[B-Greek] salt
Steven Lo Vullo
themelios at charter.net
Tue Jul 5 19:01:12 EDT 2005
On Jul 4, 2005, at 9:12 PM, Kevin W. Woodruff wrote:
> Firstly the word for fishing hALIEUEIN comes from the
> word for "sea" hALS (check a classical dictionary like
> Liddell and Scott). It is a homonym for the hALS
> meaning "salt."
Hi Kevin:
I originally began my first post in this thread similarly to the way
you began yours, with the comment that hALS (A) and hALS (B) in LSJ are
homonyms. But I deleted that comment because I was not quite sure that
the two are actually homonymous. It seemed to me possible that they are
one and the same word, though (B) is an extension of (A). The sea (the
Mediterranean) could be called hALS because it consists of salt water.
This would be a natural extension of hALS (A), especially in poetic
works. And though (A) is masculine, is it possible that hH hALS came
about after the analogy of hH QALASSA? I don't know whether or not both
(A) and (B) follow exactly the same pattern of declension, but both
have the same genitive form. So is it possible that these are one and
the same word, which, because of distinct (though related) meanings,
spawned two branches of cognates?
Etymology is a major weakness of mine, so the above may just be a bunch
of kooky-talk. And it could be that I am working with an overly
restrictive definition of "homonym." I've always thought that homonyms
are words that are pronounced and often spelled alike, but are
otherwise completely unrelated, i.e., have no shared etymology, while
polysemous words have different meanings but a shared etymology. Is it
possible that hALS (A) and hALS (B) are polysemous rather than
homonymous?
============
Steven Lo Vullo
Madison, WI
MAR student
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
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