Old Man Hare: Etymology

I didn't get to hit the books on Old Man Hare, but I've had enough feedback from readers and blegs that I can tell somewhat more of a story than last time. Let's start with what we know.
Byzantine:

1. We know of four mediaeval instances of the word.
   
2. In Suda, 10th century, λαγώγηρως is used to gloss μύξος. I glibly said "all we know about μύξος is that it's a λαγώγηρως", which is good wisecracking, and poor insight. As LSJ has pointed out (h/t Nikos Sarantakos), μύξος is just a mangling of μυωξός "dormouse".
   
3. There are two instances in a collection of manuscript miscellanea, published by Delatte ( Anecdota Atheniensia et al. ) in 1927. I haven't sighted the volume; one instance is λεβηρίς λαγόγερω "Old Man Hare pelt", and one is λαγόγερος.
   
4. There is one instance in a scholion on Lucian, used to gloss μυγαλῆ "field-mouse". This scholion was cited in Stephanus' 16th century dictionary , and in Bast's 1805 Critical Letter, but is not included in the standard edition of Lucian scholia.
   
5. I don't know when the texts are dated from, but most scholia come from between 1000 and 1500. The text of the Suda could have been tampered with and embellished by scribes at any time up to the copy we have; but my default assumption is, this word was included as a gloss in the tenth century.
   
6. The mediaeval instances all correspond, in orthography and spelling, to "hare" + "old-man". The γήρως [ɣiros] spelling of "old man" is archaic; the modern form is γέρος [ɣeros]. -ως is an archaic second declension, which is likely scribal rather than vernacular.

Modern Greek

1. There is a modern word, which I've seen as λαγόγερος, λαγόγυρος, and λαγογύρι, which denote the European ground squirrel aka European souslik.
   
2. The minority form λαγόγερος also means "hare" + "old-man". The majority form means "hare" + "round". λαγογύρι is just a neuter variant of λαγόγυρος.
   
3. λαγόγυρος and λαγώγηρως are both pronounced identically, [laɣoˈɣiros].
   
4. The word is certainly attested, according to blog sightings, in Edessa (λαγόγερος) and near Corinth (λαγογύρι).
   
5. γέρος in Modern Greek is both the adjective "old" and the noun "old man".
   
6. Greek does not allow noun+adjective compounds: λαγόγερος does not make any sense as "an old hare". The only way it makes sense is as a noun-noun compound, "hare" + "old man".

To interpret these:

• There is certainly no guarantee that λαγώγηρως meant the selfsame animal that λαγόγυρος does now (h/t Ηλεφούφουτος). It is certainly possible that the word meant a dormouse/fieldmouse back a millenium ago, and a squirrel now.
  
• OTOH, the scholiasts did not necessarily have a clear idea of what the ancient μυωξός and μυγαλῆ were. So they could have meant the same animal.
  
• λαγόγυρος "hare roundabout" is etymologically opaque.
  
• λαγώγηρως could well have been folk-etymologised as λαγόγυρος in modern times, given that Modern Greek no longer has [ɣiros] for "old man". In fact since the two are pronounced identically, the spelling could be the fault of a modern scholar, who did not know about the mediaeval antecedents of the word (or the variant λαγόγερος).
  
• λαγόγερος is problematic as a compound: it cannot mean "an old hare", the only way it can make sense is as an anthropomorphism, "a hare-like old man".
  
• To this urbanite, sousliks look anthropomorphic. They stand on their hind legs:
  
  That's weak evidence for λαγώγηρως meaning "squirrel" from the start.

Bulgarian:

1. There are various Slavic names for the European ground squirrel. Northern Slavic has variants of */sus/ (h/t Epea Pteroenta).
   
2. Slovenian and Serbian have /tekunitsa/. The Bulgarian reflex of the */sus/ root meant "rat", which suggests it used to mean "squirrel" and was displaced. But it's just as possible that it changed meaning to "rat" without external prompting.
   
3. The standard Bulgarian word for the European ground squirrel is /laluɡer/.
   
4. The dialectal variants for the European ground squirrel (h/t Julia Krivorucko) are /laɡuder/ in Southern and Eastern Bulgaria; /laɡuntʃi/, /ləɡuntʃi/, /ladʒunjak/, /lədʒunjak/.
   
5. These point to an original /laɡjuT/ or /laɡuT/, with T any coronal: /l, n, d/.
   
6. The standard /laluɡer/ seems to be derived from */laɡuler/, and ηλε-Φούφουτος thinks its an assimilating metathesis, with /laluɡer/ easier to pronounce; the word for "chatterbox" is /laladʒija/
   
7. The Bulgarian etymological dictionary does not speculate on the etymology of /laluɡer/, which suggests it is etymologically opaque in Bulgarian.
   
8. The Greek Balkanist Christos Tzitzilis (h/t ηλε-Φούφουτος) has suggested /laluɡer/ < λαγώγηρος without further discussion, as an illustration of Greek /o/ > Bulgarian /u/; the other example was /protuspor/ < /protospori/ "first seed". Northern Greek already has unstressed /o/ > /u/, but this seems to be a general process in Bulgarian loans.
   
9. The Bulgarian linguist Slavova has recently cited Tzitzilis' derivation in passing, without disputing it.

Back to Greek:

1. Modern λαγός "hare" has an allomorph λαγουδ- /laɣuð/ (from the Mediaeval diminutive λαγῴδιον), used in compounding: Modern diminutive λαγουδάκι, surname Λαγουδάκης, λαγουδοφωλιά "hare warren". That would explain Bulgarian /laɡud/
   
2. The accepted etymology of λαγωνικό "hunting dog" is from λακωνικό "Laconian dog", with contamination from λαγός—so "hare dog". That would explain Bulgarian /laɡun/.
   
3. Modern Greek has the word λαγουδέρα /laɣuðera/, "rudder"; its etymology is unknown, but it looks like "hare".

What does this tell us?

• The sideways step of */sus/ in Bulgarian from squirrel to rat confirms the flexibility of animal names across time, and that a λαγώγηρως was not necessarily a squirrel. Still...
  
• The Greek form appears three or four centuries after the arrival of the Slavs in the Balkans. So it could be originally Greek or originally Slavic.
  
• The form is attested in Greek Macedonia (which makes a Slavic loan quite possible) and the Peloponnese (which makes it not impossible). If I had attestation from the islands, a Slavic loan would look more doubtful.
  
• If the form is indeed opaque in Bulgarian, and especially if the form is absent in Proto-Slavic, then a Greek origin is likelier.
  
• The form attested in the Middle Ages in Greek (and reasonably early at that) is only /laɣoɣVr/, not a form based on /laɣuð/ or /laɣun/. If the form was derived as some sort of Greek adjective from "hare", it has only left traces in Bulgarian: there are no traces of a λαγουδ- based form in Byzantine or Modern Greek. That's not impossible, but it's not my default assumption.
  
• George Baloglou wondered whether there might have been calquing of a Slavonic form into a Greek "Old Man Hare" within Bulgarian, before the form moved south, which would explain the grammatical awkwardness. If we accept the anthropomorphic "a hare-like old man", the formation is slightly less awkward; and while such cross-linguistic calques do happen (e.g. German Handy for "mobile phone"), they are rare and learnèd. Again, not my default assumption.
  
• The palatalised variants of /laɡuntʃi/ and /ladʒunjak/ in Bulgarian are not obviously motivated within Greek; I don't see a clear reason why Greek would offer *λαγιουδάκι or *λαγωινικός as models. For now, I'm happy to make that Bulgarian's problem.
  
• The conservative take is to assume the Greek word was always λαγώγηρως; that it was borrowed into Bulgarian as */laɡuɡer/; and that the awkward l-g-g was dealt with in dialect by assimilation to l-l-g (/laluɡer/), as ηλε-Φούφουτος suggested, or by dissimilation to l-g-d (/laɡuder/). The latter dissimilation may have been modelled after the Greek diminutive λαγούδιν, without that implying that the beastie was ever called a "little hare" or variant thereof.
  
• I don't know what's happened with /laɡuntʃi/ and /ladʒunjak/, and it's a bit much to go straight from /laɡuɡer/ to /ladʒunjak/. But unlike /laɡuder/, I don't see a straightforward way for Greek to explain that level of variation.

More tentative than I'd like, but it looks originally Greek, and there's circumstantial evidence (the standing on two legs) to suggest it was a squirrel back then too. That's my take at any rate. ...Read more

Old Man Hare

[EDIT: followup post]

As I already mentioned in the past, the occasional Early Modern Greek word ends up in LSJ, because it has been used in a scholion to explain an Ancient word, and LSJ figured they'll take all the help they can get.

Such a word is λαγόγηρως. Literally, it's "Old Man Hare". Actually, literally, it's "Hare Old Man", but that just wouldn't work in English. As recorded in LSJ, it's used in the scholia to Lucian Dream 24 to gloss μυγαλῆ "field-mouse". You won't find it in the 1906 Rabe edition of the Scholia to Lucian, which the TLG has: it's "ap Bast. Ep. Crit. p. 169". This is an instance of Classicists' infuriating habit of using abbreviations without explaining them anywhere (and I checked). After some googling, I worked out it means that the gloss is mentioned in Friedrich Bast's 1805 Lettre critique de F.-J. Bast à M. J.-F. Boissonade, sur Antoninus Liberalis, Parthenius et Aristénète. (So Rabe's edition does not contain every single piece of Byzantine commentary ever authored on Lucian? Grrr.)

The word λαγόγηρως is also used in Suda, the mixmatched 10th century encyclopaedia, to gloss μύξος—although that doesn't help us much, because the only thing we know about a μύξος is that Suda says it's a λαγόγηρως.

So it's likely a Modern Greek word, and given the scholion to Lucian, it's likely a field-mouse, or some other rodent of that ilk. Old Man Hare shows up in other dictionaries too, but it does not show up in the big contemporary dictionaries of Greek; so other lexicographers are on their own. Trapp shrugs and says it's just "an animal". (He does at least record the more modern-looking variant λαγόγερος.) Kriaras can afford to go further, particularly given where it has been compiled (I'll explain in a sec): it reports that a λαγόγερος is "a kind of rat, a μυγαλῆ", and the passage it cites in response is an Early Modern falconry manual, in which the Old Man Hares are seized by birds of prey.

So those aren't Human Old Men being seized, and while they could be hares, there's no reason to think the Lucian scholion is wrong: it's some sort of rodent.

It's also a μύξος, whatever on earth that is, and as I was perusing recent additions to Suda On Line, I noted the newly translated entry on μύξος, expressing some puzzlement about glossing an unknown word with another unknown word.

At this stage, I had not checked LSJ, and I had not checked Trapp (which would have told me nothing anyway), and I certainly had not checked Kriaras. Instead I noticed that the two unknown words were not the same flavour of unknown. Suda didn't just say a μύξος is an Old Man Hare: it said a μύξος is an Old Man Hare παρ’ ἡμῖν. That παρ’ ἡμῖν means "with us"; and in Suda's way of structuring definitions, it means "in our language". As in, our vernacular, not Ancient Greek.

So without looking at Kriaras, I realised this word was at least Early Modern Greek, and quite likely Modern Modern Greek. I popped across to the online Triantafyllidis dictionary, and didn't find Old Man Hare there: so it's not a word that's made it to the Contemporary Standard. But figuring that there are always surprises to be had on the Interwebs, I googled λαγόγερος just in case.

I found Old Man Hare in a Greek digital photography forum. Like me, the photographer was an urbanite who wouldn't know a field-mouse from a dormouse (which was the Suda translator's first surmise). I mean... I don't know: *are* they the same thing? But the chap took the pic, recorded the place where and when the photo was taken—midday, near Edessa, in Greek Macedonia; and added what the locals call the beastie. Ladies and Gentlemen, courtesy of poster "Junior", meet Old Man Hare:

He exists, and he certainly looks like what Lucian's scholiast had in mind—and what the falconry writer established was an appropriate afternoon snack for an eagle.

And of course, some Greek dialectologist somewhere has recorded the fact that in Edessa (and probably elsewhere) this beastie is called an Old Man Hare. Because the Modern Greek dialect dictionary is still stuck at delta, it's not straightforward to find out who—although at least a draft of the remaining letters is now prepared. But Kriaras' dictionary staff have a fair collection of dialect glossaries on site, so they would have had the wherewithal to figure it out. And even if they didn't, Edessa is just a 94 km drive away from downtown Salonica. You'll probably run into Old Man Hare before you get to the waterfalls. (That's why the Other Language's name for Edessa is Vodena, "waters".)

Three other hits of note for Old Man Hare online. One was the Suda On Line entry, cached when it wasn't yet translated. One was from another Greek forum, this time ecological, recording Old Man Hare as one of the animals you might be surprised to find in the vicinity of Thessalonica. The Byzantine pronunciation /laɣoɣiros/ seems to survive for our rodent friend, because one posting later, courtesy of poster Kostas Karpadakis, Old Man Hare shows up again, this time spelled as λαγόγυρος, "Hare Roundabout":

I still can't tell you whether it's dormouse or field-mouse. Or hamsteroid. I showed the three links to Nikos Sarantakos (he whose Magnificent Blog I keep extolling), and he said that even before he got to the forum mention, he'd worked out this must have been a χαμστεροειδές. That kind of nonce macaronic coinage—American stem, archaic suffix—is pretty damned funny if you're steeped in the angst of Greek language history.

*I* can't tell you, but Karpadakis did not take the photo himself: he linked to zoology site in Novi Sad Uni, and the photo is labelled s-citellus02.jpg. A citellus is none of the above: as the site itself says, this is a Spermophilus citellus, which in English is the European ground squirrel, aka European Souslik.

And when I google his "historically wrong" spelling λαγόγυρος, I get not three or four hits, but 321. Confirming it as the Spermophilus citellus or Citellus citellus. Some more links: citellus #1, citellus #2, citellus #3. And a table of beastie names at Nature Names for Tourists: Local names for distinctive European mountain wildlife:

English	Polish	Slovak	Slovene	Romanian	Bulgarian	Greek	scientific
European ground squirrel or souslik	suseł moręgowany	syseľ pasienkový	tekunica	popândăul	лалугер	λαγόγυρος; σπερμόφιλος	Spermophilus citellus; also Citellus citellus

So the Bulgarians got their word for the beastie from the Greeks.

In fact, that /laluɡer/ in the Bulgarian may suggest the modern spelling λαγόγυρος, which in Byzantine Greek would have been /laˈɣoɣyros/, is more accurate, and the Old Man bit was a written correction... Nah, the /u/ is in the wrong spot. Some Bulgarian phonological process, I guess: the Greek Macedonian pronunciation would be /laˈɣoɣirus/, which doesn't explain лалугер. So I'll stick with the assumption for now that this was originally Old Man Hare reanalysed as Hare Roundabout, until I hear something to the contrary. And that the accepted modern spelling is λαγόγυρος, although that form isn't in Triantafyllidis' dictionary either.

The third link for λαγόγερος, Sarantakos dismissed as "an incredible concoction", and I'm not disagreeing. The article was by an Italian classicist, and it was dealing with the Suda entry on μύξος as a whole, which goes into bizarre beliefs about donkey urine. The identity of Old Man Hare comes up just before the conclusion.

I've never studied Italian, but what with Esperanto, Latin, French, and a fair exposure to Classical Music in my youth, I can sort of read it. It's helped working in a French & Italian department, and not being as embarrassed about speaking in Super Mario Bros. Italian as I am about speaking in Pepe Le Pew French. I could even make the minimal effort of dealing with the mojibake of the page, such as by, I dunno, switching my browser encoding to Latin-1.

But once I'd worked out the article's claim, I had no motivation to proceed further. A dictionary I had not checked was Sophocles', and the author accepted and elaborated on Sophocles' surmise that an Old Man Hare was a kind of fish. Because λαγώς was also a word for sea-hare.

Wee tim'rous beastie, you're not a sea-slug of the Aplysiomorpha clade perchance, are you?

No, I didn't think so.

That is ungracious and horrid of me. I had the benefit of late Aughties Interwebs, this guy... well, this guy was writing in 2006, so he did as well. Hm. I had access to Modern Greek (even if it was in digital photography forums, detouring via Novi Sad Uni's Zoology department), this guy likely didn't. Still, the guy was not writing after the compilation of LSJ, and even if Suda is obscure about Old Man Hare, the scholiast to Lucian is not. Sophocles at least offered a definition for λαγόγηρως, but Sophocles *is* dated, and you can do better than that in general. The falconry manual may well have been inaccessible; but Suda has a whopping big "in our vernacular" in there, he could at least have asked some Greek contacts.

The blunder here is violating the Common Sense precept of etymology: If you're looking for Latin etymologies, you start your search on the Tiber. I tracked down the origins of that saying in my personal blog just before—taking a break from obsessing about constructions of Franco-Canadian identity; and it sounds a hell of a lot better in the original German. I'm always a little miffed when Classicists get as far as Byzantine Greek, and don't notice the live language spoken on the other side. (Witness LSJ's definition of στοίχημα: it's "wager", not "deposit", and they got "deposit" by a casual reading of Eustathius' scholion.)

But now at least, we have photographic refutation. In Edessa, you search for etymologies on the river Voda.

A sentence I smirk at, I confess, given where you search for the etymology of the river Voda. Now unsurprisingly renamed Edesseos. ...Read more

pessos and pinsus: a pedimental peculiarity

Sorry about that title. I promise not to do that too often.

Over the last several months, I've been contributing translations to the Suda On Line project. (See writeup of project.) The Suda is a 10th century encyclopaedia cum dictionary, and often preserves information about Ancient Greece not available elsewhere. It also provides a lot of information that is available in better nick elsewhere; it oftentimes gets confused or garbled; it quotes the Classics in readings that we have not accepted, usually with good reason; and its lexicon component is as interesting for how it misfires in the chain of transmission, back through Photius and Hesychius to Apollonius and Timaeus and Herodian, as it is for any actual definitions. It gives some stuff to cite, plenty of stuff to chuckle about, and the occasional jolting realisation of how tenuous our knowledge of antiquity is: more of our Ancient Greek dictionary definitions than we'd like to think are based on matter as tenuous as this.

The Managing Eds of Suda On Line, stuck with the task of picking up after my teetering command of Greek syntax, also know that I have a couple of dictionaries at my disposal. So I got a query a couple of days ago on what my dictionaries said about πινσός αnd πεσσός. This is a shaggy dog story in response to that, which will take a little bit to go through: the executive summary is, the dictionary etymologies say they are related as architectural terms, but πινσός must be as Latin as it looks.

πεσσός

Let's start with the Suda entry. It reads:

Πισός. καὶ Πινσός: Πεσὸς δὲ παρὰ Προκοπίῳ.
pisós. And pinsós: but pesós in Procopius.

Eeyup. Well, start with Procopius. On Buildings (De Aedificiis) is his work on the building projects of Justinian, and De Aedif. 1.1.37 mentions πεσσός, with two sigmas. Suda routinely gets double consonants wrong, which tells you gemination was dying or dead in at least some variants of Greek by then; so that's not a problem. Especially because the Vatican and Laurentian manuscripts of Procopius spell the word with one sigma anyway. And πε(σ)σός in Procopius is an architectural term for the piers at the base of the dome of Hagia Sophia:

κατὰ δὲ τὰ τοῦ νεὼ μέσα λόφοι χειροποίητοι ἐπανεστήκασι τέσσαρες, οὓς καλοῦσι πεσσούς, δύο μὲν πρὸς βορρᾶν, δύο δὲ πρὸς ἄνεμον νότον, ἀντίοι τε καὶ ἴσοι ἀλλήλοις, κίονας ἐν μέσῳ ἑκάτεροι κατὰ τέσσαρας μάλιστα ἔχοντες. πεποίηνται δὲ οἱ λόφοι λίθοις εὐμεγέθεσι σύνθετοι, λογάδην μὲν συνειλεγμένοις, ἐς ἀλλήλους δὲ πρὸς τῶν λιθολόγων ἐπισταμένως ἐναρμοσθεῖσιν, ἐς ὕψος μέγα. εἰκάσαις ἂν αὐτοὺς εἶναι σκοπέλους ὀρῶν ἀποτόμους. ἐπὶ τούτοις δὲ ἀψῖδες τέσσαρες ἐν τετραπλεύρῳ ἀνέχουσι· καὶ αὐτῶν τὰ μὲν ἄκρα ξύνδυο ξυνιόντα εἰς ἄλληλα ἐν τῇ ὑπερβολῇ ἠρήρεισται τῶν λόφων τούτων, τὰ δὲ δὴ ἄλλα ἐπηρμένα εἰς ἀπέραντον ὕψος ᾐώρηται.
And in the centre of the church stand four man-made eminences (λόφοι), which they call piers (πεσσοί), two on the north side and two on the south, opposite and equal to each other, each pair having between them just four columns. The piers (λόφοι) are composed of huge stones joined together, carefully selected and skilfully fitted to one another by the masons, and rising to a great height. One might suppose that they were sheer mountain-peaks. From these spring four arches (ἀψῖδες) [= pendentives] which rise over the four sides of a square, and their ends come together in pairs and are made fast to each other on top of these piers (λόφοι), while the other portions rise and soar to an infinite height. (Loeb 1940 translation)

This is sense III recorded for πεσσός in Liddell-Scott. It is also noted in the Oxyrhynchus papyri (on which more soon), and Strabo 16.1.5, describing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon:

διόπερ τῶν ἑπτὰ θεαμάτων λέγεται καὶ τοῦτο καὶ ὁ κρεμαστὸς κῆπος ἔχων ἐν τετραγώνῳ σχήματι ἑκάστην πλευρὰν τεττάρων πλέθρων· συνέχεται δὲ ψαλιδώμασι καμαρωτοῖς ἐπὶ πεττῶν ἱδρυμένοις κυβοειδῶν ἄλλοις ἐπ’ ἄλλοις· οἱ δὲ πεττοὶ κοῖλοι πλήρεις γῆς ὥστε δέξασθαι φυτὰ δένδρων τῶν μεγίστων, ἐξ ὀπτῆς πλίνθου καὶ ἀσφάλτου κατεσκευασμένοι καὶ αὐτοὶ καὶ αἱ ψαλίδες καὶ τὰ καμαρώματα.
and it is on this account that this and the hanging garden are called one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The garden is quadrangular in shape, and each side is four plethra in length. It consists of arched vaults, which are situated, one after another, on checkered, cube-like foundations. The checkered foundations, which are hollowed out, are covered so deep with earth that they admit of the largest of trees, having been constructed of baked brick and asphalt — the foundations themselves and the vaults and the arches. (Loeb 1932 translation)

The pessoi look like doing the same job as in Hagia Sophia; they are big cubic squares of masonry supporting vaults. Strabo is early enough that we can assume this to be a Greek word, and not some sort of loanword. (Keep that in mind for later.)

This not the primary meaning of πεσσός, and the other meanings are not quite on the same plane:

• I: oval-shaped stone for playing draughts or backgammon. By extension, the game played with the stones, or the board it is played on.
  
• II: medicated plug of wool or lint to be introduced into the vagina, anus, etc., pessary; any oval body; ticket indicating attendance at an assembly; bolt of a door.
  
• IV: dark edge of the pupil (in the eye).

So, I.1: Small round pebble as in checkers piece. I.2: Checkerboard. I.3: Checkers the game. II.1: Small round ball of wool as in buttplug for medical use. II.2. Small round anything. II.3. Small (round?) something used as ticket. II.4. Door bolt. IV: Small round ball around pupil of eye.

III: Whopping great big cubic slab of stone that vaults rise heavenwards on.

That looks wrong. It also looked wrong to the Loeb translator of Strabo, which is why he suspected the reference in III was to a checkerboard texture. Now I wasn't in Babylon, and neither was he, but that looks like guesswork to me. The door bolt also looks out of place, although there may be a story there involving small round things. I was going to say that the definition LSJ actually gives for III, "cubic mass of building, terrace", was bogus—until I looked up the 144 AD police report by Diemous daughter of Colluthus from the Oxyrhyncus (POxy.1272):

... ἀπέκλε̣[ισα τὴν θύ]ρ̣[αν τῆς ...] οἰκίας μου καὶ τὴν τοῦ πεσσοῦ θύ[ραν, καὶ ἐ]π̣ανελθοῦσα εὗρον ὃ εἶχ[ο]ν ἐν τῷ [πεσσῷ π]ανάριον ἐξηλωμένον βαστα[χθέ]ν̣τ̣ων ἀπ’ αὐτοῦ κλαλίων χρυσῶν [δύο ὁ]λκῆς μναιαίων τεσσάρων καὶ Βήσι[ος χρ]υ̣σ̣οῦ καὶ κλαλίων ἀργυρῶν μ̣εγ̣ά̣[λω]ν δύο καὶ τὴν τοῦ πεσσοῦ θύραν ἐπηρ[μ]ένην.
I shut up the [door] of my house and the door of the terrace, [and] on my return I found that a box which I had in the [terrace] had been unfastened and that there had been abstracted from it [two] gold bracelets of the weight of four minae, a gold figure of Bes, and two large silver bracelets, and that the door of the terrace had been lifted.

With a fairly weighty note:

For the signification of πεσσός see P.Munich 11.20, 27, notes, and cf. 9.33, 12.16, 22, P.Brit.Mus. 210.19 (Journ. Phil. xxii, p. 272), 978.10 (iii, p. 233), 1023.19 (iii, p. 268), Flor. 5.9.

Alright, alright, you win: I'm not going to go following up on 120-year old journals my library won't have anyway, I'll take their word for it that a πεσσός is a terrace as well as a pier. The terrace would have also been a whopping great big cubic slab of stone anyway, even without the heavenward vaults.

(I hope the Modern Greek speakers among you picked up on ξηλωμένο in there. And "abstracted" sounds quite PC Plod, doesn't it: "By 'appenstance, I appre'ended one Erato, neighbour of Diemous, abstracting said gold figure of Bess from the premisses." Though βασταχθέντων doesn't deserve such an un'appy end. It's a Koine meaning of βαστάζω, "carry (off), steal", LSJ s.v. III, and it shows up in John 20:15 and John 12:6. "I appre'ended one Judas Iscariot as 'e was in the process of 'elping 'imself to the contents of said money bag.")

Still, for all that, sense III of πεσσός looks out of place compared to sense I, enough to make you cast around for alternative explanations of the word. Hesychius records πέσ[σ]ος as "mountain. Cypriots: place; Aeolians: field. Some people: flat ground." That's as bad as Suda's entry (especially the τινες "some people" bit, which is classic Hesychius). Although Procopius' synonym for πεσσός is λόφος, lit. "hill", it's hard to take this on board. Not impossible—anything's possible; but hard, especially given how obscure Hesychius' sources can be.

The similarity of πεσσός to "pedestal" might suggest something with feet, let's see... πέδη "fetters", πέδον "field", πέζα "foot, instep, bottom of something"... well, maybe πέζα, and maybe πέδον. You could tell an equally tenuous story with:

• πέζα "bottom of something" > πεσσός "bottom of vault";
• πέδον "field" > πέσσον "field" > πεσσός "flat base of vault";
• or πέσσον "field—or mountain" > πεσσός "pier in architecture, aka λόφος 'hill' ".

But i BC is a bit late for Proto-Greek *dj to be alternating between /ss/ and /zd/. Is it not, ye divinities of Greek etymology, Frisk and Chantraine?

Yes, pedē, pedon and pezda all come from *ped/pod-, as you'd expect: "foot (trap)", "footing", "foot thing" (*ped-ya). Anyway, pessos is not Hellenic, and Chantraine rejects the guesses Frisk cites—not that Frisk is any more enthused about them (Aramaic pīs(s)ā "stone, little board", Indic pāśaḥ "cube", pāśī ~ pāṣī "stone", Armenian yesan "whetstone").

But we'll leave πεσσός aside for now, because incredibly, that's not the major problem with Suda's rattling off of πισός πινσός πεσός. The major problem is whether πινσός is the same word as πεσσός.

(Or how long Chantraine is going to remain available on BitTorrent... Online Frisk entry, if you can stand pre-Unicode font failage.)

πινσός

Around the time of Procopius, a new word shows up for a column used to hold up a vault. LSJ glancingly notices it in the scholia to Pindar O.2.146: "= πεσσός ΙΙΙ, cubical block of masonry".

κίονα δὲ οὐ στύλον λέγει· ἀλλ’ ἔστι παντὶ οἴκῳ τόπος στύλος λεγόμενος, ἐφ’ οὗ κεῖνται οἱ πινσοὶ καὶ λέγεται ὅλην ἔχειν τὴν οἰκίαν.
He [Pindar] says kiōn not stulos (for "column"); but in every house there is a place called the stulos, on which the pinsoi lie, and it is said to hold up the whole house.

The glancing mention is because of LSJ policy with scholia. LS (pre J) systematically wound back its coverage of Byzantine Greek through the 19th century; but it has to keep definitions of words used in the Byzantine commentaries on Classical works: without those words, we can't make sense of the Classics. The words the Byzantine commentaries use to explain Ancient Greek are, of course, Byzantine Greek, so LSJ doesn't do a great job in understanding them. An example we noticed while writing the Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds (p. 264): Eustathius of Thessalonica uses στοίχημα, straightforwardly in its modern sense of "a bet", to explain Iliad 4.769 περιδώμεθον "we wager". But LSJ don't know any Modern Greek, nor any Byzantine Greek (in which στοίχημα originally meant a pact, or an agreement). Eustathius' is the only instance they notice, and they guesstimate from the context that στοίχημα means "deposit".

Lampe's dictionary (ii-viii AD) does not notice πινσός, but luckily the word is in the early pi's, so we have both Trapp's and Kriaras' definition in print. Trapp (ix-xv AD) defines it as "(supporting) column", and records it in Delehaye's collection of the Stylite Saints (with the textual variant πεσσούς), Dobschütz's collection of Images of Christ, John Moschus (vii AD), Theophanes the Confessor (ix AD), and on it goes. Trapp also notes the variant forms πίνσος in Constantine Porphyrogennitus, and πισσός in Julian of Ascalon (vi AD), the Barberini Euchologion (viii AD), and on that goes too. Constantine of Rhodes (x AD) also has πινσόπυργος, "a tower reinforced with supporting columns". By this stage, we're not on Diemous' terrace any more: the pinsos is exclusively a column propping up other things, including the pendentives of Hagia Sophia, house columns, and towers. Constantine of Rhodes' towers are in a description of the Church of the Holy Apostles, so they're presumably piers as well.

The word also makes it to the Early Modern Vernacular, and Kriaras (xii-xvii AD) gives it the more expansive definition "(Architect.) a bulky square built column which usually supports arches and domes". Unsurprisingly, most of the instances are in the Narrative on the Building of Hagia Sophia (very occasionally as πίνσος, πίσος, or πισσός), but it also turns up in Digenes, the Rod of the Archpriests, and the Account of the city by Theodore (?).

εποίησε και τους πινσούς το μήκος πενταπήχεις
αντί κιόνων έστησε τούτους εν τῳ τρικλίνῳ
έθηκε πλίνθους τέσσαρας εφ' έκαστον πινσόν τε
And making piers, five cubits each in length,
he set them in the dining hall as columns,
and onto every pier he placed four slabs.(Digenes Z 3851)

Kriaras cite TLG for the first appearance of πινσός in iv AD. Mpf, Gregory of Nyssa ("a pinsos of her house"), but a spurious text, so it doesn't prove iv AD. Then John Moschus (vii AD), fragments of the Spiritual Meadow in an x AD mansucript; then Theophanes the Confessor. The stylites from Trapp's first reference were all the rage in v AD and vi AD; let's say vi AD to be on the safe side. Which is Procopius' time.

So, we have a word that means the same thing as πεσσός III, that turns up in the descriptions of the same blocks of masonry in the same Great Cathedral, that gets conflated with πεσσός III in at least one text, and that Suda includes in its word dump next to πε(σ)σός III. Surely it's the same word, right? LSJ thinks so. And both Trapp and Kriaras have no problem with a straightforward "πινσός > πεσσός". The first guess seems to have been Charles Du Cange, in his commentary on Paul the Silentary: "there is little to constitute the origin of the word, other than Greek πεσσός, which means the same as κύβος". And who'd gainsay it?

Well, me. Not just because Du Cange's semantics is off. (Dude, it's not a "cube", as in dice that you'd play on a pessoi board. It's slightly ginormouser than that.) But also because /ns/ is not a Greek cluster. OK, let me qualify that: any /ns/ in Proto-Greek got mooshed to /ss/ or /ːs/ (hence Proto-Greek *pansa > Attic πᾶσα, Doric παῖσα; why else did you think the feminine of πᾶν, παντός has no /n/ in it?) Any /ns/ you see in the Classical language is at the boundary between a root and an affix, and isn't part of a root: ἔν-στασις, μαλάκυν-σις. If you see an /ns/ in a Greek root, it's come from the West. Like Modern πένσα "pliers", which the dictionaries take back to French peince, presumably via a Venetian *pensa. Or in the case of Byzantine Greek, like ἀδμηνσίων ~ ἀδμισσίων, δεμονστρατίων, δεπονσάτωρ, δηφένσωρ, δισπενσάτωρ ~ δεπενσάτωρ ~ δισπεντζέρης. Which makes you look at πίνσος askance.

Now it's possible for Byzantines, who had plenty of Latin words with /ns/ around them, to insert an /ns/ where it didn't belong. When Catherine Roth of Suda On Line brought the issue up with my dictionaries, she mentioned κιστέρνα "cistern", which Suda (and in fact, most Byzantine authors) hyperlatinised to κινστέρνα. From teh googles, it looks like Portuguese and Romanian had the same idea. But Latinise πεσσός? And switch the vowel to ι on top? I'm not seeing a good reason for it.

Now, if pinsus means something sensible in Latin, we're in business. The most excellent news is, it shows up in Vitruvius On Architecture. The most not so excellent news is, pinsus is just Latin for "compacted", and Vitruvius is talking about smashing up pavement, not raising columns heavenwards:

Deinde rudus inducatur et vectibus ligneis, decuriis inductis, crebriter pinsatione solidetur, et id non minus pinsum absolutum crassitudine sit dodrantis
Next, lay the mixture of broken stone, bring on your gangs, and beat it again and again with wooden beetles into a solid mass, and let it be not less than three quarters of a foot in thickness when the beating is finished (Vitruvius Pollio De Architectura 7.1.3, 1914 Loeb Translation)

Google Books hints that at least in Britain and/or Ireland, mediaeval Latin pinsus just meant "hard". Which pavement pounded by gangs of ten (decurii) would be.

So what do I think is going on with "πισός. And πινσός: but πεσός"? Of the three, πισός could be a variant of πινσός, merging /ns/ to /ss/ (as done elsewhere, because /ns/ really wasn't at home in Greek; e.g. ἀδμηνσίων ~ ἀδμισσίων, ἰνστιγάτωρ ~ ἰστιγάτωρ, κομπενσατίων ~ κομπεσσατίων). But Suda is sloppy enough with its hoovering up in alphabetic order, that this could just be a variant accentuation of πίσος, "pea". I don't know, and neither does anyone but Mr Suidas.

For all that πεσσός is as Greek as a non-Hellenic word can be, I'm having trouble accepting that it could switch to πινσός on its own. But when πινσός turned up in Greek, people thought they were interchangeable words, and there's no good reason to think they ever meant anything different.

At least, not while πεσσός meant a pier or terrace or column or whatever else, from Strabo through Diemous to Procopius, and raised from the dead again in our days, like so much Standard Modern Greek vocabulary: as far as Kriaras' sources are concerned, πεσσός is just backgammon and suppositories. And even those sources were probably reanimating the dead themselves.

My surmise is that πινσός came into Greek as pinsus, maybe even as a term of the trade for concrete; it sounded like πεσσός, and its meaning was close enough that it could slip into usage replacing πεσσός—which was too tied to backgammon and suppositories to make sense for architecture. So πεσσός was Latinised, but it was Latinised in the direction of an existing and relevant word, not just with a random n-insertion.

Well, OK, the meaning is not that close; the piers of Hagia Sophia are ashlar and brick (Sir Banister Fletcher's a History of Architecture, Architectural Press, 1996, p. 310), not crushed stone. And house columns aren't crushed stone either. But it's the best I can come up with. If anyone out there knows any better... ...Read more