ῥάπυς

Forms

ῥᾰ́πῠς (rhápus) f (genitive ῥᾰ́πῠος); third declension^[1] Also ῥάφυς (rháphus).^[2][3]

Etymology

An old European name of the turnip.^[4][5] Beekes considers the group Pre-Greek, because the variation between ⟨π⟩ and ⟨φ⟩ (ῥάπυς beside ῥάφυς (rháphus)) and the suffix of the related ῥάφανος (rháphanos) “cabbage, radish” are typical of that substrate, and he compares the plant-name endings of σίκυς (síkus) and στάχυς (stákhus).^[3] Similar words occur elsewhere in Europe but with vowels that do not agree: Latin rāpum, Old High German ruoba and Lithuanian rópė point to *rāp-, Russian репа (répa) to *rēp-, and the Greek forms to a stem with a short vowel and a plain or aspirated labial.^[3][4][5] Since Greek also lacks the prothetic vowel expected before an inherited initial r-, Chantraine and Frisk conclude that the words are not a common inheritance but old borrowings, and Wiktionary also prefers several separate borrowings.^[4][5][1]

Earliest recorded meaning

The word is known from Athenaeus, who quotes the cookery writer Glaucus of Locri for ῥάπυς and Speusippus for ῥάφυς, which Speusippus equates with the βουνιάς (bouniás), a kind of turnip.^[2][6]

Semantic evolution

Beekes and Chantraine suggest that the old name of the turnip passed to the radish and the cabbage (ῥάφανος (rháphanos), ῥαφανίς (rhaphanī́s)) as turnip-growing declined in Greece, and that a new transparent word, γογγυλίς (gongulís) “the round one”, took over for the turnip.^[3][4] ῥάπυς itself remained a rare word.^[7] Galen's text has it only by conjecture, and the PHILOGLOSSA database rates the evidence for the word as low.^[2][8]

Timeline

• 4th century BC – Speusippus has the form ῥάφυς for a kind of turnip, as Athenaeus reports.^[2][9]
• 2nd–3rd century AD – Athenaeus quotes Glaucus of Locri for ῥάπυς.^[2][6][9]

Meanings

Noun

1. The turnip.^[2][6][1]

Related words

• ῥάφυς (rháphus)
• ῥάφανος (rháphanos)
• ῥαφανίς (rhaphanī́s)
• Latin rapum

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; Jones, Henry Stuart (1940), A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
3. ^ 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
4. ^ a b c d 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. ^ a b c Frisk, Hjalmar (1960–1972), Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3 vols, Heidelberg: Carl Winter
6. ^ a b c Bailly, Anatole (2020), Dictionnaire grec-français, Bailly 2020 Hugo Chávez ed., ed. Gérard Gréco et al.
7. ^ Keersmaekers, Alek (2021–2025), GLAUx: The Greek Language Automated corpus, https://github.com/alekkeersmaekers/glaux
8. ^ Scarborough, Matthew (2025), PHILOGLOSSA: database of Pre-Greek and other non-Indo-European words in Ancient Greek, version 1.0
9. ^ a b Rodríguez Adrados, Francisco, et al., eds. (1980–), Diccionario Griego-Español, Madrid: CSIC, http://dge.cchs.csic.es/xdge