About the Yew1

[Douglas G Kilday]

Steve Long (28 Jun 2001) wrote:

>I don't think so.  Your [DGK's] 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.

Well, score one for yew, Steve. I can't find any attestation of <taxos>
'yew' in Classical Attic, so I must retract my rash claim that it was the
"regular Greek word". However, when Dioscorides says "Ro:maioi ... taxoum"
it doesn't mean the cognate was unknown in Greek. Oddly enough, in fact, the
6th-cent. "Dioscurides Latinus" uses the Greek acc. form <taxon>, not
<taxum>.

"The best evidence is that words were applied when appropriate." I can't
disagree with that, but inspection of the attested Attic words for 'yew'
suggests that platitudes can be transcended. Cratinus (died 419 BCE) has
<mi~los>, as does Theophrastus (371-287). Plato employs <mi~lax>, while
<smi~lax> and <smi~los> belong to later Attic. Plato's usage is highly
significant, as he otherwise shows a fondness for archaisms like <smi:kro's>
and <sme:'rinthos>. The stem mi:l- cannot be a reduction of smi:l-. As for
the ending, the forms in -os appear to be used consistently for 'yew', but
not the forms with the "Aegean" ending -ax. Therefore, as a working
hypothesis, I take <mi~los> as the regular Attic for 'yew', and <smi~lax>
(which lacks IE etyma according to Watkins) as an "Aegean" term meaning
'having sharp leaves' related to <smi:'le:> 'type of knife'. The form
<smi~los> (found in Callimachus, 3rd cent. BCE, and later) is either a
contamination or a pseudo-archaism. I'm not sure whether <mi~lax> is a
contamination; it might be a legitimate "Aegean" word. Anyhow, it's now up
to you to show that <mi~los> ever "stood for a variety of trees and wood
uses among the Greeks".

>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.

Are you a heavy smoker, doodler, or finger-drummer, Steve? Your elaborate
defense of <smi~lax> as 'suitable for carving', and your obsession with the
purported naming of trees on the basis of manual use, suggest a
thorough-going digital fixation. Now, I'm not trying to attack your
personality, but in doing etymology I think you should pay more attention to
empirical work, and less attention to the presumed linguistic behavior of a
nation of Steve Longs.

>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.

It's not a particularly intricate piece of carving. A PIE root *eiw-/oiw-
could yield *eiwom/oiwom 'small round fruit, berry', *eiwos/oiwos
'berry-tree', and *eiwa:/oiwa: 'cluster of berries'. From *oiwa: could come
Lat. <u:va> orig. 'cluster of berries or grapes', once in Vergil 'cluster of
bees', later 'single grape'. Observe the parallel decollectivization in Fr.
<raisin> < Lat. <race:mus>.

As for northern PIE-speakers moving west into yew-country and applying the
generic *eiwos to a specific new type of berry-tree, when there were other
berry-trees around, this sort of thing happens all the time. Consider Eng.
<deer>, originally the generic term for 'beast', like Ger. <Tier>. Or Amer.
Eng. <corn> 'maize', originally 'grain'. Or Afrikaans <wildebeest> 'gnu',
orig. 'wild beast' (duh!).

In short, my etymological proposal involves nothing out of the ordinary. I
can't pretend to be able to "prove" it, and there are other proposals for
"yew" on the table. But I don't see that anything is gained by quibbling
over arrowwoods or "modern scientific classification" vs. ancient usage. If
things were as chaotic as you suggest, it would be impossible to reconstruct
_any_ PIE dendronyms. But we do have several (by consensus; you are of
course free to be a dissident).

DGK