About the Yew1

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/27/2001 9:20:37 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:

<< 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>. >>

I don't think so.  Your first post was probably right.  I seriously doubt
that you'll find a single reference to yews or any other tree as <taxos> in
all of Classical Greek.  Even your own Dioscorides cited <taxos> = yew "as a
Latin word" according to L-S.  The best evidence is that the Greeks used
"smilax" for the yew when it was appropriate. Other words may have been
applied, by Greeks using the yew for other purposes, when appropriate.  As
was probably the case in Celtic, Germanic and Slavic, the more modern yew
words probably stood for a variety of trees and wood uses among the Greeks.

<<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.>>

If I came to a similar conclusion about a linguistic matter, the moderator
would bite my head off.  There's actually strong evidence of the importance
of vines (the bindweed is a vine) to the ancient woodworking and carving
trades.  Pins, plugs, bindings and wickerwork all often used vines as basic
material.  Convolvulus particularly has a thick curling trunk that made it a
favorite for carving the kinds of spiral implement handles often associated
with the Celts.  In fact, the vine patterns so often used to border large
carved bowls that its been suggested they might have been a relict of the use
of vines as bindings to hold the staves on more basic bowls and barrels.
This leads to the common practice of carving vines on kraters as
evidenced,e.g., in Flavius Josephus' descriptions of the ornaments on large
ceremonial bowls (smilaxi kissou kai petalois ampelo:n eskiasto philotechno:s
entetoreumeno:n.)  It's not impossible, btw, that the yew would have been one
of the woods preferred for such carvings - if one recalls the advantage of
the yew as a bow material was its bendability and ability to be steamed into
a curved shape despite being carved or turned.

<<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.>>

I suspect no word had the exclusive sense of "yew" in pre-Roman Greek.  I've
not seen any in the texts anyway.

<<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);...>>

Whatever the two sources of the words, they are distinguishable in Greek
texts almost only by context and often not even by that.  The source of
course is irrelevant because my notion was that they were borrowed, without
regard to the source, in a later form into Celtic.

<<Lumping together similar-sounding words in order to support crude
generalizations is as hazardous to the facts as going berserk with a straight
razor.>>

Hacking away at anything that doesn't show direct descent from *PIE - even
though those connections clearly make better sense in terms of the material,
textual and historical evidence -  really demands much more crude
generalization.  Rather than even considering whether the supposed *PIE
phonology might not apply here, we are assured instead, against the obvious
practices of the cultures involved, the intricacy of attested ancient
terminology and 30 better candidates - that the yew was "the berry tree" -
can't get more crudely generalizing than that.  And it's quite a piece of
carving that somehow turns that crude generalization into a serious etymology.

Regards,
Steve Long