ῥίνη

Pronunciation

• 5th-century BC Attic: /r̥ǐː.nɛː/^[1]
• 4th-century AD Koine: /ˈri.ni/^[1]
• 10th-century Byzantine: /ˈri.ni/^[1]

Forms

ῥῑ́νη (rhī́nē) f (genitive ῥῑ́νης); first declension^[1]

Etymology

The origin is unknown; no Indo-European etymology has been established.^[2][3] Beekes and Chantraine take “file, rasp” as the original meaning and the fish name as derived from it, because the shark's rough skin was used like a file, whereas Strömberg had derived it from ῥινός (rhīnós, “skin, hide”) as “fish with a skin” and made “file” secondary.^[2][3] Frisk saw a formation with a suffix -ν- from a verb found only in Germanic, Old Saxon wrītan (“to tear, scratch, write”) and Old English wrītan (“to scratch, write”), but Beekes rejects this, because the Greek form would need a root with a laryngeal and the Germanic one has none.^[2]

Earliest recorded meaning

Its earliest uses are in the 5th and early 4th century BC: the Hippocratic writers and the comic poet Epicharmus use it for the shark, and Xenophon's Cyropaedia for a file.^[4][5]

Semantic evolution

As a tool the ῥίνη was the file or rasp, named by Xenophon, Aristotle and Aeneas Tacticus and listed in an inscription from Delos of the 3rd century BC.^[4] The shark called ῥίνη is the angel shark, whose rough skin was used like shagreen to polish wood and marble; it is named in Attic comedy and in Aristotle's zoology.^[4][2] Herodian says that the word for the shark was accented ῥινή, and later Greek had a form ῥῖνα.^[4][2] Its diminutive is ῥινάριον (rhīnárion).^[1]

Timeline

• 5th century BC – The Hippocratic writers and Epicharmus name the angel shark.^[4][6]
• 5th–4th century BC – Xenophon uses it for a file.^[4][6]
• 4th century BC – Aristotle uses it for the file and for the shark.^[4][6]
• 3rd century BC – An inscription from Delos lists files.^[4]

Meanings

Noun

1. A file or rasp.^[4][2]
2. The angel shark, whose rough skin was used for polishing wood and marble.^[4][2]

Word family

• ῥινάριον (rhīnárion)

Related words

• ῥινός (rhīnós)

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g 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 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
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; Jones, Henry Stuart (1940), A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
5. ^ Keersmaekers, Alek (2021–2025), GLAUx: The Greek Language Automated corpus, https://github.com/alekkeersmaekers/glaux
6. ^ a b c Rodríguez Adrados, Francisco, et al., eds. (1980–), Diccionario Griego-Español, Madrid: CSIC, http://dge.cchs.csic.es/xdge