The etymology of Greek σειρήν revisited

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Standard etymological dictionaries of Greek mention two possible etymologies for the word σειρήν ‘siren’: either a relationship to σειρά ‘cord, rope’ or else to Σείριος ‘Sirius, the dog star’, none of which is very convincing on semantic and morphological grounds. Mycenaean se-re-mo- shows that this was originally an -m-stem and both the scarcity of -m-stems in Greek and Indo-European and the presence of an initial s- that has not become an aspirate point to a non-Indo-European origin of the word. In the past, some scholars have proposed that this must be a Semitic loanword related to the root of Hebrew šîr ‘sing’, but the actual explanations suffer from any or other flaws. However, Ugaritic šrm, dual or plural of the word šr ‘singer’ appears to be a good candidate as the source of the Greek word for ‘siren’. It also suits the cultural and chronological context in which it must have been borrowed by the speakers of Greek in the 2nd millennium BC.