The root of all gluttony
-
Roberto Batisti
Abstract
The etymological analysis of Attic Greek τένθης ‘gourmand, glutton’ (Ar.+) has focused since Antiquity on comparison with the obscure Hesiodic hapax τένδει (Op. 524). Rejecting this unpromising solution, in this paper I go back to a forgotten proposal by Solmsen (1897), who compared τένθης with the PN Πενθεύς ~ Τενθεύς and Lat. condiō ‘to season (food)’, reconstructing a root *kʷendʰ-/*kʷondʰ-. While Solmsen did not pursue further analysis of this root, I propose that it arose - possibly already at the PIE stage - from *kʷem- ‘gulp, swallow’ with addition of the “detransitivizing” suffix *-dʰ-e/o-. The present stem *kʷem-dʰe/o- would have had the intransitive meaning ‘to swallow food’ with Indefinite Object Deletion, as is typologically common in “ingestive” verbs. In addition to the agent noun τένθης, I suggest that πάθνη ~ φάτνη ‘crib, manger’ was another nominal derivative of the ‘neo-root’ *kʷendʰ-/*kʷondʰ-/*kʷn̥dʰ-. I conclude by discussing other possible etymologies of Lat. condiō.
© 2022 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Altisländisch vatr neben vatn, färöisch vatur neben vatn ‚Wasser‘
- Alternative etymologies for two British Celtic verbal forms
- The Luwic inflection of proper names, the Hittite dative-locative of i- and iia̯ -stems, and the Proto-Anatolian allative
- Sobre el origen de la escansión larga de la sílaba reduplicada de ἵημι
- Luwian Tarhunaza-, Cilician Τροκοναζας, Τρικοναζας
- Take up your arms
- Hermes Ἀργεϊφόντης and Agni bhā́r̥jīka
- Une innovation divine
- The mixed aorist subjunctive in Classical Armenian
- A note on Greek ἰκμάς
- Greek τηλεκλυτός ‘far-famed’ and its Welsh comparanda
- Interlocked life cycles of counterfactual mood forms from Archaic to Classical Greek
- The root of all gluttony
- Artemis Orthia
- Linguistic evidence for Kuṣāṇa trade routes
- Variation and change in the formal marking of Khotanese I
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Altisländisch vatr neben vatn, färöisch vatur neben vatn ‚Wasser‘
- Alternative etymologies for two British Celtic verbal forms
- The Luwic inflection of proper names, the Hittite dative-locative of i- and iia̯ -stems, and the Proto-Anatolian allative
- Sobre el origen de la escansión larga de la sílaba reduplicada de ἵημι
- Luwian Tarhunaza-, Cilician Τροκοναζας, Τρικοναζας
- Take up your arms
- Hermes Ἀργεϊφόντης and Agni bhā́r̥jīka
- Une innovation divine
- The mixed aorist subjunctive in Classical Armenian
- A note on Greek ἰκμάς
- Greek τηλεκλυτός ‘far-famed’ and its Welsh comparanda
- Interlocked life cycles of counterfactual mood forms from Archaic to Classical Greek
- The root of all gluttony
- Artemis Orthia
- Linguistic evidence for Kuṣāṇa trade routes
- Variation and change in the formal marking of Khotanese I
