Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 20/05/2006 18:14, tladatsi AT charter.net wrote:
> ... In any event I cannot think of any non-religeous Hebrew loan words to 
> Greek, certainly not before the CE.  ...
>   

How about Greek KANNA and KANWN (W = omega; cf English "cane" and 
"canon") from Hebrew QANEH, or at least from its Semitic cognates? This 
is of course semantically and lexically very close to the hypothesised 
KANNABIS loan. In fact KANNABIS, if not Scythian or Thracian, could well 
be a Greek compound of KANNA and something else, although probably the 
latter element is not Hebrew BSM.

Also of course we have most of the names of the Greek letters of the 
alphabet, which are clearly loans from NW Semitic. It is of course 
almost impossible to distinguish loans from Hebrew from loans from its 
closely related languages, unless this is clear from a religious context.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/