θύννος
Pronunciation
- 5th-century BC Attic: /tʰýn.nos/[1]
- 4th-century AD Koine: /ˈθyn.nos/[1]
- 10th-century Byzantine: /ˈθyn.nos/[1]
Forms
θῠ́ννος (thúnnos) m (genitive θῠ́ννου); second declension[1] Feminine θύννα (thúnna) and θυννίς (thunnís).[2][3]
Etymology
Beekes, Chantraine and Frisk treat it as a Mediterranean word, and Beekes classes it as Pre-Greek: the feminine θύννα (thúnna) with a short -α points to a Pre-Greek origin.[4][5][3][6] Lewy compared Biblical Hebrew תַּנִּין (tannīn, “sea monster”) and Ugaritic tnn (“dragon”), but Chantraine rejects this, and Rosół counts it among the rejected Semitic etymologies.[4][3][7][8] Wiktionary instead derives it from a Phoenician form of that word, which it finds in a place name meaning “island of tunnies” near Monastir.[1]
The Greeks themselves connected it with θύνω (thúnō, “to dart”), as in Oppian's line on the tunnies that dart along, but LSJ, Chantraine and Frisk count this as a folk etymology.[9][3][6]
Earliest recorded meaning
Its earliest records, meaning the tunny or tuna, are in Semonides and Hipponax and in a fragment ascribed to Hesiod; an oracle in Herodotus and Aeschylus's Persians follow.[2][8][10]
Semantic evolution
The tunny was caught in large numbers in the Mediterranean, and Greek had words for its fishery: θυννοσκόπος (thunnoskópos) was the lookout who watched for the shoals, and θυννάζω (thunnázō) meant to fish for tunny.[3][6][11] Aeschylus and Aristotle mention it, and Athenaeus discusses it at length.[9]
Latin borrowed it as thynnus or Latin thunnus, the source of the Romance names.[4][6][12] From Latin came English tunny (1520s, probably through French), and through Arabic and Spanish also American tuna (1881).[11] Modern Greek calls the fish τόνος (tónos), a back-borrowing from Italian tonno.[13]
Timeline
- 7th–6th century BC – Semonides and Hipponax name the tunny.[2][8]
- 6th–5th century BC – Aeschylus uses it in the Persians.[9][2]
- 5th century BC – Herodotus quotes an oracle that names it.[9][4]
- 4th century BC – Aristotle mentions it in the History of Animals.[9]
- 2nd century AD – Oppian links the name with the verb for darting.[9]
- 1520s – English borrows tunny from Latin, probably through French.[11]
Meanings
Noun
Word family
- θυννίς (thunnís)
- θυννοσκόπος (thunnoskópos)
Related words
- Latin thunnus
- English tunny
- English tuna
References
- ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
- ^ a b c d e Diggle, James, et al., eds. (2021), The Cambridge Greek Lexicon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- ^ a b c d e 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
- ^ a b c d 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
- ^ Beekes, Robert S. P. (2014), Pre-Greek: Phonology, Morphology, Lexicon, ed. Stefan Norbruis, Leiden; Boston: Brill
- ^ a b c d Frisk, Hjalmar (1960–1972), Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3 vols, Heidelberg: Carl Winter
- ^ Rosół, Rafał (2013), Frühe semitische Lehnwörter im Griechischen, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang
- ^ a b c Scarborough, Matthew (2025), PHILOGLOSSA: database of Pre-Greek and other non-Indo-European words in Ancient Greek, version 1.0
- ^ a b c d e f g Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; Jones, Henry Stuart (1940), A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
- ^ Keersmaekers, Alek (2021–2025), GLAUx: The Greek Language Automated corpus, https://github.com/alekkeersmaekers/glaux
- ^ a b c Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
- ^ Saalfeld, Günther Alexander (1874), Index Graecorum vocabulorum in linguam latinam translatorum, Berlin: Weidmann
- ^ Ινστιτούτο Νεοελληνικών Σπουδών (Ίδρυμα Μανόλη Τριανταφυλλίδη) (1998), Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής, Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki