The ascent of Olympus / by Rendel Harris.

  • J. Rendel Harris
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The ascent of Olympus / by Rendel Harris. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    69/188 page 51
    “ As the names of most of our fruit trees come from the Latin : cherry (cerasus), fig (ficus), pear (pirus), mulberry (morus), plum (prunus), etc.—1 would rather assume that the names of the apple . . . are to be derived from Italy, from a town of fruitful Campania, celebrated for the cultivation of fruit-trees, Abella, modern Avella Vecchia. Here the cultivation of another fruit, the nut, was so im¬ portant that abellana sc. mix = nux. In the same way the Irish aball . . . may have come from malum abellanum as the German pfi^'sch comes from malum persictim. . . . “ Attractive, however, as this derivation is, as regards the facts, 1 do not disguise from myself that phonetically the regularity with which Ir. b [aball), Dutch p (Eng. apple), H.G. pf (fipfel), Lith. b (obulas) correspond to each other, is disturbing in a set of loan-words. In Teutonic, especially, there seem to be no Latin loan-words which have been subjected to the First Sound-shifting. 1 assume, accordingly, that the Celts, as early as their inroad into Italy, took into their language a word corresponding to the Irish aball, which spread to the Teutons before the First Sound-shifting, and thence to the other Northern members of the Indo-Germanic family” [Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, trans. by F. B. Jevons. Lond. 1890, p. 276). Some years later Schrader went further with the inquiry, and admitted that “ it was possible that, after all, Abella might be originally related to the North European names for the apple, and that the place might be named after the fmiit and not the fruit after the place''^ [Real-Lexikon der indogermanischen Al- tertums. Strassburg, 1901, 43). It would seem to be involved in the preceding argument that the fundamental characteristic of the Cult of Apollo is to be sought in the region of medicine ; to put it in the language of mythology, that he was Paian before he was Apollo. Assuming that Paian or Paion is the proper term to be applied to a god of healing, as to Zeus, Asklepios, Apollo, or Dionysos, we have to look for the origin of the ^ Precisely the same conclusion is reached, but with a more positive statement, by Hoops in VValdbdume und Kulturpfldnzen m ger7nanischen Alterthuin (Strassburg, 1905, p. 477 ff.). Feist, on the other hand, thinks the question must be left undecided [Kultui^, Ausbreitiing und Herkunft der Indogennanen. Berlin, 1913, p. 190).
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3