Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>]

Hi Karl,

On Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:01:26 -0700, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:
> George:
> 
> On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 11:31 PM, George Athas 
> <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>wrote:
>> ...
>>  As for hoplite, you're dealing again with possibilities that seem to
>> have no evidence behind them. The term is Greek. Do you have evidence to
>> the contrary? Do you have evidence for the word dating before 500 BC? If
>> not, your proposal, as much as I like it and would enjoy affirming it, is
>> actually nothing but pure speculation. These basic evidential distinctions
>> between evidence, possibility, and probability, which are crucial for
>> determining knowledge, don't seem to be something you consider, while most
>> (!) of the rest of us do.
> 
> Do you have any evidence that hoplite isn’t a loan word into Greek, that by
> the fifth century had been in the language so long that its foreign roots
> were forgotten? Just like “pork” and “beef” have been in English so long
> that we don’t consider them as loan words brought into English by foreign
> invaders?

One does have to deal with the fact that οπλιτης/hoplite is pretty
clearly derived from οπλον/hoplon, which seems originally to have been
a fairly fluid term for a variety of tools before its later becoming
specialized in the sense of a type of shield, and then armour in
general.  That means that even if _hoplon_ were a loan into Greek,
_hoplites_ would not be, and one has to allow for the development of
meaning in the primary word and the subsequent creation of the derived
word before the latter was imported into Hebrew.  (_Hoplon_ itself may
be a loanword into Greek for all I know - at least I'm not aware of an
IE etymology.)

> I don’t deny that it possibly was originally Greek, or it could have been
> another Indo-European language, all I say is that it appears to be a loan
> word into Hebrew to refer to an elite fighting force, possibly came into
> Hebrew through the Philistines. Further, almost an identically formed word
> appears in another ANE language to refer to an elite soldier. It’s possible
> that that’s just a coincidence. Or it could be an example of linguistic
> borrowing. Too little evidence remains to answer these questions.

For curiosity, what's the other word?

-- 
Will Parsons