βρένθος

Forms

βρένθος (brénthos) m (genitive βρένθου); second declension^[1]

Etymology

The origin is unknown.^[2][3][4] Several rare words seem to share this form: a bird name, “arrogance”, Hesychius' gloss “tomb”, and the names of a perfume and of some plants, and it is unclear how they are related.^[2][4][3] Chantraine took the bird name and the word for arrogance to be one word, which Beekes doubts.^[2][4] Frisk saw “arrogance” as a back-formation from the much commoner verb βρενθύομαι (brenthúomai, “to swagger”).^[3] If the variant reading βρίνθος (brínthos) is reliable, Beekes thinks the bird name may be Pre-Greek, because of the variation between /i/ and /e/.^[2][1] Older scholars, Pokorny among them, compared Latin grandis (“large”) and Slavic words for “breast”, but Chantraine and Frisk find all such etymologies unfounded.^[1][5][3][4]

Earliest recorded meaning

Aristotle's History of Animals names it as a water bird, and in another passage, with the variant βρίνθος, as some kind of songbird.^[6][2][7]

Semantic evolution

The bird has not been identified;^[4][6] Chantraine suggests it may be the grebe, while Hesychius glosses it as the blackbird.^[4][6] Aelian also mentions the bird.^[6] In Athenaeus the word means a haughty bearing, arrogance, and Hesychius gives a sense “tomb”.^[6][2] Related words name a perfume, βρένθειον (bréntheion), known since Sappho, and some red roots used as rouge.^[2][3]

Timeline

• 4th century BC – Aristotle names a water bird and a songbird with this word.^[6][2]
• 2nd–3rd century AD – Aelian mentions the bird, and Athenaeus uses the word for arrogance.^[6][7]
• 5th century AD (probably) – Hesychius glosses it as the blackbird and as “tomb”.^[6][2]

Meanings

Noun

1. An unidentified water bird; also some kind of songbird, glossed as the blackbird.^[6][2]
2. Haughty bearing, arrogance.^[6]
3. (Hesychius) A tomb.^[6][2]

Word family

• βρενθύομαι (brenthúomai)
• βρένθειος (bréntheios)

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Beekes, Robert S. P. (2010), Etymological Dictionary of Greek, with the assistance of Lucien van Beek, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 10, Leiden; Boston: Brill
3. ^ a b c d e Frisk, Hjalmar (1960–1972), Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3 vols, Heidelberg: Carl Winter
4. ^ a b c d e f Chantraine, Pierre (2009), Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque: histoire des mots, new ed. with a supplement (Chroniques d'étymologie grecque 1–10), Paris: Klincksieck
5. ^ Rodríguez Adrados, Francisco, et al., eds. (1980–), Diccionario Griego-Español, Madrid: CSIC, http://dge.cchs.csic.es/xdge
6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; Jones, Henry Stuart (1940), A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
7. ^ a b Keersmaekers, Alek (2021–2025), GLAUx: The Greek Language Automated corpus, https://github.com/alekkeersmaekers/glaux