Jegu, Brg is Birgit, Mu is Mubi, Smr is Sumray, Tmk is Tumak, Nd is Ndam (these are African languages within Chadic), NaIE is narrow Indo-European (i.e., Indo-European excluding Hittito-Luwian), Gk is Greek, L is Latin, Gmc is Germanic, A is Altaic, M is Mongolic, WrM is Written Mongolian (Classical Mongolian), HlM is Halha (Khalkha) Mongolian, pKo is proto-Korean, Mko is Middle Korean, NKo is New Korean (Modern Standard Korean).

10.3. Latin rōs ‘dew’

Consider Latin cornū-, cornuus ‘horn’. The etymon is Proto-Indo-Europe- an, but it is shared with Semitic (e.g., Hebrew) /qarn-/. There are instances where a term in Biblical Hebrew is arguably of Indo-European origin. Take Latin rōs (genitive rōris), i.e., ros caelestis, ‘dew’. The usual Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew name for ‘dew’ is /ṭall/, but in Song of Songs 5:2 it is rĕsīsēi-lā́yla, literally ‘droplets/fragments of night’, in relation to the Biblical Hebrew verb (lā)ros /ross/ ‘(to) sprinkle’(Ezekiel 46:14). It is unclear whether there is any relation to Latin rōs ‘dew’, whose genitive is rōris, and which often occurs in the plural rōres (in Columella nocturni

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 115 rores, ‘nightly dew’). Latin rōs also denotes ‘dripping’. The Latin verb for the sprinkling of dew is rōro, in the infinitive rōrāre; cf. Italian irrorare, French arroser. Note Proto-Indo-European *ros- ‘dew’. A Nostraticist, Allan Bomhard (2018), listed in entry 730 (on p. 1654 in the file = p. 858 on the page, as it belongs to Vol. 2)95 lexical data including these: Sanskrit varṣá-m ‘rain, raining, a shower’, várṣati ‘to rain’; Hit- tite warša- ‘fog, mist’; Greek ἕρση ‘dew’ (Homeric ἐέρση, Doric ἕρσᾱ); and for Proto-Indo-European he quoted from Mann’s An Indo-European Comparative Dictionary (1984–1987) these terms: ‘droplet, sprinkling, shower, dew, rain’ (from Mann’s p. 1521), ‘to shed, to sprinkle, to pour, to gush, to rain’ (ibid.), ‘pour, downpour’ (from Mann’s p. 1604). The existence of the Hittite and Greek terms would be enough for a loanword to appear in Biblical Hebrew, once one considers Hittite and Aegean ethnic presence in the Canaanite and later periods.96 Concerning Latin rōres, consider that Dogopolsky (2008) has a Nos- tratic proto-root 739 being *rûrû ‘to flow, to stream’ on pp. 714–715, claiming occurrences in Kartvelic, Indo-European, Altaic, and Dravidic, but not Hamito-Semitic. He omitted Latin rōs ‘dew’, but signalled (by pointing g to another proto-root) “L[atin] ūrīna ‘urine’ (semantic infl. of Gk ‘urine’ < NaIE [i.e., Narrow Indo-European, i.e., all Indo- European languages except Hittite-Luwian] *wors-/*wers- ‘rain, dew’ < N[ostratic] ‘pour, flow’, q.v.)”. Dolgoposlky (2008) has this other Nostratic proto-root on pp. 1854–1855:97

95 The Afrasian section of that entry is not relevant for the Hebrew term at hand, and Hebrew does not appear there. 96 The Nostratic school within linguistics is controversial; its exponent Dolgopolsky stated (2008, p. 40): “Turkic preserves much of the phonological information of proto-Altaic, so that proto-Turkic *tolu ‘hail’ is a legitimate cognate of IE *del- ‘rain, dew’ and probably of FU [i.e., Finno-Ugric] *tälwä ‘winter’, in spite of its absence in all other branches of Altaic, and hence it must have existed in proto-Altaic.” One may retort: perhaps it was borrowed. Is this relevant for Hebrew /ṭall/, ‘dew’? 97 HS is Hamito-Semitic, S is Semitic, WS is West Semitic, Sr is Syriac, JA is Jewish Middle Aramaic, Trg. Is Targumic Jewish Middle Aramaic, BHb is Biblical Hebrew,

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Ar is Arabic Hrs is Harsusi (one of the modern South Arabian languages), Ak is Akkadian. ?σ,φ,μ concedes that the etymology is questionable on semantic, phonological, and morphological grounds. IE is Indo-European, NaIE is Narrow Indo-European (i.e., “IE Proper”, a subfamily including all IE languages except Hittite-Luwian), OI is Old Indian, L is Latin, Sl is Slavic, OCS is Old Church Slavic, R is Russian, Uk is Unrainian, Blg is Bulgarian, Scr (recte SCr) is Serbo-Croatian, Cz is Czech, Slk is Slovak, P il Polish, Lt is Lithuanian. U is Uralic, FU is Fenno-Ugric, Prm is Permian, Z is Ziryene, Yz is Yazvian, pVg is Proto-Vogul, Vg is Vogul, Vg Ss is the Sosva dialect of Vogul. Yk (not in Dolgupolsky’s list of abbreviations) perhaps stands for Vg TY (the Yanïchkova subdialect of the Tavda dialect of Vogul), or perhaps stands for Yr (Yurak, an extinct Fenno-Ugric language akin to Nenetz and Enets), or then again perhaps Yk stands for Y, i.e. Yukagir (Yukaghir). A is Altaic, M is Mongolic, Wrm is Written Mongolian (i.e., Classical Mongolian), HlM is Halha-Mongolian, i.e., Khalkha Mongolian. Since the 15th century, the Khalkha have been, and still are, the largest subgroup of Mongol people in Mongolia. “The Thirteen Khalkhas of the Far North are the major subethnic group of the independent state of Mongolia. They number 1,610,400 (78.8%) of Mongolia’s population (1989 figures)” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalkha).

10.4. Merely look-alikes? Latin tolle!, Hebrew ṭol! ‘take!’

Time and again, one comes across striking instances of similarity between Semitic and the lexicon of Indo-European or of given Indo- European languages, but look-alikes are not necessarily genetic cognates, nor need they to be loanwords. For example: the typically Tan- naitic Hebrew singular masculine imperative ṭol! /ṭol!/ = Latin tolle! ‘take!’ Is this merely coincidental similarity? The Hebrew verb nāṭál ‘to take’ (a “weak” verb, as because of its initial radical /n/ missing from some inflected forms, it belongs to the primae infirmae class) is already found in Biblical Hebrew, but is not widespread in that historical stratum; e.g., the imperfective verbal form /yiṭṭol/ (<*/yinṭol/) ‘he takes’ in Isaiah 40:13. The verb spread in Tannaitic Hebrew because of the influence of Aramaic, where the lexical cognate is the verb for ‘to take’ (as opposed to the typical Biblical and Modern Hebrew verb for ‘to take’, lāqáḥ). Perhaps, in the perspective of Agmon (2010), a Mesolithic biliteral Proto-Semitic root ṭ-l became a Neolithic trilateral Semitic root n-ṭ-l. The prominent linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (Gorizia, 1829 – Milan, 1907) had published two works about “the Aryo-Semitic nexus” —this being a supposed relation between Indo-European and Semitic languages: “Del nesso ario-semitico”, published in the periodical Il Politecnico, but addressed as open letters, the first to Adalbert Kuhn in Berlin (Ascoli 1864a), and the other one to the linguist Franz Bopp (Ascoli 1864b). He then also published “Studj ario-semitici” (Ascoli 1867). Hermann Möller (1911) made a valiant effort at detecting lexicon shared by “Indo-Germanic” and Semitic, and he theorised an Indo- Semitic Ur-language. Here and there, Vennemann resorts to Germanic/ Semitic parallels found in Möller (1911), but Vennemann theorises them differently. Moscati et al. (1964, p. 17) claimed that “the ‘Aryo-Semitic’ (Ascoli) or ‘Nostratic’ (Pedersen, Cuny) hypothesis which is claimed as a common ancestor of Hamito-Semitic and Indo-European” is “very highly speculative, especially on account of deep-seated morphological differences between those groups, although the inflexional structure appears to be common to both. A more reliable explanation is to be sought in the common Mediterranean environment […] Such limited links as may exist between Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic should not, therefore, be regarded as

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/ 118 Ephraim Nissan a heritage from a ‘parent’ language, but rather as a haphazard collection of isoglosses not unconnected with the geographical proximity of the two groups and certain historical contacts between them” (quoted by Kaye 1999, p. 331).

10.5. Salvatore Debenedetti relating in the 1880s the river names Arno and Arnōn, vis-à-vis some current thinking about Arno

The Arno is the most important river of central Italy after the Tiber. Their respective length is 250 km and 405 km. This subsection is based upon part of Sec. 1, “The River Arno”, in my article “European fluvial names, Hebrew sources, and imagined history” (Nissan 2019), and especially upon its Sec. 1.2, “Arno’s names in Jewish contexts: the tenth-century reference in the Yosippon, and the cultural context of a 19th-century academic in Pisa relating Arno to the name of the biblical river Arnon”, and upon Sec.1.3, “Etymological hypotheses concerning Arno”, in that same paper. In the early 1880s — Asher Salah points out (2013, pp. 183–184) — “Salvatore De Benedetti, in one of the lectures he delivered at Pisa Univer- sity, while aiming to show the spiritual and etymological affinities between Hebrew and Italian, derived the name of the Florentine river Arno from the biblical Arnon, making thus easier to acclimatise the sceneries of ancient Israel to Dante’s homeland”. The river Arno is Tuscany’s main river. In Biblical (and Modern) Hebrew, Arnōn is the name of a prominent river in Transjordan, and its current Arabic name is Wadi Mujib: a tributary from the east of the Dead Sea, it enters that lake now at 420 metres below sea level, nearly at the latitude of Gaza. In biblical times, it was Moab’s northern border. In all likelihood, De Benedetti’s etymological hypothesis was a pious folk-etymology, amounting to a minor modern scholarly myth. Marco Di Giulio (2016, 94) has remarked that whereas for the coeval linguist, Gra- ziadio Isaia Ascoli (an academic in Milan98 who brought about a leap in quality and exercised a lasting impact on linguistic research in Italy, and

98 See on him Morgana and Bianchi Robbiati (2009).

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 119 introduced the concept of substrate), his dual identity, Italian and Jewish, was

reflected in a concern to illuminate the connections and influences linking Semitic and Indo-European languages and cultures[, i]n De Benedetti’s work, his dual identity is more directly represented by his interest in developing parallels between ancient Israel and contemporary Italy. Each of the two scholars responded to the secularizing leanings of the unified state by representing Jewishness as a cultural rather than a religious heritage.99

The etymology of the Biblical Hebrew river name Arnōn is unclear, and there is no obvious solution. (Arnon is also an Israeli and Thai surname.)100 I suspect that the Biblical Hebrew tree name óren (Isaiah 44:14)101 is unrelated, at any rate if the tree genus originally denoted — which is the bay-tree (the laurel: Laurus nobilis), according to Ye- huda Feliks (1997, pp. 159–161),102 whereas in present-day Hebrew, óren

99 A Piedmontese, Salvatore De Benedetti (Novara, 1818 – Pisa, 1891) had an entirely secular outlook anyway. “Unlike Ascoli, De Benedetti, when he became a professor, was not yet a scholar. Rather, he was an educator, a journalist, and an intellectual who had committed himself to the ideals of the liberal revolution” (Di Giulio 2016, p. 100). Salvatore De Benedetti’s value for scholarship was in that he translated from Hebrew, e.g., the hymns of the great medieval poet Yehudah Halevy (Canzoniere sacro di Giuda Levita, tradotto dall’ebraico e illustrato, published in Pisa in 1871). In Pisa, he held the chair of Hebrew language (1862–1891). 100 Avraham Arnon (1887–1960) was an Israeli educator and a recipient of the Israel Prize. Baruch Arnon (b. 1940) is a Jewish American pianist and music teacher. Daniel I. Arnon was a biologist who is associated with photosynthesis. Ruth Arnon is an Israeli biochemist. Also note Poj Arnon, a Thai film director. 101 In a sarcastic description of the manufacture of idols. The identification of the wood as being that of the bay-tree is plausible, as bay-tree wood is used sometimes in the manufacture of furniture. 102 Feliks was relying upon two talmudic occurrences of ‹ʔrwnym› (in Rosh HaShana, 23a) or ‹ʕrwnym› (Bava Batra 81a); in particular, in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Bava Batra 81a, top, Hebrew ‘aronim ‹ʕrwnym› is defined in Aramaic as ‘arei ‹ʕry›, i.e., ‘bay-trees’. In Arabic, the name for ‘laurel, bay-tree’ is γār (ghār), the initial ayin‘ ע phoneme being voiced velar fricative (cf. an uvular r). Historically, the letter of the Hebrew and Aramaic alphabet has stood not only for those languages’ phoneme /ʕ/ (the voiced pharyngeal fricative), but also for the Proto-Semitic phoneme of the Arabic letter ghayn, a phoneme later lost from Hebrew and Aramaic, later than 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/ 120 Ephraim Nissan denotes the pine — is not especially conspicuous on the banks of that river (over 300 plant species are recorded in the Arnon basin).103 Note instead Syriac arnā ‘mountain goat’. Part of the Arnon/Wadi Mujib river-bed runs in a deep gorge. Ibex are found on high ground near the Dead Sea where freshwater can be accessed (e.g. in Ein-Gedi). Wild goats are part of the fauna in the Wadi Mujib natural reserve indeed. Also note that Ărān was the name appearing in Genesis 36:28 in a list of descendants of Seir (Śē‘īr) the Hurrite, so this is extremely relevant for Transjordan, the country of that river. There is an iconic trait of the river Arnon, where the water flows inside a canyon, and tourists wade through water as deep as their legs are long. The facing rocky walls, with uneven surfaces, are so close, that this apparently inspired, in the Roman period, a rabbinic legend, claiming that when Moses led the Children of Israel in that area, they had been unaware of Amorite troops ambushing them from cavities high in the rocks; the walls then met by miracle, with the jutting rocks crushing the ambushers. Unaware, Israel passed above the joined walls of the canyon, instead of passing beneath, in the valley (which given the real setting, must be in the river-bed). Only awareness of the striking scenery of the Arnon canyon could have inspired this story. In Louis Ginzberg’s digest of such legends (1911, pp. 337–339), his retelling perhaps obscures a bit what the original homiletical text states. It is a parallel of the passage of the Red Sea, and the biblical text of the passage of the Arnon, too, is followed with a song (Numbers 21:14).

Roman period: it is not unproblematic that there is an interchangeability of ‹ʔrwnym› (aronim) or ‹ʕrwnym› (‘aronim? gharonim?). Feliks (1997, p. 159) mentions that in Akkadian, erinu denotes the cedar tree. The Jonathan Targum rendered in Aramaic the only occurrence in the Hebrew Bible of óren ‹ʔrn› with órnā ‹ʔrnʔ›, clearly a cognate, unhelpfully for identification. 103 A spelling error in a manuscript is instructive: Feliks (1997, p. 159, fn. 3) mentions that in the Perush ha-Gadol (Greater Commentary), attributed to Rav Hai Gaon, to the Mishnah at Parah 3:6, one comes across the spelling ‹ʔrnwn› (which happens to be the same as the spelling of the river name Arnōn), but it should be the tree-name plural form ‹ʔrnyn›, like in an authoritative manuscript of the Mishnah. See Mishnah, tractate Parah 3:8.

The Arnon river’s canyon, not far from the Dead Sea. Backpackers wade through the water.104

104 https://theplanetd.com/images/wadi-mujib-canyoning-jordan-walking-through- water.jpg

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/ 122 Ephraim Nissan

Latin Arnus occurs in Pliny, Natural History 3.50; in Tacitus, An- nales, 1.79; and in Livy, 22,2 (but in the latter it apparently is an in- terpolated gloss, “arnus”, where the text just says “fluvius”). Consider that the current status quaestionis of the etymology of Arno shows no consensus. The philologist Hans Krahe related the river name Arno on a paleo-European basis *Ar-n-, derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *er- ‘flow, move’. Cf. Greek ’óρνῡμαι ‘move, stir oneself’, and Germanic terms for ‘zeal’ such as English earnest, and Old Norse ern ‘clever, energetic’. Also consider non-Anatolian Proto-Indo-European *wer- / *wēr- / *ur- ‘flowing water’. While never mentioning the river Arno in his book, the former Soviet, naturalised Israeli linguist Aharon Dolgopolsky (2008) made the PIE root *wer- / *wēr- / *ur- ‘flowing water’, into part of his Nostratic root 2509, on pp. 2340–2341. He claimed derivatives also in Uralic (for ‘river-bed’), Dravidian (such as, in Telugu, e.g. vaṟṟu ‘flow’, ‘flood’; and in the Kui language, vāru ‘stream, torrent’); as well as ancient Egyptian and East Chadic (within Hamito-Semitic). Proto-Indo-European *er-, *or- ‘stir, move’ is the most likely etymology of Hittite aruna- ‘sea’, for which also proposed is a “Hattic origin, from the place-name URUArinna (URUTÚL-na) via *arinna- ‘foun- tain’” (Weeks 1985, 8, §1.32). [Incidentally, the Hittite word for ‘water’ is watar, genitive wetenas (ibid., 7, §1.31).] The Hittite transitive verb for ‘to move’ is arnu- (ibid., 89, §10.61; cf. 10, §10.11): “10.61 — CARRY — A basic sense ‘transport, (re)move, deliver’ etc. underlies the many shades of meaning apparent in arnu-, a caus[ative] (*r0-new-/r0-nu-) to IE *er- ‘move’, matching Skt [=Sanskrit] ṛṇóti ‘arise’, Av[estan] ərənoiti, Gk. ὄρνῡμι ‘rouse, set in motion’” (Weeks 1985, 89, §10.61). Cf. ibid., 157, §20.47: “arnuwala- ([whose Sumerogram is] NAM.RA) ‘displaced person, deportee’, fr[om] arnu- ‘move, remove, transport, bring’, etc., caus[ative] to ar- ‘move, stir’”. Quite importantly, there exist similar names of other rivers: the Arn in southern France; the Arna/Arne, a tributary of the Suippe in the department of the river Marne; and in the Lombard Alps, the Arno, a creek near Varese; and a lake, Lago d’Arno, in Val Camonica. In the 19th to the 21st centuries, because of the involvement of German historical linguistics re- searching Italian, all too often Germanic etymologies were proposed for Italian lexical or onomastic items, even when historically or prehistorically unlikely. It is unlikely indeed for Arno, which one even finds etymologised

(by a Web étymologisant) from Germanic *Arn in relation to *arnō-, *arnōn, *arna-, *arnan, *arn. Even semantic motivation from ‘eagle’ was suggested, by claiming that the upper course of the Arno resembles the contour of an eagle. This is not cogent at all,105 all the more so as the area was not Germanic. Significantly, the proponent of that etymology was at such pains to exclude ancient Roman occurrences of Arnus (so that the river name could be Germanic because of the Barbaric invasions), that he insists on a theory that Tacitus’ Annales were forged by Poggio Brac- ciolini… To do away with this kind of bizarre “etymologies”, for Arno in particular, I would suggest in jest that Arno is related to the Greek verb ἀρνέομαι, i.e., ‘I deny’ (cf. Armenian uṙanam ‘deny’). Besides, it is inane to claim, which has been done, that the river name Arno is related to the Frankish king Arno. Importantly, there is a river Arnon in central France. Its length is 150.5 km. It is a left tributary of the river Cher, into which it flows near Vierzon. Whereas it makes sense that the etymology is correlated to that of other rivers with a similar name in formerly Celtic areas, I wonder whether the precise form Arnon resulted from adaptation to the name of the biblical river Arnon, of which the clergy were aware. Massimo Pittau has related Arno to Etruscan antiquity, but pointed out as being possibly relevant an Istrian noun denoting ‘rocky bay’: “arno «insenatura rocciosa in cui entra il mare» (AEI 27, 482) (voce prelatina; AEI, DELI, Etim), che sono da connettere col lat. Arnus «Arno» (fiume dell’Etruria), col gentilizio lat. Arnius e da confrontare con quello etr. Arna (Ad 2.32) e infine con l’appellativo etr. arna (Ta 5.4)” (from Pittau’s

105 In contrast, an argument from contour has been made, and is more cogent, for Bríndisi < Latin Brundisium < Messapic Brunda naming a port city in Apulia (cf. Old Greek Βρεντέσιον, Old Italian Brandizio, Brindisine Brínnisi). An etymon in the Messapic language, brunda ‘head of a stag’, ‘trophy with antlers’ (Brention), is still currently accepted (including in lay reception: even in the name of the local Pizzeria Brindisi Brunda: see http://www.pizzeria.brindisi.br.it/), based on an etymological statement in Strabo 282, because that shape is suggested by the contour of the harbour. In Strabo’s Greek, the name of the city was derived from Βρένδος ‘deer’ and Βρέντιον ‘head of a deer’, Greek words only documented in that etymological statement. Besides, Isidore of Seville (d. 636), writing in Latin in his Etymologies, XV.i.49, claimed: “The Greeks built Brundisium, and it is called Brundisium in Greek[!] because brunda means ‘head of a stag’, it being the case that in the shape of the city the horns and head and tongue may be seen”.

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/ 124 Ephraim Nissan entry for Italian arnia ‘beehive’, which he relates to Medieval Latin arna “vas apium” [i.e., a container of bees]). Because of the perceived sense ‘cavity’ of such possible cognates, for the river name Arno it was suggested that the semantic motivation is from ‘river-bed’ (cf. Italian àlveo ‘river-bed’ vs alveare ‘beehive’).106 Another etymology for Arno, by Boriosi, relates the river name to the Arni, a tribe of Umbrian, non-Etruscan background, and for whom he cited the inscriptions of Toppole d’Anghiari. The present-day Umbria region is east of Tuscany, whereas the course of the river Arno begins in Tuscany’s easternmost province indeed. The Arni resided in the upper valley of the Tiber, and in the Arno valley in the area of Subbiano and Rassina near Anghiari. By the way, Arni is a hamlet on Monte Altissimo in northwestern Tuscany: see Repetti (1833), s.v. Arni. To the etymology of Arno, Emanuele Repetti devoted one paragraph (1833, s.v. Arno): “Piacque a taluni scrittori derivare la parola Arno da greca origine (Αρνος) significante agnello, mentre altri credettero che alla Tribù di Roma Arnense dasse [sic] il suo nome Arno, piuttosto che l’antico paese di Arna posto nel confine dell’Umbria fra Città di Castello e Perugia” [“It pleased some authors to derive the word Arno from the Greek Αρνος, i.e., ‘lamb’, whereas others believed that the Arnense Tribe of [ancient] Rome took it name from the Arno, rather than from the ancient village of Arna, located in Umbria between Città di Castello and Perugia”].

10.6. Fallacies concerning iĕcur ‘liver’ and καρωτόν, carota, ‘carrot’

Elsewhere (Nissan 2008, 2014) I have illustrated a kind of etymological fallacy, with two made-up cases of etymothesis. Semitic lexical derivatives for ‘liver’ are from the root kbd, whose central sememe is ‘heavy’, i.e., the

106 Arno is so defined in an email I received from Massimo Pittau (27 February 2018): “Fiume della Toscana. L’idronimo deriva dal lat. Arnus, il quale è da riportare al gentilizio etr. Arna, Arnai (ThLE), corrispondente a quello lat. Arnius (RNG). Esso inoltre è da connettere con l’appellativo etr. arna probabilmente «cavità (sepolcrale)» e all’ital. arna, arnia «alveare» col significato fondamentale di «cavo, cavità». Pertanto Arno probabilmente significa «scavato, incavato, incassato nel terreno» (evidentemente in alcuni suoi tratti particolari). Sul piano linguistico è da confrontare con gli altri appellativi italiani alveo di fiume e alveare”.

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 125 protosememe of Hebrew yqr (for ‘dear’, ‘costly’),107 whose Semitic root has no known derivative for ‘liver’. One does find iĕcur ‘liver’ in Latin, unlikely to have come from Semitic: it is well established among Indo- European cognates, and their peculiar genitive forms are not amenable to yqr. An example similar to fallaciously relating iĕcur to yqr by analogy to the polysemy of the Hebrew root that yields the noun kāḇēd [ka'ved] for ‘liver’, is from names for ‘carrot’. For Semitic roots krt and gzr the central sememe is ‘to cut’. Semitic names for ‘carrot’ outwardly have a root gzr (a semantic shift to ‘wedged taproot’ from ‘cut’ is tempting) — actually in a naïve multilingual dictionary, typewritten and with corrections by hand, by the climatologist Dov Ashbel (1896–1989), namely in Ashbel (1959/60, p. 133), he derived the European lexical type carrot from the Hebrew infinitive kārōt while claiming in Hebrew: “The sense of the [Hebrew] words [sic] gzr and krt [i.e., the verbs written without the vowels] is the same. (The leaves of this plant are gzurim, cut, into small pieces.)” — but it has been cogently shown they are a loan from outside Semitic, namely, Middle Persian, the historical stratum relevant for the appearance of the terms in Semitic. Neither the Persian, nor the Greek and European names for ‘carrot’ came from Semitic krt. Within Semitic, the word appeared in Arabic jázar ‘carrot’ (in Syriac, gezārā took on the sense ‘turnip’), whereas in Hebrew, the lexeme of the noun gézer in the sense ‘carrot’ only appeared during the Middle Ages. Already in Tannaitic Hebrew, one comes across the unrelated lexeme of the noun gézer in the sense ‘block’, ‘piece’. Jewish Middle Aramaic ‹krtʔ› is understood in the sense ‘leek’, and is related to Tannaitic Hebrew plant names whose root is krš. Tannaitic Hebrew ‹krty› (kartī) was defined s.v. by Jastrow (1903) as “porraceous (of color), leek-green stuff”. Cf. Jastrow (1903), s.v. ‹krtynwn›, which, according to Jastrow’s remark, is formed like Greek πράσινον for ‘green,’ ‘leek-colored.’

107 A conjugation conveying the reflexive or inchoative aspect yielded in Hebrew the inchoative verb /nityaqqer/, which, whereas it would in Israeli Hebrew be understood as ‘to become more costly,’ in Biblical Hebrew has the sense ‘to become heavier’. The context of occurrence is in Exodus 17:12, in the episode in which Moses, during the battle against Amalek, has his arms lifted and kept in that position by Aaron and Hur. This is because Moses felt his hands or arms to be too heavy to keep them raised without help. Cf. in Exodus 4:10, when Moses resists his call to prophecy and leadership, and objects: “because heavy of mouth (kebad pe) and heavy of tongue (u‑kebad lāšōn) I [am]”.

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/ 126 Ephraim Nissan

In the Baghdadi Judaeo-Arabic vernacular, the masculine, singularia tantum noun kərráθ denotes what in English is known as ‘chives’ (Allium scorodoprasum, Allium schoenoprasum), a porraceous, onion-flavoured plant (which is why in Italian it is called erba cipollina, i.e., literally, ‘onion-like grass,’ as well as aglio romano and aglio cipollino, i.e., literally, ‘Roman garlic’ and ‘onion-like garlic’). It is known that Latin carota is only documented as early as the third century C.E. In fact, de Vaan omitted carota from his etymological dictionary of Latin. Other European languages tend to have similar names (see Nis- san 2014), and usually the path of transmission hypothesised is from Greek καρωτόν to Latin carota, and from Romance languages such as French to, e.g., English carrot. The root of carrots has a tapering shape, wedged in the ground. The Italian technical name for the main axis of the root of such vegetables, i.e., the ‘taproot,’ is fittone, related to confitto for ‘wedged,’ ‘driven in’. It is the taproot that is the edible part of carrots. The temptation would be to posit that there is a general pattern as follows, in which two Semitic roots, R1 and R2, are (near-) synonyms as per their central sememe S1, and such that a different sememe, S2, is instantiated for a lexical derivative of R2 (but not of R1) somewhere within Semitic, whereas a term that looks as though it is amenable to R1 is found as conveying the word-sense S2 in some language outside Semitic, yet geographically a neighbour. Things do not fit in nicely, and we have to reject those etymologies.

An analogical reasoning fallacy.

Fallacy when reasoning about iecur.

Fallacy when reasoning on names for carrot.

The declension of iecur in Latin is peculiar. In the nominative case, this neuter noun is found in the two forms: iĕcur and iŏcur. (Moreover, a diminutive, iĕcuscŭlum, is found in the writings of Cicero.) As to the genitive singular (‘of the liver’ or ‘of a liver’), three forms exist: iecŏris, iecinŏris, and iocinŏris. Cognates are found in other Indo-European languages as well. In particular, Old Indian has yakṛt for the nominative, and

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/ 128 Ephraim Nissan yaknaḥ for the genitive. Old Lithuanian had jaknas, whereas Latvian has in the plural aknas (and dialectally, jęknas). More like Latin iecur as in the nominative is the Persian jigar (this time the phonetic value of the j here is like the j of English spelling). For Greek, the term for ‘liver’ is hēpar (ἡπαρ) in the nominative, and hēpatos (ἡπατος) in the genitive. For p where k is found in the cognate terms from the other Indo-European languages, cf. Latin equus for ‘horse,’ vs. Greek hippos, whereas for Greek at an older documented stage, namely Mycenaean, -kw- was preserved where Greek has -pp-. The data from Indo-European are known and uncontrover- sial. Romance, i.e., Neo-Latin, languages replaced iecur with a different lexical type. Refer to Temistocle Franceschi’s treatment of Italian fégato (Franceschi 1985).

10.7. Latin maltha ‘mortar; cement’

In de Vaan’s etymological dictionary of Latin (2008), there is no entry for Latin maltha ‘mortar; cement’. The etymon is Greek, as the spelling with th also suggests. Consider however (as this may have influenced semantic remotivation through there probably being a perception that the effect of grinding was involved) the Umbrian cognate kumaltu of the Latin verb molō ‘to grind’, as well as the Indo-European cognates, in de Vaan’s entry for that verb, on pp. 386–387:

Cement is mentioned by the Hebrew name méleṭ in Jeremiah 43:9. This noun has cognates in Syriac. This does not ensure that the term is originally Semitic, but it could be, or then it is an Indo-European loanword, which I tend to prefer. Mario Alinei has written (2000, pp. 843–844) — while discussing claims by Emilio Sereni (1981, pp. 29–30) — that mota in Northern Ital- ian and in Italian dialects, the Provençal derivatives of the type mauta (> mota), for ‘mud’ and the like, “tutti «fango» o «calcina» e «poltiglia», pur derivando immediatamente dal lat. maltha «malta, cemento, misto di calce e sugna»,108 sono in ultima analisi di origine greca, dal gr. málthē/-a «misto di pece e cera utilizzato per calafatare le imbarcazioni». Anche *meldh- [cfr. DELG], e quindi avesse origini anIE, potrebbe essere stato introdotto in Grecia dai primi gruppi coltivatori del Neolitico, e di qui nel bacino nord-mediterraneo occidentale, con la CI/C”, i.e., Impresso Car- dial or just Cardial Pottery culture (Alinei’s brackets). According to Ali- nei’s approach, the spread of farming and of Cardial pottery was carried by non-Indo-Europeans, in particular speakers of Semitic vernaculars. The following is quoted from Alinei (2002):

Unfortunately, even if this hypothesis were sufficient to solve the problem for Greece — which it is not […] — the major problem is that also Southern Italy and the islands109 are characterised by highly peculiar phonetic features — namely the retroflex or cacu- minal rendering of /l/, /d/ and /tr/ — which are totally alien to Latin phonology, and which are usually considered a typical trace of the so called “Mediterranean”, non- IE substratum.110 The following figure shows the distributional area of these retroflex sounds […] Notice that this area comes very close to that of the earliest spread of the

108 Prepared as a mix of lime and pork fat. 109 Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Elba, and the areas in the Italian Peninsula shown in a map in Alinei (2002) but also Lunigiana (the northwesternmost area of Tuscany). 110 Note however the occurrence of retroflex consonants in Scandinavian languages.

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Impresso/Cardial Ware — that is Southern Italy and the islands —, and that this is in total contradiction with what the NDT predicts,111 namely that the concentration of non-IE features ought to appear especially in the areas not or little touched by the Impresso/Cardial culture. But the opposite is true: not only do we not find any trace of non-IE influences in the areas not or little touched by the Impresso/Cardial Ware, but we find them only precisely where the impact of this culture was the earliest and the greatest! Only if we assume the Continuity Theory, and thus the reverse hypothesis that the autochthonous people were IE, and the intrusive farmers were non-IE, can we explain the coincidence between the area of retroflex sounds and that of the earliest spread of Impresso/Cardial.

10.8. Latin betulla ‘birch’ (< Celtic>), resembling by coincidence Hebrew bĕtūlā ‘virgin, maiden’, bĕtūlat-haššiqmā ‘the sycamore tree as long as no wood was cut away from it (as yet)’

The etymon of Latin betulla ‘birch’ is satisfactorily explained as being Celtic, in relation to Proto-Indo-European *gwet-u- ‘pitch, resin’, which has also given Latin *betu- ‘pitch, resin’ as an intermediate phase yielding bitūmen, bitūminis ‘pitch, asphalt’: “The Latin word”, i.e., bitūmen, “pre- supposes *betu- ‘pitch, resin’, which it must have borrowed either from Sabellic (where *gw > b) or from Celtic (compare Lat. betulla ‘birch’ from British or Gaulish Celtic *betui̯a). According to Pliny, pitch was extracted from birch trees in Gallia; but the same procedure may have been prac- tised among Italic peoples” (de Vaan 2008, p. 73). It is therefore by sheer coincidence that Latin betulla ‘birch’ resembles Biblical and later Hebrew bĕtūlā ‘virgin, maiden’, even though I would not exclude that Mediterra- nean traders from a Northwestern Semitic background, in case they had exposure to Latin betulla ‘birch’, may have folk-etymologised; at any rate, we have no evidence for that. As for probably autonomous semantic development within Northwest Semitic of the sense of bĕtūlā ‘virgin, maiden’ to ‘untapped for wood’ in the context of trees, consider the Mishnaic Heb- rew compound bĕtūlat-haššiqmā, which literally means ‘the virgin of the sycamore tree’, and denotes the sycamore tree as long as no wood was cut away from it (as yet). That compound occurs in the Mishnah, tractate Bava Batra 4:8.

111 NDT is Colin Renfrew’s Neolithic Diffusion Theory.

11. Concluding remarks

Several entries in Michiel de Vaan’s Latin Etymological Dictionary (2008) are the point of departure for this long study, which has taken us places. The various lexical candidates for being interpreted as having resulted from ancient language contact we have considered are uneven in how compelling the etymology proposed is, and perhaps how compelling it could be. Nevertheless, I am of the opinion that it can be worthwhile to signal some lexical look-alikes, prior to refuting them right away, or for other scholars to do so. At any rate, hopefully all in all this paper will be considered a worthwhile contribution to the literature, or will have provided matter for thought about how to further pursue research into possible language contacts between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Italian peninsula before the rise of the Roman Republic and then empire as a circum-Mediterranean dominant power.

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