Revisiting the lily

Looking back at my personal notes and some previous online conversations concerning the common words for 'lily' or 'flower' that spread across the Mediterranean, I believe there's still some unfinished business.


A conflict arises

Under Hittite alel-, Jaan Puhvel lists off related forms in a multitude of languages showing that this word must have been an important "culture word" since olden times. I surmised and still surmise that Egyptian is the one ultimate source behind all of this. I eventually reasoned to myself that the Ancient Egyptian feminine noun written only as ḥrr.t was once pronounced *ḥalūrat (~  *ḥarūrat) guided in part by the Coptic forms with vowels explicitly written in a Greek-based alphabet.

Everything seemed fine until I started to question when exactly Egyptian *ū evolved into *ē and how. Foreign texts from the Amarna period seem to suggest that a vowel-sound like *ū must still have been spoken at about 1350 BCE. The cuneiform inscription labeled EA 368 records the numeral mu-ṭu (the Egyptian word for 'ten'), leading therefore to Callender's *mūḏaw (whose orthography I simplify to *mūḏu). Clearly the eventual change to *mēḏ- (Sahidic Coptic mēt) hadn't yet taken place.


The Minoan perspective

Meanwhile, the hypothetical Minoan loan *aléri 'lily' had emerged out of the illuminating conversations I had with Minoan Language Blog's Andras Zeke. With the former Egyptian form I've attempted, I can't sensibly explain the connections Zeke had alluded to between a certain Cretan Hieroglyphic plant glyph known as CHIC 031 and its later derivative Lin AB 27 which has been given the value of RE. (See John Younger's The Cretan Hieroglyphic Script: A review article in Minos 31-32, 1996. It's mentioned in the middle of page 397.) A Mycenaean loan from Minoan can cleanly explain later Classical Greek λείριον (léirion) 'lily' and so this serves to doubly assure the term *aléri.

Surely the phonetic value of CHIC 031 and Lin AB 27 reflects the actual Minoan word for a flower or lily but to get *aléri out of *ḥalūrat, I would have to assume that the word was loaned only by the **closing of the 2nd millennium BCE** when the Egyptian vowel shift in question must have taken place! Ironically this is when the Minoan language was also becoming extinct (if not already moribund as the Achaeans swept through). It could never explain the said Cretan Hieroglyph dated to as early as the 17th century BCE.

Ground control, we have a problem.


Everything's coming up roses (or Egyptian lilies)

This all seems remedied however if I simply ammend the Egyptian 'flower' term to *ḥalīrat. Given that, the Egyptian term must be borrowed into Minoan around or before 1700 BCE. Minoan *aléri would acquire a new specialized meaning of 'lily' as well. The Cretan hieroglyphic lily symbol is subsequently created, understandably employed to write LE ~ RE ("l" and "r" not being distinguished in both Linear A and Linear B scripts) since this is afterall the stressed syllable of the surmised word. Sahidic hrēre should also be accounted for in the same way that Egyptian *rīʕa 'sun' likewise produces rē.

At any rate, this is one confusing little word but who knows what new weeds I might yet dig up in this untamed flower garden.

Why does Apollo play a lyre?

It seems like a simple question but mum's the word online and even Wikipedia doesn't help although it does touch on the iconic lyre in its current draft of the Apollo article. To me, it's most likely that the deity of the sun isn't given a stringed lyre due to anything more elaborate than a word pun in some forgotten tongue. Which one, when, and in what way are the remaining questions.

In fact, the ultimate source of the word 'lyre' is still a riddle. The etymology of Classical Greek λύρα, from whence the English word, is uncertain but most often suspected to originate from a non-IE language, most probably Minoan. Note that the word dates back to Mycenaean, as attested in Linear B ru-ra-ta-e = *lūrātāe '(two) lyrists [dl.]' so it could very well be a borrowed word from the Minoan language. So I hypothesize a Minoan form *lura 'lyre' as the most credible source.

Coincidentally I've already been interpreting lursθ in the Lead of Magliano as a proper intransitive participle of a stative verb luras 'to be bright'. Within its context, Tins Lursθ would be the genitive of an epithet meaning 'Shining Sun' pointing to the highmost one, Tinia. Inscription TLE 747 also attests to lursl, a type-II genitive of its corresponding bare deverbal noun, lurs, which would then imply 'light'. Since -as- seems to be a fairly productive derivational suffix in Etruscan verbs (possibly a stative marker) I anticipate a more active root, *lur- 'to sparkle, to shine', at its base.

This latest revelation has got me wondering if there is a connection with this sun-lyre motif. Given both *lura 'lyre' and *lura- 'to sparkle', there would be natural temptation to use the 'lyre' as a creative solar symbolism. Of course, I still need to investigate this further and make sure that these translations are solid but it's one tempting thought that has me itching for more data.

A European 'wolf' wanderword

My prior comments on Lupercalia and Etruscans bring up an interesting potential wanderword in Italy. While some mentally ill surfers enjoy preying on random bloggers with the bait of aimless opinions and fake interest to lead one's readers off topic, the delete button prunes away the rubbish in seconds. Another blog with a lower bar of entry can suit these persons' needs if that sort of discussion is so pressing for them. For me however, the relatively virgin topic on the origins of the Lupercalia festival and wolf themes is more satisfying.

The real questions that need to be investigated are:

• What was the Etruscan word for 'wolf'?
• Was an Umbrian loanword involved (and what was its word for 'wolf')?
• Why do so many religion-related terms from Umbrian appear to be loaned into Etruscan?
  Does this say something specific about the nature of early Etruscan-Umbrian relations?
• Did Etruscans bring these themes to Italy from Lydia?
  Were they organic to Italy itself?
• When did the aforementioned lupus/lupu pun first surface?
  Did the wolf-Hades theme originate with the wordplay?
  Or did this wordplay only accommodate a pre-existing theme perhaps?
• Is this Etruscan theme founded on an older Egyptian chthonic canine motif seen in Anubis?

Just to scratch at the surface of this topic, some scholars would like to see an inherited Proto-IE reconstruction to account for all the European wolf terms. This certainly seems superficially well-grounded; the root *wĺ̥kʷos has a great amount of data to support it. I won't question the existence of the root either but I must contemplate: Are all the cognates truly accounted for by this reconstruction or is it simply an all too convenient way to gloss over hidden details of 1st millennium BCE cultural-linguistic interactions between Etrusco-Rhaetic peoples and the Indo-European Italic-speaking population?

Many irregular sound changes are present in European words for 'wolf' but the unfirm cognates are somehow tolerated by Indoeuropeanists. Hotwords like taboo are the usual exit door in journal articles to escape the mind-boggling complexities of the topic in 10 pages or less but key problems remain:

• Germanic *wulfaz has an *f when *hw should be reflexed.
• Latin lupus 'wolf' is waved away as random metathesis due to taboo.
  
• An obvious Latin doublet, lupus 'wolf' and volpēs 'fox', is left unexplained.
• How might Greek ἀλώπηξ (alōpēx) meaning 'fox' be related?
• And what too about Luwian ulipna-/walipna- 'fox'?
  Why that unexpected -p- again?

Abundance of Hecate

The name Ἑκάτη (Hekátē) is so often claimed to mean 'far(-darter)' presumably based on the feminine form of ἕκατος 'far' (hékatos) but I find myself starting to question this because this title really doesn't get to the heart of her fundamental nature. It's merely the obscure being explained with the obscure. It begs the question: Why 'far-darter'? And this leads to long tales about her Artemesian arrows which only beg further questions about how all these metaphors and concepts were mashed together like this in the first place.

One thing is certain though. Where religious beliefs are involved, we must expect poetic creativity to have superceded literal reality. Any religious etymologies will unavoidably be quite meaningful, artful and multilayered. They may even transcend individual cultures and languages. A conservative approach remains important but we can't be stunted either.

Other available wordpuns shaping her name could be:

• ἕξ 'six' (hex) and ἕκτος 'sixth' (héktos)
• ἑκατόν 'hundred' (hekatón)
• ἑκατόμβα 'hecatomb, sacrifice of 100 oxen' (hekatómba)

However if it's already suggested that Hecate may be of non-Greek origin, are there important foreign connections that we're missing? I've recently noticed how similar Hecate is to an Etruscan goddess by the name of Catha. I reason that Catha must have literally meant 'She of Abundance' (< *caθ 'to be full, to be abundant' + -θa [feminine]), a name designed simultaneously to allude to the bounty of the earth and to the abundant appearance of the full moon.

The Piacenza Liver and the contents of TLE 131 (Laris Pulena's sarcophagus) show that Catha sits beside the lord of the underworld Pacha (aka Bacchus, Fufluns) as consort. As such the pair are equivalent to the Greek xenologisms Aita and Phersipnai (Hades and Persephone). So Catha is a goddess of earthly abundance and associated with the underworld^[1], much like Hecate (as well as like Egyptian Isis). The similarity in name between Catha and Hecate only makes me ponder further about an unexplored link.

NOTES
^[1] Popular Etruscanists like Larissa Bonfante, Jean-René Janot and Nancy de Grummond all continue to misinform us that Catha was a sun goddess based only on contrived comparisons like Martianus Capella's obscure philosophical poetry of 400 AD and Dioscerides' equation of the Etruscan floral term *cauθa 'chamomile' with a Latin idiom 'eye of the sun'; see De Grummond/Simon, The religion of the Etruscans (2006), p.11 and Chapin, Charis: Essays in honor of Sara A. Immerwahr (2004), p.361 . This is pretentious erudition which deceitfully avoids examining Etruscan material in perverse favour of secondhand Roman sources which aren't even of the period in question.

Back to 'back'

Concerning the etymological 'back' problem I've been having since December, I might have found a decent cure. I had elaborated before that it's long been known that there appears to be a common word for 'back' or 'hip' across ancient Greece and Turkey: Classical Greek ischíon 'hip-joint' and Hittite iskis- 'back'. This pair just can't be a coincidence and an underlying Proto-Aegean term *iskʰis(a) seemed like a plausible fit to me.

However, I kept on feeling that unlike the previous words I've suspected to be Proto-Aegean, this one comes across as a little extra odd. Firstly I can't find a way of analysing the expected Aegean root into smaller meaningful morphemes and secondly the structure of the root seems unexpected for Proto-Aegean (eg. *s in syllable codae). Yet I know that this is at least better than the horrid attempts by Indo-Europeanists to reconstruct *h₁isgʰís- based only on two items from a very restricted geographical area. Surely this can't be correct either.

It was a tough problem so I did some yoga, smoked a spliff, watched some TV and then once my mind was distanced from the problem, I experienced a profound synaptic event. I realized that my subconscious mind had been wrestling with that initial i- for some reason. I was slow to heed my inner eye telling me of a common Hittite pattern. There's a long list of Hittite words which are the products of prothetic i- breaking up original clusters of the *sC(C)- sort. For example, ispant- 'to libate' < *spend-. So why then wouldn't iskis- be approached by IEists this way too? I suspect the answer is disturbingly circular since if one is hell-bent to deny the probability of a Greek loan from Hittite and is equally determined to make this a common IE root at all costs, then one must reconstruct this silly onset, *h₁i-.

Brainstorm time! Let's start from scratch and try this again. We have a common Greek and Hittite term for 'back' or 'hip'. Let's now just assume that the Greek word is a loan from Hittite, leaving only a single term to play with. Let's also assume that the initial i- in Hittite is prothetic like these other words. This gives us a Pre-Hittite term *skis-. Let's analyse this term as a native s-stem like some other body part terms implying that it's built on a verb stem *skei-. It just so happens that there is an identical IE root *skei- 'to cut, split'. Now, if this term originally referred to the 'spine' then it indeed 'splits' the back into two halves. Thus Pre-Hittite *skei-s- > iskis- would be 'that which divides' or 'that which is divided'. I suppose then that an Aegean or Minoan intermediary is unnecessary if the loan happened towards the closing of the 2nd millennium BCE.

The poppy pops up from nowhere

In 1862, volume 94 of the publication The North American review wrote on page 384:

"We are told that the use of the common white poppy as a soother of pain and giver of sleep, has been familiar from the earliest times; and an ingenious attempt has been made to derive the name poppy, or papaver, from papa or pap, because the plant was commonly mixed with the food of young children, to secure their sleep. This is one of those etymological postulates more ingenious than probable."

Nearly a hundred-and-fifty years later, I still can't get a straight answer on the origin of Latin papāver. If it somehow were to have something to do with the nursery term pāpa for 'food' (cf. pāpārium 'pap') as implied above, and even ignoring that such a semantic link is trying in itself, how would this poppy word have been grammatically formed from such a root? There are oddly only five terms in the Latin dictionary on Perseus ending in -ver (excluding vēr itself) which could suggest that the word was loaned from elsewhere, yet if so, establishing its source so far eludes me. What a frustrating word.

From whence Sanskrit kapúcchala?

As I've probably mentioned before, I strongly suspect Julius Pokorny and followers have lazily lumped Sanskrit kapúcchala 'tuft of hair from the back of the head' in with other evidence supposedly supporting Proto-Indo-European (PIE) *kaput 'head', all just to give the illusion that the evidence is more robust and geographically dispersed than it honestly is. It's also a lot easier in any bureaucracy, including in academia, to simply go with the flow and ne'er question the status quo. However in this case, I'm fortunately not the only one out there that thinks this smells fishy. I insist that this PIE root never existed and that there are only Western European reflexes of this 'head' word, all attributable to loans from the Aegean family during the 2nd millennium BCE and later, ie. from either Minoan *kaupada (> Greek κεφαλή) or Etruscan *kaupaθ (> Latin caput; indirectly into Germanic as *haubidaz prior to Grimm's Law, perhaps through Venetic).

Though I found one lead online stating that Mayrhofer once dared to analyse kapucchala into a pejorative prefix ka- plus puccha- 'tail' (Mayrhofer, Kurzgefaßtes etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindischen [1956], p.157), I've just come across a curious entry in both Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionary and Capeller's Sanskrit-English Dictionary that identifies the syllable क ka alone as 'head'. This tickles me. Since I knew already that पुच्छ puccha meant 'tail', this implies that कपुच्छ ka-púccha-la- with diminutive -la- just means 'little head-tail', perfectly fitting for a tuft at the back of the head.

If the word can be explained purely in Sanskrit terms, a PIE origin would be woefully extravagant by comparison and then easily dismissed as bunk. The other spelling kaputsala would be just an alternative phonetically-faithful rendering and certainly adds nothing to the arguments of the **kaput camp until they can substantiate both **kaput and **śala-. Even the justification for this unmotivated segmentation of the word is lacking. It seems to be based on wishful thinking.^[1]

That being said, now I'm having trouble confirming the source of the equation ka = 'head'. Is it attested somewhere directly? Or is this purely assumed by 19th-century Indicists attempting to etymologize Sanskrit vocabulary (in which case, an asterisked *ka is in order)? Oddly enough, there a few other words that strongly seem prefixed with this morpheme ka-: क-स्तम्भी kastambhī 'prop of a carriage-pole' (cf. स्तम्भ stambha 'post, pillar') and कं-धर kaṃdhara 'neck' (lit. 'head-bearer', cf. धर dhara 'supporting').

Rejecting PIE **kaput, what then is the etymology of Sanskrit क ka 'head'?


NOTES
^[1] After posting this, I managed to discover one tantalizing lead that may help settle this issue (see Brugmann/Streitberg, Indogermanische Forschungen, v. 3 [1894], p.236) which I subsequently posted in my commentbox. If I'm reading the German correctly, it seems like the authors are admitting that kaputsala was caused by a more modern modification of kapucchala, based on an etymological whim.

Minoan pulses and bitter vetches

I'm looking at another potential substrate word, this time from Minoan. I think there might be a lot more here than meets the eye so I'll just start with the preliminary leads first and perhaps expand in a future post.

This etymological safari starts by examining the origins of the Greek word ὄροβος 'bitter vetch' whose etymology remains unknown and very likely to be a product of Mediterranean substrate. The bitter vetch, despite the nasty sounding name, is a type of legume related to the bean. Another similar word, ἐρέβινθος 'chickpea', looks like a derivative of the former. Yet nothing in Greek grammar can yield one from the other, nor has anyone been successful in attributing either of these terms to a previous Indo-European form.^[1]

Trying another approach, a Minoan root could underly both: *arapua 'pulse, bitter vetch'. Upon this we could build the form *arapuwinta 'chickpea', ie. from the base *arapu- plus *-inta, a productive derivational suffix already attributed to Pre-Greek substrate.

This leads to the possibility that if the term survived into Old Etruscan by inheritence, it might be *arapu. Towards Late Etruscan, /p/ before /u/ is expected to soften to bilabial fricative /ɸ/^[2] with added vowel-raising before resonant /r/. This takes us to a Late Etruscan form *erfu. However reasons for this hypothetical Etruscan word present in Italian substrate requires added justification from me. So... more to follow.


NOTES
^[1] Burkert/Raffan, Greek religion: Archaic and classical (1987), p.19 (see link).
^[2] This sound rule was previously mentioned on this blog (for eg.: Some observations concerning Woodard's The Ancient Languages of Europe).

A new post on Pre-Greek place-names

Mr Zeke has scribed a new post Pre-Greek place-names of the Aegean complete with detailed surveys like the one above that history buffs will delight in. As I discovered with Italian placenames and Etruscan's involvement in many of them, toponyms can be a source of endless fascination and learning about the impact that substrate languages have had on their region.

In the case of the toponyms in the environs of Greece, the Aegean islands and Turkey, there's an ever-going quest to tease out the Minoan (and also Hattic) threads that inevitably must exist here. What hampers our knowledge is the lack of information about these forgotten languages but it's also precisely that aching riddle that compels us to crack it.

Did the Etruscans ever speak of fair Padua?

Latest input from a commenter on the exact entry-point of the early Etrusco-Rhaetic into Italy has led me to contemplate all things Padua, an old city with a rich past located in the plains north of the Po River. By doing a quick google search on the city, one profits from some of the most paradisaic pictures one could ever behold. I'm instantly overcome with an overwhelming yearn to escape there some day and never return!

But back to reality, a simple question pops to mind in relation to the Etruscans I obsess over each day: What was Padua in Etruscan? A check in my database revealed an embarrassing blank. An embarrassing blank because the Romans knew the city well under the name Patavium. Citizens boast that it's one of the oldest cities in Italy and it was historically the most prominent of the Veneti people who lived in this region. Surely the Etruscans knew of this city and had their own name for it. So I must remedy my ignorance somehow.

Without any direct attestation of this city in any Etruscan inscription I know of, I decided to get clever by searching through my database for any last names reasonably similar to this Latin name Patavium, the reason being that there are many other Etruscan family names referring to the historical ethnicity of the people who sported them, eg. Umrina, literally 'Umbria' or 'of the Umbri' (cf. Latin name Umbricianus).

While the search-strings pat* yielded zilch, I stubbornly expanded my quest with pet*. Eureka. Now I saw a single name precisely fitting the criteria of my quest: Petui. Could this name mean 'Paduan' or '(s)he of Patavium' perchance?


In the process, I noticed that I'd incorrectly labeled this name in my online dictionary as a female praenomen (apologies!) but my recent scouring has given me confidence that this is in fact a gentilicium since it's attested in many inscriptions including CIE 3666, 3667, 3672 and 3675. Massimo Tarabella confirms that it is indeed a family name on page 372 of Prosopographia etrusca, Volume 1 (2004) where he delves into the history of the name under the heading Petui. Disappointingly, little insight is found and there is no mention of Patavium as I would have desired. However, the author fails also to reflect on one of its attested genitive forms, Petevis, which is found in CIE 3673 and which directly motivates an earlier form *Petavie with the restored second syllable.

Given these newly uncovered facts, I think I'm going in the right direction with this. As such the cityname could be expected to be *Petau and its surrounding region, *Petavina, following standard Etruscan naming practices for regions and cities paralleling the example of Capeva 'Capua' & Capevana 'Campania'. I might just dare to take it up a notch and suggest that the name is indeed Venetic, as would be expected afterall, and that the Venetic name was pronounced *Pataviom, literally meaning 'The open (land)' from a hypothetical adjective *patavos 'open, wide, vast' (cf. Lat. pateo, patulus < PIE *peth₂- 'to be spread out'). Such a meaning would be more than apt for a city lying in flatlands adjacent to the Adriatic Sea.

One final thought, this family name seems to surface mostly in the city of Perusia (ie. modern Perugia) which lies several miles due south of Patavium. Perhaps is it possible that with the constant threat of Celtic invasion, some Paduans had migrated southward for a greater feeling of safety? Alas, to every mystery solved, more questions rear their ugly heads! Not even noble Heracles could tame this enticing Hydra.

The scarab rises in Etruria

The Greek scholar Hesychios of the 5th century CE claimed that the word for the beetle (= Greek κάνθαρος) among the Tyrrhenoi (ie. Etruscans) was βύρρος (burros) in his work Glossai. This teases my curiosity for a number of reasons but I'm surprised that Etruscanists, as far as I've read, haven't picked up on what I'm about to explore here. Etruscanists will typically quote Hesychios' gloss blindly but offer no further insights.

As is well known, the beetle was a reknowned symbol of the sun god as he rose from the netherworld and, by extension, a symbol of the eternal human soul after death. This symbol was not just worshipped in Egypt, but judging by the archaeological finds, the icon had also spread into Minoan Crete^[1] and even into later Etruria through the migration of the Etruscans and their culture where we find yet more scarabs^[2], particularly as funerary offerings, testimony to a widespread heliocentric faith.

The beetle was a widely worshipped animal for a very specific reason that can be firmly traced back to the Egyptians and their language. The source of the symbolism was pure word-play since in Egyptian, the word for 'to become' was *ḫāpar (> Sahidic ϣⲱⲡⲉ) while the symbol for 'beetle' contained the same consonantal skeleton, ḫpr, but presumably with different vowels. The rising sun was subsequently known by his holy epithet, Khepri 'The Becoming One' (written in Egyptian only as ḫprỉ). His name came to be written by scribes with the similar-sounding 'beetle' ideogram and even envisioned by Egyptian artists as a man with a beetle's head.


Given that we can be certain of the Egyptian origin of scarab iconography, it stands to reason that Etruscans borrowed the symbolism from them somehow, probably during the 2nd millennium BCE when Proto-Etruscans were still in the environs of Cyprus and Southern Turkey. The question I must pose however is: What was the vocalism of the Egyptian word for 'beetle', and is the above gloss by Hesychios a hint to its original pronunciation?

I'll dare to offer a hypothesis for the sake of debate and to connect dots that I believe need to be connected. Is it possible that the Egyptian word for 'beetle' was pronounced *ḫapúri? (Unfortunately Coptic gives me no hints on this.) Such a term could then have entered Proto-Aegean or later dialects before 1500 BCE in the form *apúri. By way of Cyprian Syncope which crops up in many other words on a regular basis, this yields *pur with which we might assign the Etruscan name for 'beetle', thereby addressing Hesychios' claim and tying everything together into a neat package.


NOTES
^[1] Aruz, Marks of distinction: Seals and cultural exchange between the Aegean and the Orient (ca. 2600-1360 B.C.) (2008), p.56 (see link).
^[2] Scarisbrick, Historic rings: Four thousand years of craftsmanship (2004), p.19 (see link).

The rug that you wear

Larissa Bonfante informs us in Etruscan dress (2003), p.104 that, based on the Greek word τήβεννα (tēbenna), the toga was known to the Etruscans as *tepenna. While I gauge this to be essentially correct, it requires some ammendments to account for some minor, but important, facts that Bonfante has overlooked.

First, it must be known that Etruscan lacks geminate consonants. Putting it another way, Etruscan never distinguished between written -nn- or -n-, being pronounced exactly the same: plain old /n/. This is unlike languages like Italian where double letters in spelling can make a difference in the spoken language. Since it's unnecessary for Bonfante to be faithful to the Greek spelling with double nu (-νν-), *tepena would be a comparatively more sage reconstruction. However, a second interesting fact is that there are some dialects of Greek (like Doric) which preserve long a when other dialects have raised the vowel to long e (eta). So a meticulous linguist asks themselves whether they are to take the phonetics of this Greek word at face value or whether they should assume that eta reflects an earlier long a at the time this word entered Greek from the donor language (ie. tēbenna from earlier Greek *tābenna) . Adding these extra considerations into account, I believe that Etruscan *tapina is the most accurate reconstruction.

But now the fun's just starting. Earlier in Paleoglot: Minoan inscription HT 104, I began to realize that the Minoan word for 'carpet' or 'rug' must have been *tapia (note both Greek δάπις 'rug' and τάπης 'rug', strongly hinting at substrate influence). Through the lens of my personal view of a two-branched Aegean family, the adjacent Proto-Cyprian language should have shown *tapi by the end of the 2nd millennium BCE due to the regular syncope of all final vowels. This is precisely the form I would expect to be inherited into Etruscan too.

The exciting part is that, within the bounds of Etruscan grammar, a word like *tapi-na is a perfectly acceptable derivative of *tapi plus the very productive suffix of appurtenance, *-na. This can account for the term tēbenna morphologically and phonetically while it would just as aptly account for the attested semantics of the word as well! It might even be recommended (although not necessary to this theorized etymology) to tweak the value of the Aegean root *tapiya to a broader value of 'cloth' or 'textile' (ie. anything woven, not just rugs but also garments too). The fundamental meaning of the Etruscan tebenna then can be summed up as simply 'that from cloth'. This thought-experiment couldn't have produced a more mundane and sensible result.

Sentina, an Etruscanized Latin name

On page 269 of Tarquinia: Archeologia e prosopografia tra ellenismo e romanizzazione, Federica Chiesa explores the history of the Etruscan gens Sentina and states in Italian:

"The brief onomastic formula of this Šethre Sentina (Ta 1.202) neither presents us with ulterior data nor relevance to our knowledge of the gens, which despite the nomen of an ethnic type, boasts exclusively Tarquinian attestation. The support is uncertain."^[1]

Frankly I'm not sure what the problem is in etymologizing this name. Firstly Sentina can be securely formed from the combination of praenomen Sentiie (TLE 113: Senties 'of Sentiie') plus the suffix of appurtenance -na. This praenomen is in turn attributable to the attested Latin name Sentius.

While I haven't read this directly, I would presume that the Latin name in turn formed, as many Latin cognomina do, from a descriptive adjective. In this case, sentus 'thorny, rough, rugged' seems like a decent match. So I see nothing Etruscan in this name aside from its highly productive suffix.


NOTES
^[1] I've translated this from the Italian: "La brevissima formula onomastica di questo Šethre Sentina (Ta 1.202) non apporta dati ulteriori nè rilevanti alla nostra conoscenza della gens, che malgrado il nomen di tipo etnico, vanta attestazioni esclusivamente tarquiniesi. Il supporto è incerto."

On to the kinnor

Continuing on with my unintentional yet alluring theme of "musical instruments of the ancient Mediterranean", I'm lately exploring the whole issue with the stringed instrument known as a kinnor which is variously translated as a zither or a lyre. If it's true that the name of the kithara is ultimately from a Minoan compound meaning 'three-stringed' and containing the element *ki 'three' (see Paleoglot: The kithara), then it stands to reason that the similar name, kinnor, is probably likewise Minoan in origin and containing the same petrified numeral with a different second component.

I racked my brain on this one, looking at all the available comparanda I could amass this past few days and my findings can be summarized as follows:

1. Greek κινύρα (kinúra) 'lyre'
   
2. Mycenaean ki-nu-ra = *Kinúras [PY Qa 1301]
3. Hebrew כִּנּוֹר (kinnōr)
4. Hittite kinartallas ~ kinirtallas 'singer, musician'
5. Akkadian kinnāru 'lyre'
   

After reflecting today, I believe however that in the above pile that there are subtle red herrings lurking about, veering us away from the most rational solution. Although I was reluctant at first to accept it, Beekes' conclusion that Greek kinúra is loaned from Hebrew kinnōr now appears sensible to me. However his online commentary in his database is much too brief for a labyrinthine etymology such as this because the direction of borrowing implies that we must then reject the connection often cited between kinúra and an earlier Mycenaean name *Kinúras which therefore cannot mean 'kinyrist' but rather 'lamenter' (via an unrelated Greek word, kinurós 'wailing') in contradiction to, for example, John Franklin's suggestions in his elaborate article Kinyras at Pylos (see online pdf) that there is a connection.

From the Hebrew reflex, the famous Canaanite Shift of *ā > *ō by the close of the 2nd millennium BCE brings us back to an earlier form reflected directly in Akkadian as kinnāru. This same form explains the derivative in Hittite, kinartállas, whose accent I presume lies on the syllable just after the foreign stem kinar- in order to explain the alternation of a and i in spelling (ie. a reduced pretonic vowel perhaps?).

This all means that, to update the form I offered in a recent comment, the compound we're looking for in Minoan is precisely *ki-naro. I will withhold my analysis of the second component for a future entry.

The kithara

Let's talk some more about some wandering instrument terms in the Mediterranean. That of the kithara (ie. the classical lyre) is an interesting case.

In January, I explained my refined etymology for the mythic creature known to the Greeks as the Chimaira. I've been suggesting since then that it originally came from a Minoan compound *Ki-Amária meaning literally 'Three-Face' which subsequently, following the traditional etymology usually given, the name would have been corrupted by native Greek words χίμαρος 'he-goat' and χεῖμα 'winter' after being loaned from the Minoan language. The Chimaira afterall is a symbol of the seasons of the year, commonly three in number in Greek, Egyptian and (presumably) Minoan culture. This could confirm that *ki is the common Aegean word for 'three' since it's well attested in Etruscan as ci.

So am I pushing it too far to extend this further and suspect that the κιθάρα 'lyre' may likewise be a Minoan compound *ki-θiara meaning 'three-string'? This hypothesis has a clear precedent in the native name of the haunting Chinese lute, the san-xian (三弦), likewise meaning precisely 'three-string'.^[1] The classical Mediterranean lyre came in different shapes, with different numbers of strings, but indeed including the 3-stringed variety.^[2]


If we take my Minoan compound for granted for a second, it would also imply a word *θiara 'string', relating nicely to Egyptian *sīra 'hair, string, thread', written only as [sr] (> Sahidic Coptic sir 'hair, line, stripe'). The last thing for me to figure out however is whether [sr] is from earlier Old Egyptian *zīra /θiːrə/^[3], matching the expected Minoan form best as well as suggesting a reasonably early entry point of the name for the lyre into the Aegean linguistic sphere.


NOTES
^[1] The Persian seh-tār (سه تار) is another example.
^[2] Bamford, Homage to Pythagoras: Rediscovering sacred science (1994), p.251 (see link): "What is the historical position of the Greek cithara? The Greeks believed that the cithara had come into Greece as a three-stringed lyre in the ninth century and that it had been developed in Greece itself. This is one of the many fallacies that must be abandoned, because of the pictorial evidence the seven-stringed lyre can be traced back to Minoan Crete, c. 1450 BCE." However, in light of my Minoan musings above, I wonder if this classical Greek stance is possibly due merely to a faulty historical recollection of timeline sullying an otherwise fundamentally correct etymology.
^[3] Woodard, The Ancient Languages of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Aksum (2008), p.164 (see link) confirms that the Egyptian z was a voiceless interdental fricative /θ/, merging with s at a quite early date.

Edward Sapir and the Philistine headdress

Browsing the web as usual I came across something that captured by attention. It turns out that Edward Sapir in his 1937 article Hebrew "Helmet," A loanword, and its bearing on Indo-European phonology had reconstructed a Philistine word *kaubaɣ- 'helmet' based on the Christian story of Goliath (1 Samuel 17:5). There in Samuel, the word for 'helmet' is recorded as either kōbáʕ (כובע) or qōbáʕ (קובע), a rather curious word of non-Semitic origin whose mystery has cultivated much academic curiosity. It's certainly connected with Hittite kupahis 'headdress' although exactly how this word was transmitted between Semitic and Anatolian groups is a riddle to solve. Note easterly Hurrian kuwahi too although seeking an origin of this word in Eastern Turkey seems most unlikely despite what Puhvel suggests (see Puhvel, Hittite Etymological Dictionary: Words beginning with K (1997), p.257).

Quite eerily, I've already suggested a Minoan word for 'head' or 'summit', *kaupaθa (read Paleoglot: A hidden story behind Cybele the Earth Mother?), but I was ignorant at the time of Sapir's published hypothesis. This Minoan etymon is my attempt at better explaining (via expected Etruscan *caupaθ) the source of both Germanic *haubida- and Latin caput in a way that an over-cited Indo-European root (*)*kaput- just can't convincingly accomplish without fiddling with the phonetics. Surely, given this particular set of uncannily similar yet phonetically irregular reflexes, we should seriously be thinking about recent loan transmission rather than leaping to the comparatively more contrived assumption of some long-ago Proto-Indo-European utterance. Add to this Greek κύπτω (kúpto) 'to bend forth, stoop forth' for which Beekes fails to find a credible Indo-European etymology and suggests Pre-Greek origin, much to my bookish delight. Nonetheless, some do try even to loosely etymologize the aforementioned Philistine word in Indo-European terms with no noteworthy success.


Matching the spirit of Sapir's whimsy while in honest desire to crack this Mediterranean puzzle, I wonder sometimes about the elusive Philistine language and its origins which scream 'Aegean' all over it. Unfortunately, the Philistine civilization also still screams 'mystery' all over it and with no forthcoming answers in sight. We must remember though the mention of the *Pirastu [prst.w] in Egyptian records, one of the 'Sea Peoples' listed to have attempted a minor coup on Egypt at the end of the 2nd millennium BCE.

Now, would it be unfathomable to posit the idea that the Philistine language could be a direct descendant of Minoan (or perhaps a Minoanized language) in which the word for 'head' (and subsequently for 'headdress' through metonymy) became, for the sake of public brainstorming, *kopað in this dialect? Semites, Hittites or some other intermediary might perhaps have misheard the voiced dental fricative /ð/ as a voiced pharyngeal fricative /ʕ/ (ie. ayin) or a voiced glottal /ɦ/. Stranger things have happened in loanwords, eg. the Semitic name of the famed North African city of Carthage which entered into Greek as Καρχηδών (Karchēdṓn), into Latin as Carthāgo, and into Etruscan as *Carθaza.

A Minoan word for red dye

Here's an interesting set of reflexes for discussion. It hints at yet another Wanderwort possibly eminating out of Minoan Crete regarding materials used for red dye:

• Hittite midis ~ mi[d/t]as 'red'
• Mycenaean *miltos 'red mineral' (> Gk μίλτος 'red chalk')
• Egyptian mnš.t 'red ochre'
• Latin minium 'red lead'

The second syllable of the Hittite form alternates between -i- and -a- and the internal stop is sometimes written out in the script as -t- (/d/) or -tt- (/tʰ/). Its large variation in spelling might hint at a post-Proto-Anatolian borrowing. The Mycenaean reflex is attested in a feminine adjective spelled out in Linear B as mi-to-we-sa 'red-painted' and combined with later Classical Greek μίλτος points to the root *milto-. The vocalism of the Egyptian word is unattested due to the nature of its script but if we reconstruct *mīnašat, it agrees better with the Hittite and Mycenaean material while still resembling the Latin reflex enough to pursue this hypothetical relationship further. Finally, it's impossible for Latin to have acquired a Minoan word directly but if Etruscan brought related cognates to Latin, we have here a full package of evidence pointing to a general Aegean word describing minerals used for bright red or red-orange dye. Given the ambivalence of the exact mineral, we might surmise that it was the colour that was most important in the word's semantics and not the chemical structure (something the ancients could hardly know about anyway). Thus, whether red lead (Pb₃O₄) or red ochre (Fe₂O₃), the word must have described any mineral which could be used to make bright-red or red-orange dye.

Now if we accept that there is a Minoan word here, what is its likeliest form? This has got me thinking hard and long because while there appears to be a relationship between the above words, finding a common etymon behind them all is tricky. For me, Hittite, Egyptian and Mycenaean all point to a general structure of *miN(T)- (N = resonant, T = coronal). The Latin word, which we might assume is from Etruscan, strangely doesn't reflect the expected coronal. At this point, it's understandable that one might decide to abandon this idea altogether due to a lack of consistency. However, for the sake of brainstorming, I thought of one elaborate possibility.

Let's suppose that there was an Aegean root *minyu 'red-orange mineral dye'. From this, let's also suppose that Minoan added an optional suffix *-zo (cf. Etruscan diminutive *-za), thus Minoan *mĩyuzo. This can then yield all of the Hittite, Egyptian and Mycenaean reflexes at once. In Etruscan however, inherited *miniu, without suffix, would yield Latin minium 'red lead'. Now we just might be able to explain this whole package of possible substrate. Maybe outlandish but it was worth a shot.

Thoughts on the etymology of Greek ἀκακαλίς

According to Perseus Online, ἀκακαλίς is equivalent to νάρκισσος 'narcissus, daffodil'. Some like Jennifer Larson in Greek nymphs: Myth, cult, lore^[1] suspect that it could be Pre-Greek but, as always with these sorts of ideas, people are vague about the five Ws. Beekes too proclaims the word Pre-Greek^[2] but is vague about what this elusive original word looked like, what it ultimately signified and what precise "Pre-Greek" language we're dealing with. I'm here to suggest something bold and off-the-wall: The word is just plain ol' Greek.

What tipped me off was, for starters, a casual search in the Perseus' Greek dictionary using the search string akak*. I like to begin here when investigating any etymological case labeled Pre-Greek because it makes it easy to find straight-forward native derivations beginning with the same sequence of letters. Fortunately most of Classical Greek's derivations were very regular and the root is normally at the beginning of the word unless a prefix has been attached. If so, one may use the "words containing" rather than "words starting with" tab.

Now in this search list, there was nothing terribly clear to me at first. The word ἄκακος was interesting but it only means 'unknowing of ill, guileless' and it's hard to immediately see why this should be connected with flowers. Yet, a strange instinct compelled me to check this word out further, just in case. Nothing. Then there was another word in the list, ἀκάκης, with two links marked LSJ and Middle Liddell. Clicking first on Middle Liddell, it only mentioned that the word was a poetic form of ἄκακος. Again, zip. So I checked the LSJ entry out of sheer hopelessness. BINGO! There, unassuming and in abbreviated form, it briefly states "epith. of Hades".

That's it! An epithet of Hades, the god of the underworld and death! This harks back to my aptly named post Death and daffodils where I explored a possible native etymology of ἀσφοδελός 'the netherworld asphodel meadow' effectively meaning 'the meadow (ἕλος) not (ἀ-) [reduced to] ashes (σποδός)" or 'unashen meadow'.

So now we have an interesting connection between ἄκακος ~ ἀκάκης 'naive, guileless', Hades and its apparent derivative ἀκακαλίς. Note too that the mythical egoist Narcissus did naively drown to death by his own reflection at water's edge before the narcissus flower (daffodil) rose up in his place, a symbol then of death and rebirth. Thus it's a native word, making Beekes' judgement false in this case.


NOTES
[1] Larson, Greek nymphs: Myth, cult, lore (2001), p.187 (see link).
[2] See Beekes, Greek Etymological Dictionary: ἀκακαλίς.