Loan words
Some indication of a people’s
foreign contacts is given by the foreign words that enter its language.
Individual items in isolation prove little. If we speak of tycoons, or
of running amok, that is not evidence of significant Japanese or Malay
influence on British culture (though it does reflect the fact that we have had
dealings with the Far East). If, on the other hand, one can find some dozens of
words coming from the same language or area of the world, that can only be the
consequence of comparatively close and sustained contact.
Greek has a large proportion of
words that have no satisfactory Indo-European etymology. Many of them must have
been taken over from other peoples with whom Greek-speakers came into contact
after their arrival in the Mediterranean area: certainly from the existing
population of Greece, and very probably from the Minoans, but also from peoples
living further east, in Anatolia, the Levant, perhaps even Egypt. Not all of
these words can now be traced to their source, mainly because we know too
little of some of the languages in question. Of those that can, a large
majority are of Semitic origin, or at least have cognates current in Semitic
languages. A few others may be Anatolian.
Assessments of the quantity of
Semitic loan words in Greek have varied enormously. The learned Samuel Bochart
(1595–1667) certainly went much too far in his attempts to identify them, as
did most of those who wrote on the subject before the present century. Knowledge
of the Semitic languages was not what it is today: the study of Akkadian was
still in its youth, and Ugaritic was still undiscovered. Scholars were too
easily satisfied with partial phonetic correspondences and vague semantic
relationships. This century brought an extreme reaction by philologists who
sought to limit the number of such borrowings to a mere handful. So long as a
link between a Greek word and some Indo-European root could be suggested,
however remote, it was considered simply superfluous to entertain a Semitic
etymology. In the last thirty years the pendulum has swung back towards the
centre. Émile Masson in 1967 provided a solid basis, and since then a fair
number of the older Semitic etymologies have been brought back into favour and
some new ones found. For the first time a distinguished Indo-Europeanist
(Oswald Szemerényi) has played a significant part in this research.
The connections will sometimes
have been complex and sometimes indirect. Some oriental words may already have
made themselves at home in Greece in the Early Bronze Age, before the
proto-Greek-speakers arrived, and might have entered Greek from ‘Pelasgian’. A
likely example is the word for wine, as the vine was established in Greece at
an early date. The Greek woino- (from which came Latin uinum, and
which Germanic wein, win, etc.) corresponds to Semitic *wainu
(Arabic wain ‘black grapes’, Ethiopic wäydne ‘vine’), as also do
Hittite wan-, Luwian wiyan(i)-. But in north-west Semitic initial w-
turned into y- not later than the middle of the second millennium; hence
Ugaritic yenu, Hebrew yayin. If a Linear A word on a Cnossian
pithos fragment is rightly read as ya-ne and interpreted as ‘wine’, it
suggests either that Crete shared in the same phonological change or that the
word was a not too ancient borrowing from Canaan. The Greek form with w-,
which appears in Linear B, must have been taken over earlier, if not from a
different source (which is less likely).
Two other words of Semitic
provenance, kumin- ‘cummin’ and šisam- ‘sesame’, appear in both
Linear A and Linear B, and might therefore have come into Greek via Minoan
rather than directly. Any Egyptian words are likely to have reached Greece by
way of either Crete or Phoenicia. A few words appear both in Semitic languages
and in Hittite or Luwian; in some cases the Greek form is closer to the one, in
some to the other. Besides wοîno-, mention may be made of kuanos
‘small, blue enamel, lapis lazuli’ (Hitt. kuwann- Ug. iqn(ī)û,
Akk. uqnâ, late Bab. qunâ); nitron ‘sodium carbonate’
(Hitt. nitri, Heb. nēter Aram. nitr-, Akk. nit(i)r(u));
kakkabē ‘partridge’ (Hitt. kakkaban-, Akk. kakkabānu,
etc.); kumbahos ‘helmet’ (Hitt. kubahi-, Heb. kôbaʿ or qôbaʿ);
perhaps elephant- ‘ivory, elephant’ (Hitt. lahpa-) if it is from
some Akkadian compound alap X ‘ox of X’.
The total number of words which
appear in Greek in or before the fifth century and for which, in my opinion, a
good case has been made for a Semitic connection, satisfying the two criteria
of a good phonetic correspondence and a good semantic fit, is something over a
hundred. They include the names of animals, insects, and fishes, plants and
plant products, minerals, vessels and containers, fabrics and garments, various
other manufactured articles, prepared foods, terms used in commerce and
religious cult, and the names of the letters of the alphabet. Several of them
are already attested (whether directly or indirectly by derived forms, proper
names, etc.) in the Linear B tablets. In addition to some already mentioned,
one may cite apenā ‘cart’, temenos ‘assigned land’ (below, p.
36), khitōn ‘tunic’, khrúsos ‘gold’. Some others may be equally
old but by chance not attested in the tablets. Many, no doubt, entered the
language in later periods. Dozens more appear after the fifth century, for
example names of gems and plants in Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and others. Here
again, the first attestation may come long after the word established itself in
Greek. A considerable number turn up as dateless glosses in Hesychius. Among
these are some attributed to ‘the Cypriots’. Cypriot Greek evidently
accommodated a larger number of Semitic (presumably Phoenician) words than
other forms of Greek, which is not surprising. (Martin Litchfield West, The
East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth [Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997], 12-14)
