RT Journal Article
T1 The etymology of Greek σειρήν revisited
A1 Luján Martínez, Eugenio Ramón
A1 Vita, Juan Pablo
AB 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.
PB Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
SN 0017-1298
YR 2018
FD 2018-06
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/95665
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/95665
LA eng
NO This paper is a result of the research projects FFI2015-63981-C3-2 and FFI2015-67357-P, which have the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. It has been written as part of the activities of the Research Group ‘Religious texts from the Antiquity: The Classical World and the Near East’ of the Complutense University of Madrid.
NO Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO)
DS Docta Complutense
RD 10 abr 2025