Re: [tied] Athene

From: Dennis Poulter
Message: 3236
Date: 2000-08-18

The problem of deriving Athena from Hanahana is to my mind not so much that of the origin of the Greek theta, but that of the final syllable. The earlier Greek forms, in inscriptions before 4c, and attested in Homer, Aeschylus, Aristophanes and others, has this as /-naie:/, /naia/, or /naa/. This would suggest that Neit is a more plausible source than (Ha)-na. Further, after a somewhat cursory check, I cannot find "a great number of Greek divine and semi-divine names" (John) that begin with At-, other than Atlas and all his derivatives, and that cannot be analysed as a-, e.g. A-tropos, A-talanta. There is however a possible Egyptian source in /Ht/ "temple or abode of a god", or "tomb", which, although not attested for Neit, has been transcribed elsewhere in Greek and Coptic as /At-/ or /Ath-/. There is of course the statement by Charax of Pergamon in the 2c AD that "the Saitians called their city Athe:nai".
 
Cheers
Dennis
----- Original Message -----
From: Piotr Gasiorowski
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Thursday, 17 August, 2000 11:26 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Athene

 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2000 1:45 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Digest Number 124

Guillaume pisze: En grec d'avant l'ere chretienne, il me semble que la palatalisation des occlusive ne s'etait pas encore passe. Il y a suffisemment de preuve venue de transcriptions en Latin par ex. En tous cas, En grec meme on a suffisemment de preuve qu'il y avait bien une aspiration : la loi de Grassman, les crases du type kata + hoios -> kath hoiOn. Ce que dit John n'est pas rejetable absolument meme si c'est fortement douteux : mais ca a au moins l'avantage d'exister.
 
 
 
Drogi Guillaume,
 
Masz w zasadzie racje, ale:
 
(1) Stop + aspirate contraction, whether in simple sandhi (ouk he:dus > oukHe:dus) or in crasis (ta himatia > tHaimatia), normally took place phrase-internally between a proclitic and the following word, and of course in compound verbs and words derived from them (ap-histe:mi > apHiste:mi). I don't think this kind of assimilation operated in ordinary compounds (leuko- + hippos > Leukippos), or at least I can't think of any examples to falsify this belief.
 
(2) I wonder if Anatolian <h> would have been reflected as [h] in Greek. I'm not insisting that it wouldn't, but again I can't think of a precedent. Out habitual transliteration is potentially confusing. If the Ahhiyawa people < Akhaiwoi, then Hittite <h>, pronounced as a velar/uvular fricative [x], may have been closer acoustically to aspirated [kH] than to glottal [h] (note the use of [k] as a rough English substitute for German or Gaelic [x], as in Bach or loch). Are there any h-initial Greek loans to support the equation Anatolian hana- = Greek ha:na:?
 
Piotr