About the Yew1

[Douglas G Kilday]

Steve Long (6 Jun 2001) wrote:

>Quick note.  Allow me to address this in more detail once I get back to my
>papers.

>But I did want to just point out that "Greek has (s)mi:lax" from the earlier
>post [DGK, 5 Jun 2001] is a good place to start to examine the simplification
>being attempted above.

>The statement that "It is very unlikely that a name for this particular tree,
>once established among a body of speakers, would be applied by those speakers
>to any other tree" just won't work with Greek.

Actually, I believe it will work, but my earlier posting contained a glaring
oversight. The regular Greek word for 'yew' is <taxos>, which is clearly
from the same source as Latin <taxus>. The word I cited, <smi:lax>, is an
epithet of several diverse plants. As you suggest, the most plausible
connection is with <smi:le:> 'type of knife', and the epithet probably means
'having knife-like leaves', since vines and weeds are hardly suitable for
carving. Anyhow, there is no reason to suppose that <smi:lax> was ever
established in the _exclusive_ sense of 'yew' and then applied to other
plants.

>In fact, the Greeks used "smilax" to apply at least four other forms of flora.
>And the original associations they were making appear to be to carving or
>perhaps sharpness of the leaves.  As far as, "red berries" goes, one of the
>trees-smilax was the "Hollyoak" or "Holmoak", which of course has red berries,
>provides an excellent carving wood and has sharp leaves.  The odd thing, of
>course, is that there is little or no reference to the smilax being poisonous
>in Classical Greek.  When we do have a connection between poisonous and
>arrows, it is in words like "ion", which is often associated with the violet,
>although there are texts where it is pretty clear this association is
>arbitrary and that the word has multiple meanings in reference to flora also.

There are three distinct Greek words here: the oxytone <i:os> 'arrow'
referred by L&S to the root of <ienai> 'to go'; the oxytone <ios> 'poison,
esp. of serpents' cognate with Latin <vi:rus> 'slime; poison' (PIE *weis-
Pok. 1134); and the paroxytone <ion> 'violet' cognate with Lat. <viola> id.
of non-IE origin.

>The closer we look, in fact, the more we understand that the ancients were
>more concerned with wood and pitch and bark and juice than they were with the
>modern-style scientific taxonomy of trees (except for the occasional natural
>historian) and that the names they actually used reflected this.  More
>importantly, if we don't look closely, we may inadvertantly use Occam's Razor
>to remove a good chunk of the truth.

If poor old Occam had a nickel for every time someone misused his razor, he
would be the world's richest dead man. It seems to me that your own method
of analysis is likely to cut out much of the truth as well. Lumping together
similar-sounding words in order to support crude generalizations is as
hazardous to the facts as going berserk with a straight razor.

DGK