Etymologically
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κόμμι

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Pronunciation

  • 5th-century BC Attic: /kóm.mi/[1]
  • 4th-century AD Koine: /ˈkom.mi/[1]
  • 10th-century Byzantine: /ˈkom.mi/[1]

Forms

κόμμῐ (kómmi) n (genitive κόμμεως); third declension[1]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Egyptian qmyt (“acacia resin, gum”),[2][1][3] or from qmy (“anointing oil”).[1] Athenaeus already called it a foreign word.[4]

From κόμμι came Latin cummi, later gummi, the source of the other European forms.[2][5] Beekes rejects the idea that Greek and Latin borrowed the word separately from Egyptian, since two independent loans would hardly have taken the same form.[2]

Earliest recorded meaning

It is first found in Herodotus and in the Hippocratic treatise On Joints.[4][6][3]

Semantic evolution

The gum came from the acacia, as Theophrastus and Dioscorides say.[4][7] Usually the word is not declined, but some writers inflect it, with a genitive κόμμεως and datives κόμμει and κόμμιδι.[4] Coptic has the word as Coptic ⲕⲟⲙⲙⲓ (kommi), which the DDGLC lists as a borrowing from Greek, with many spellings in Sahidic manuscripts from about AD 300.[8]

Modern Greek κόμμι (kómmi) is a learned revival of the ancient word, used of plant gums and of rubber.[9][10]

Timeline

  • 5th century BC – Herodotus and the Hippocratic writers use it for gum.[4][6]
  • 4th–3rd century BC – Theophrastus says that it comes from the acacia.[4][11]
  • 1st century AD – Dioscorides, too, names the acacia as its source.[4][11]
  • About AD 300 – The earliest Sahidic Coptic manuscripts with the borrowed word date from this time.[8]
  • Modern Greek – Κόμμι is a learned revival of the ancient word.[9]

Meanings

Noun

  1. Gum, especially that of the acacia.[4][3]
  • Latin cummi
  • English gum

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
  2. ^ a b c 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 Diggle, James, et al., eds. (2021), The Cambridge Greek Lexicon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; Jones, Henry Stuart (1940), A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
  5. ^ Saalfeld, Günther Alexander (1874), Index Graecorum vocabulorum in linguam latinam translatorum, Berlin: Weidmann
  6. ^ a b Keersmaekers, Alek (2021–2025), GLAUx: The Greek Language Automated corpus, https://github.com/alekkeersmaekers/glaux
  7. ^ 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
  8. ^ a b Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic (DDGLC), Freie Universität Berlin and Universität Leipzig
  9. ^ a b Ινστιτούτο Νεοελληνικών Σπουδών (Ίδρυμα Μανόλη Τριανταφυλλίδη) (1998), Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής, Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
  10. ^ Babiniotis, Georgios (2010), Ετυμολογικό λεξικό της νέας ελληνικής γλώσσας [Etymological Dictionary of Modern Greek], Athens: Κέντρο Λεξικολογίας
  11. ^ a b Rodríguez Adrados, Francisco, et al., eds. (1980–), Diccionario Griego-Español, Madrid: CSIC, http://dge.cchs.csic.es/xdge