Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 5/22/06, Peter Kirk wrote:

> Well, the language could be Zyryan = Komi. But the name used by Liddell,
> Scott and Jones is closer to "Syrian" and "Syriac", and most of the
> other 47 hits on "Syrianian" make much more sense if related to Syria
> and Semitic languages. I accept that "Sirianian" is sometimes used of
> Zyryan/Komi, but the LSJ spelling is "Syrianian". But if pïš is in fact
> the Zyryan/Komi word for "hemp" rather than a form of the Syriac word,
> that is best explained as a contraction of KANNABIS, or else as a
> coincidence. It seems hardly plausible that the Greeks put together
> their word for "hemp" from a concatenation of the words in two different
> languages of remote "barbarian" peoples.

The use in context is that these are examples of "Ugro-Finnish."  These
are two branches of the currently so-called Finno-Ugrian family.  Syriac is
not.  If you look up "Finno-Ugrian" along with "cannabis" you will find more
hits in google, although none are probably as trustworthy as LSJ/
Perseus.  The last line in the wikipedia article notes what is apparently
a vague sound correspondence between "hemp" and "cannabis" (h = c,
m = n, p = b).  So perhaps the theory on these lines is, that cannabis/hemp
represents a word borrowed way back when into IE from Finno-Ugrian words
and having undergone many language borrowings across the IE and other
languages distorting its reconstruction.  But as the LSJ terms are old (ie,
ancient/outdated and mostly used in reference to 19th century articles), I
am not sure how valid that supposition is.

Yitzhak Sapir
http://toldot.blogspot.com