Pre-Hellenic Loanwords in Ancient Greek

Upcoming project conference: New Perspectives on the Early History of Ancient Greek (Copenhagen, 4.–5. August 2025). Link to the programme in the alt-text.

Anyway, this has been an example of one of the better, but perhaps lesser-known cases for a family of substrate vocabulary in Greek? Hope you've enjoyed reading this. Like and subscribe etc., etc. for more of this. Yadda, yadda, yadda... I have to run now.

So if some of these (that aren't productively derived within Greek) are actually loanwords, where do they come from? Unfortunately it's not so easy to be certain when it's an enigmatic word borrowed even before the time of Homer.

From Pierre Chantraine, Formation des noms en grec ancien (Paris, 1933) p. 216 Enfin le groupe de αἰσυμνάω, dor. αἰσιμνάω 'arbitrer', avec les dérivés αἰσυμνήτης, αἰσυμνητήρ etc... , suppose un substantif en -mn-. Le substantif désigne un chef, un magistrat (à Mégare p. ex.), un arbitre aux joux, et les membres de certains collèges religieux (à Milet, etc...). L'origine en est probahlement asianique, cf. les noms homériques Αἰσυήτης, Αἰσύμη, Αἰσύμνος le nom de divinité Αἰσυμνήτης et la variant αἰσυητήρ = αἰσυμνητήρ Ω 347. Le rapport avec αἶσα « part » (origine indo-européenne, cf. osque aeteis, etc...) peut n'être du qu'à l'etymologie populaire.

The variants are not easy to explain etymologically, especially in view of the Doric forms that show -ι- for -υ- (but I'm sure someone can make something up through the Caland System if they try hard enough). Chantraine, Formation (1933: 216), already considered these probable prehistoric loanwords.

On the basis of all this we can go back to our Homeric hapax and suppose it probably meant something like:

βῆ δ᾽ ἴεναι κούρωι αἰσυμνῆτρι ἐοικώς (Il. 24.327)
He set out to go resembling a [αἰσυμνῆτρι] *princely/regal young man...

So where it occurs in Euripides we have a context of:

γήμας Κρέοντος παῖδ’, ὃς αἰσυμνᾶι χθονός. (E. Med. 19)
"[Jason] having married the daughter of Creon, who rules over this land."

All of these forms can be (more-or-less) accounted for as derived nouns from the verbal stem αἰσυμνάω, which actually occurs once in Euripides Medea 19 and scholiasts and ancient commentators to the passage gloss it variously as ἡγεῖται καὶ ἄρχει 'lead and be leader', βασιλεύει 'be king, rule'.

...also elsewhere in Ancient Greek inscriptions a Doric form αἰσιμνάτας as the title of some kind of magistrate (IG VII 15.1 αἰσιμνάτα[ς, Megara; αἰσιμνῆν I.Kalchedon 6.1) with an unexpected fluctuation of -υ-/-ι-.

Though West prints the more difficult reading, I presume Munro & Allen read αἰσυμνήτηρ on the basis of the better attested ā-stem masculine stem αἰσυμνήτης (Od. 8.258+), which is used to designate some sort of official in the games which Odysseus participates in while visiting the Phaeacians...

This word was evidently a bit confusing for the later scholastic tradition. The textual transmission of the Iliad has a few variant readings:

αἰσυμνήτηρ, -ῆρος (Munro & Allen's reading)
αἰσυιήτηρ, -ῆρος (West's reading)
αἰσυήτηρ, -ῆρος (another variant mss.)

Homer attests exactly once a term, αἰσυμνήτηρ, used to describe the god Hermes as he travels from Olympus to Troy to give Priam instructions to pay a ransom for the body of Hector:

βῆ δ᾽ ἴεναι κούρωι αἰσυμνῆτρι ἐοικώς (Il. 24.327)
He set out to go resembling an [αἰσυμνῆτρι] young man...

And yes, I made my project acronym something that could only properly be a two-termination adjective in Greek (i.e. φιλόγλωσσος), but that's the only way I could get a catchy acronym to work. Please don't hurt me.

I guess I'll have to come up with a reintroduction post, though if you're following this account I assume you're probably far more likely to be already following me on my main, which is @mattitiahu.bsky.social where I am a much more silly person.

I suppose that since BlueSky is a much bigger thing than it was when I started this account with one of my own invite codes, maybe I should post with this occasionally.

Entry for σαῦσαξ, -ακος in the LSJ: a leguminous plant (Com. Adesp. 1375), and (2) 'a mild kind of cheese' (Hsch.).

The Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon, in its typical Victorian prudery fails to omit that Hesychius also mentioned their supposed erotic virtues.

The headword in Hesychius is in the accusative plural, so the nominative singular for a single one of these aphrodisiac cheeses would be σαύσαξ.

I have now translated the Hesychius gloss for this lemma in the dataset as "nourishing soft cheeses; these also are considered to be advantageous for sex" since I have been informed that aphrodisiac cheeses were apparently a thing.

Ilya Yakubovich and Alice Mouton have published a new edition, translation, and commentary on Cuneiform Luvian ritual texts, *and* it's Open Access?? Okay, maybe the future isn't so bad after all.

I did not expect to find a reference to 'Merica in an academic paper about Hittites and the Ahhiyawa question:

Seems like a perfectly reasonable assessment to me.

Sorry, I'm not gonna alt text all that.

Formatted reference: Watmough, Margaret M. 1997. Studies in the Etruscan Loanwords in Latin Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore.

Right, here's Watmough's nuanced take on connecting Etruscan φersu 'performer(?), mask(?)' with Latin persōna, which boils essentially down to 'maybe it could still be saved, but you would have to make a couple of non-falsifiable assumptions'.

Not that I'm aware of. But mind, Robert Beekes tended to automatically classify all Greek nouns terminating in an -οπ-/-ωπ- as of substratum origin. I'm not sure that can be true in all cases (like οἶνοψ, etc.).

That's one that I really want to be true but I think the jury is currently out. IIRC Helmut Rix continued to accept the etymology, but Watmough, Studies in the Etruscan loanwords in Latin (Firenze, 1997) wasn't so sure. I have a copy of the latter at the office and can have a closer look tomorrow.

One might consider it odd that the word for 'person' is a loanword in Ancient Greek, but then again the word 'person' itself is a very widespread loanword in European languages ultimately from Latin persōna 'a mask; character' which has undergone secondary semantic shift.

Ancient Greek Word of Uncertain Provenance of the Day: ἄνθρωπος 'person, human being', first attested in a dative-instrumental form a-to-ro-qo (*ἀνθρώκʷωι) 'with (a figure of) a person' describing an inlaid decoration on a ta-ra-nu *θρᾶνυς 'footstool' in a Linear B inventory list (PY Ta 722.1).

That's a good idea! Though, I think for me it would make sense to write a report of the project activities later on, rather than present the project before I've done much at all. Let me think about it. :)

I have created an account for my Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project. Project-related tweets and general Ancient Greek substrata related tweets will go there. bsky.app/profile/phil...

First post! This account will be for general outreach activities of the EU funded MSCA project Pre-Hellenic Loanwords in Greek!