Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization; Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence

Chapter 7: The Greek Language in the Mediterranean Context: Part 3, Lexicon

[CH. 7] LEXICON 165 INTRODUCTION T his chapter is divided into three sections, each concerned with the possibility or probability of lexical borrowings from Afroasiatic languages into Greek. The first part examines the present state of the study of this subject. Second is a consideration of whether Greeks in the Archaic and Classical periods had any conception of having borrowed from other languages and the third studies the reliability of postulating Indo-European roots when the only attestations are from Greek and Armenian or Greek and Latin. Such similarities may, in fact, merely be the results of common borrowings from Semitic or Egyptian. Much of this last section is devoted to Semitic and Egyptian loans into Latin and illustrates the need to look beyond Indo-European especially when considering genetically irregular parallels among Greek, Armenian and Latin. THE STUDY OF LEXICAL BORROWINGS Phonological and morphological exchange between languages is rare and is generally believed to require long periods of intimate contact between speakers of the giving and receiving languages. The copying or “borrowing” of words is far more common and easily accomplished. THE GREEK LANGUAGE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN CONTEXT Part 3, Lexicon Note the case of Greek, which is thoroughly Indo-European in morphology and phonology, but largely non–IndoEuropean in lexicon, of English, which is largely nonGermanic in lexicon and of Turkish and Persian with their extraordinary proportions of Arabic loan words. I. J. Gelb, “Thoughts about Ibla” CHAPTER 7 166 BLACK ATHENA Loaning is one of the main vehicles by which phonological and morphological change can be brought about.1 Nevertheless, massive borrowing can take place without such changes. As we have seen in Chapter 5, no new sounds were introduced into Greek from Afroasiatic, although some previously existing ones, notably prothetic vowels, /b/, /p/, initial and medial s- and -ss-/-tt- became far more frequent as a result of contact with Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic.2 By analogy, it should be noted that no new phonemes came into English after the Norman Conquest even though most of the vocabulary was introduced from outside after 1066.3 Etymologists have great difficulty explaining the Greek lexicon. As mentioned in Chapter 5, Anna Morpurgo-Davies, professor of IndoEuropean at Oxford, put the proportion of Greek words with IndoEuropean etymologies at less than 40 percent.4 Thus, despite assiduous work by brilliant scholars, the situation around 2000 CE is still very much as Sir Henry Stuart Jones described it in 1925. In explaining why the new edition of Liddell and Scott’s standard and massive Greek-English Lexicon should, surprisingly, only include a “minimum ” of “etymological information,” he wrote, A glance at Boisacq’s Dictionnaire étymologicque de la langue grecque will show that the speculations of etymologists are rarely free from conjecture and the progress of comparative etymology since the days of George Curtius . . . has brought about the clearance of much rubbish but little solid construction.5 Much of this “rubbish” was of course Semitic, which could not be accepted within the Extreme Aryan Model. This model, as I have already argued, was established earlier in philology than in other disciplines. The process of “clearance” in Greek was very much that described for English by W. W. Skeat, the famous linguist and lexicographer when he wrote in 1891: I have had much to unlearn, during the endevour to teach myself, owing to the extreme folly and badness of much of the English etymological literature current in my earlier days, that the avoidance of errors has been impossible . . . the playful days of Webster’s Dictionary when the derivation of native English words from Ethiopic and Coptic was a common thing.6 Skeat described his own purpose in the following way: “I have endevoured, [CH. 7] LEXICON 167 where possible, to trace back words to their Aryan roots, by availing myself of the latest works upon comparative philology.”7 To return to the lack of progress: clearly linguists relying almost exclusively on Indo-European have reached a dead end. All they can do is to try to explain why the Greek lexicon cannot be explained. The nonIndo -European elements are simply written off as “pre-Hellenic” or from other lost languages.8 It is commonly asserted that these non-IndoEuropean elements are the herbs, shrubs and natural features of the new environment settled by the incoming northerners. It is certainly true that words like ma:raqon “fennel,” mi:nqh “mint...