Sunday 20 May 2018

Is AGAPE A LOAN WORD

Is AGAPE a loan Word from an West Semitic Afroasiatic language?

I've seen arguments for and against but I think yes for THREE reasons

ONE

There are no cognates to AGAPE in other IndoEuropean languages
even if you prefer the agape is aga with a verbal suffix added why no other cognates ?

TWO Hebrew Aramaic and Arabic have cognate words !

Aramaic has Chav / Hoeba etc KH-V
Hebrew has AHAV  HB
Arabic has H B B  hubb habba ahabba.

But Agape appears in Homer!
 Yes and so do Phoenician traders and stories about Greeks and Phoenicians intermarrying.

But Hebrew and Aramaic the Rkh M stem  more frequently!

So how do I explain this?

I think just as it is in modern standard colloquial Arabic likewise in ancient time it was a popular non literary term. Slang even !

It was brought to Greece maybe as early as the Mycenaean period by refugees from the collapse and defeat of the Hyksos dynasty described in myths as Egyptians and hearing it used by later Phoenician traders reinforced its usage plus there would have been Greek mercenaries who picked it up working in the Near East for the Assyrians and Persians alongside others who spoke West Semitic languages.

Frankly I expect there is a reasonable chance cognates to H B B will turn up on ancient tablets yet to be discovered.

One last point.

How did or could (a)H vowel B change to agape?

There is evidence many words or syllables starting with p or b may be been gw or kw sounds in older forms of Greek.

The sound written H in our alphabet in modern Western Semitic languages is an unvoiced version of AYN and ... we tend to hear ha but maybe greeks could only say gwa or hwa and changed the BB to a P the two Bs fusing into one P ?

We can't know for sure but this is what I speculate happened!

Your choice which you prefer!

If anyone reading this blog is far more fluent in Aramaic than me I've love to see and add some more examples that are NOT cited in the most common Google searches.

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