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/