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Two Iranian loanwords in Syriac*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2017

Nicholas Sims-Williams
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Abstract

This article discusses two Syriac words which have been understood in many different ways by both ancient and modern scholars. The translations and etymologies previously proposed are evaluated and new explanations are offered, according to which both words, sāsgaunā “red” and syānqā “hemi-drachm”, are loanwords from Middle Persian, though unattested in that language.

Keywords

Syriac lexicographySyriac etymologyIranian loanwords in SyriacSyriac sāsgaunā “red”Syriac syānqā “hemi-drachm”
Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 80 , Issue 3 , October 2017 , pp. 485 - 490
Copyright
Copyright © SOAS, University of London 2017 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Agnes Korn, who kindly allowed me to read her article “Arménien karmir, sogdien krmʾyr et hébreu karmīl «rouge»”, BSOAS 79/1, 2016, 1–22, in advance of publication and thus provided the impetus for the first of these notes, and who also provided valuable comments on its first draft. See also Agnes Korn and Georg Warning, “Armenian karmir, Sogdian karmīr ‘red’, Hebrew karmīl and the Armenian scale insect dye in antiquity”, in Marie Louise Nosch, Cécile Michel et al. (eds), Textile Terminologies – from the Orient to the Mediterranean 1000 BC–AD 1000 (forthcoming).

References

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6 Thus Philippe Gignoux apud Ciancaglini, Iranian Loanwords, 224.

7 Shaked, “Items of dress”, 114, refers rather vaguely to the “assimilation and dissimilation of consonants involving sibilants” but it is hard to see the relevance of the words he cites in this connection: Aramaic ṭas “plate”, Arabic ṭass “cup” < Middle Persian tašt (or perhaps rather from its expected by-form *tast); Middle Persian tis “someone” beside Parthian čiš, both ultimately from Old Iranian *čisčit. Sogdian has several examples of s assimilating to š ( Gershevitch, Ilya, A Grammar of Manichean Sogdian (Oxford, 1954), §450Google Scholar), but not of the reverse.

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18 Cited in R. Payne Smith, Thesaurus Syriacus, col. 2682.

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20 Bedjan, Paulus, Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum, II (Paris, 1891)Google Scholar, 299, line 20.

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33 Hinz, Walther, Islamische Masse und Gewichte (Handbuch der Orientalistik, Ergänzungsband 1, Heft 1, Leiden, 1955), 11Google Scholar.

34 See Yoshida, Yutaka, “Sogdian miscellany”, Studia Iranica, 13, 1984, 145–9Google Scholar, esp. 146 n. 2; Sims-Williams, Nicholas, Biblical and other Christian Sogdian Texts from the Turfan Collection (Berliner Turfantexte, XXXII, Turnhout, 2014), 103Google Scholar.

35 Rather than “double” with Drower and Macuch, Mandaic Dictionary, 100.