24 Nov 2010

Aegean bread and grain


I think I might have hit upon the Proto-Aegean word for 'bread' and 'grain'. At the base of this suspicion is Greek σῖτος 'grain, wheat, wheaten bread' which has proven difficult to etymologize into Indo-European terms.

The Greek word appears best connected with Assyrian šeˀatu 'grain, barley', feminine derivative of šeˀu which is probably loaned from Sumerian še, but the devil's in the details. What's missing in our picture of the word's hypothetical transmission is the meddlesome four-dimensional hole that hovers over the space between Turkey and Greece and between the periods of the 3rd and 1st millennia BCE. In this case and the many others I've already talked about, it can be filled in by a Proto-Aegean etymon.

An Aegean word *sayáta, presumably spoken around 2000 BCE, could reasonably be loaned from šeˀatu. The phonetics in this transfer pose no problems since Aegean languages, like Etruscan or Minoan, show no evidence for phonemic glottal stops. Indeed they show the use of interloping y to break up colliding vowels between stem and suffix, as in Etruscan śealχ 'sixty' /ˈʃejəlkʰ/ < *śa-y-alkʰ (cf. Etr śa 'six'). This 'bread' word can be an added example of this intervening phoneme showing how Aegean speakers would have perceived /-ʔ-/ in neighbouring Semitic and Egyptian languages as just an allophone for /-j-/.

Minoan *siata /ˈsiə̯tə/ can evolve from the Aegean root which in turn explains Mycenaean *sitos (written si-to) and later Greek σῖτος. What's uncanny about this adventure in extrapolation here is that there exists an Egyptian scroll recording the existence of an 'Asiatic illness' for which an incantation is recommended in 'the language of the Keftiu' (ie. Minoan). These Egyptian symbols were written out phonetically to reflect actual Minoan words. One of the words is written sata (that is, sȝ-t) and is followed by a bread determinative. This fact teases me to ponder further: Is this so-called bilingual incantation actually just a ritual prescription to placate deities of illness and death with a votive offering of bread? Such a bread offering to heal the body may remind one of later Biblical symbolism associating unleavened bread with the body of Christ.

Further yet, if we follow this idea to its full conclusion, one would reasonably expect that Aegean *sayáta would contract to Cyprian *śatʰ according to the rules of Cyprian Syncope as I explored it in a few earlier posts. Strangely, we also seem to have a genitive form śaθaś in the Liber Linteus (LL 3.xviii). So can the phrase nunθene śaθaś mean '(they) brought some bread' with the genitive being used in a partitive sense, just as with du in French ils amènent du pain? It's worth a shot.

8 comments:

  1. How exactly does śealχ demonstrate a /j/? I could assume the *a > e to be evidence for a former /j/ (but at first sight it could also be dissimilation or something)? Synchronically that spelling rather seems to point to hiatus.

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  2. There are other examples. The genitive of Arnθ is not just Arnθal which is what we'd all expect Aranθ + -al to produce, but also Aranθial [TLE 233] or Arnθeal [TLE 320]. This is particularly the pattern in older Etruscan. The presence of -i- or -e- between the stem and the genitive ending -al must have originated at a time before Cyprian Syncope when the stem in once ended in a vowel. When vowel met vowel in the genitive, /-j-/ would have been introduced as a glide.

    Lemnian Φukiasiale also shows this intrusive -i- between stem and ending: Φukias-i-ale.

    Then there's Minoan ka-ni-ya-si [PK Za 12], a variant of ka-na-si [IO Za 2]. Yet again, the same specific pattern.

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  3. Thanks, those are better examples indeed.

    I am still interested in how you see śealx demonstrating the same, however. Do you have reasons to think there was an unwritten /j/ there synchronically? I would expect /ʃejəlkʰ/ to be written śeialx.

    (BTW, and please correct me if I'm grossly misremembering, or getting too off the topic, but wasn't that -C / -Ci- phenomenon part of the evidence used by someone to argue for palatalized consonants in Etruscan?)

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  4. "Do you have reasons to think there was an unwritten /j/ there synchronically? I would expect /ʃejəlkʰ/ to be written śeialx."

    If you expect it, then put your money where your mouth is: Find an Etruscan example of a minimal pair showing a distinction between /ea/ and /eja/. Good luck!

    "[...] wasn't that -C / -Ci- phenomenon part of the evidence used by someone to argue for palatalized consonants in Etruscan?

    Maybe you're alluding to the two *y's that you may have overlooked in the implicit Aegean form:

    Aegean *sayáyalako '60'
    > Cyprian *śayalkʰ
    > Etruscan *śealχ

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  5. The phonetics in this transfer pose no problems since Aegean languages, like Etruscan or Minoan, show no evidence for phonemic glottal stops. Indeed they show the use of interloping y to break up colliding vowels between stem and suffix

    Huh. So, I go back and forth a lot between the phonetic values RA and JO for AB60 in Linear A, most of all because of the AB60-AB57 combination in Linear A and the JO-JA ending combination in Linear B. Is it the JO-JA ending in Linear B that allows you to assert this for Minoan above? What are other examples?

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  6. Compare ka-na-si [IO Za 2] and ka-ni-ya-si [PK Za 12]. I interpret this to be a stem kana- 'to bear' followed by a vowel initial ending -asi producing the underlying form *kan(i)asi.

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  7. Please may i ask your help as i am very new to this examining of ancient languages. I have a question is there anywhere on any of the tablets that have either Linear B or A or hieroglyphic a number of signs that say the name Europa or some ancient derivation of it. I was wondering as there are a number of religious tablets. I know she is the Cretan mother goddess but i am not looking for the signs to goddess mother as above i am looking to see if her actual name pops up. Sorry to waffle.Cheers Matt.

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  8. The goddess may be Minoan but the name Europa is Greek (Εὐρώπη Eurṓpē), meaning 'Wide-faced' from εὐρύς eurús 'broad, wide' and ὤψ ōps 'eye, face, appearance'. It was an epithet of the moon. In fact I've talked about a possible Minoan term for 'face' almost exactly a year ago in The hidden face.

    So this means that we shouldn't expect to find this name in Linear A documents which are written in the Minoan language. If it existed in Mycenaean (Linear B), I'd expect *Eurōpā reflected but I don't know if it's been found in any artifact so far.

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