Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Open Questions

What Is the Origin of the Word Salamander?

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Open Question

The Persian compound reading (sam, "fire," plus andar, "inside") most Persian lexicographers now treat as a later back-formation from the Greek word rather than its source, and the standard modern authority on Greek etymology, Beekes, classifies salamandra itself as Pre-Greek, meaning no successful Indo-European derivation for the word has been established.

What would resolve this Either a securely attested Pre-Greek Aegean word the name can be shown to derive from, or new philological evidence settling the direction of borrowing between Greek and Persian rather than leaving it a rejected folk etymology on the Persian side.
OpenHistorical and comparative Indo-European linguistics, Pre-Greek substrate studies, Iranian philologyRobert S. P. Beekes, with Lucien van Beek, Etymological Dictionary of Greek
Cross-Tradition Connections

Question On

Source Etymological Dictionary of GreekRobert S. P. Beekes, with Lucien van Beek
Sources
Etymological Dictionary of Greek
Robert S. P. Beekes, with Lucien van Beek, Brill, 2010
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.