# Etymology: Olympic



## momai

Hi,
Could you please help me to determine what the origin of this word is ?
I've just watched a video on youtube which claims that the word is originally a combination of two Assyrian words il/al:god and ambo/ambon:throne which is in turn means the god of the throne.
etymonline states that it's of unknown origin , so I suppose now this claim is true.
Thanks in advance.


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## rbrunner

Why should a mountain in Greece have an Assyrian name? Does the video propose an explanation for that as well, beside the etymology itself? Anyway, I could not find any source for that; I couldn't even find _ambo_ or _ambon_ as a word of Assyrian (instead of Greek) origin, regardless of any "Olympic" connection.


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## fdb

Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding: "Olympic" (as in Olympic games) is from Olympia, the name of a town in ancient Greece. Nobody doubts this. What is "unknown" is the ultimate origin of the place name Olympia (and also of the various mountains called Olympos).

ilu is indeed the Akkadian (Babylonian, Assyrian) word for “god”. ambōn on the other hand is not Akkadian; it is a Greek word meaning “rim or edge of a cup”.


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## momai

rbrunner said:


> Why should a mountain in Greece have an Assyrian name? Does the video propose an explanation for that as well, beside the etymology itself? Anyway, I could not find any source for that; I couldn't even find _ambo_ or _ambon_ as a word of Assyrian (instead of Greek) origin, regardless of any "Olympic" connection.


Why would Greek people call a place something they don't know what it means in first place?!
BTW I'm not a historian nor a linguistic and this is where I took this piece of Information from!



fdb said:


> Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding: "Olympic" (as in Olympic games) is from Olympia, the name of a town in ancient Greece. Nobody doubts this. What is "unknown" is the ultimate origin of the place name Olympia (and also of the various mountains called Olympos).
> 
> ilu is indeed the Akkadian (Babylonian, Assyrian) word for “god”. ambōn on the other hand is not Akkadian; it is a Greek word meaning “rim or edge of a cup”.


Ok thanks , you may check this if you want .
The word looks very simillar and means the samething the man says in his video.


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## fdb

momai said:


> Why would Greek people call a place something they don't know what it means in first place?!
> BTW I'm not a historian nor a linguistic and this is where I took this piece of Information from!



I listened to this (I can understand Arabic); it is nonsense. Anyway, he is using "Assyrian" to mean "Syriac" (Aramaic), not ancient Assyrian. ambōn is a Greek loanword in Aramaic, not the other way around.




momai said:


> Ok thanks , you may check this if you want .
> The word looks very simillar and means the samething the man says in his video.



This link refers to the Aramaic (Syriac) word bēmā (Western Syriac bīmā) “pulpit”. This is again a loanword from Greek bēma.


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## momai

Ok ,Thank you very much.


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## ahvalj

Beekes (_Beekes RSP · 2010 · Etymological dictionary of Greek:_ 1073–1074 — https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_7IkEzr9hyJeWVWWWcydS0wVE0&authuser=0) writes:

"[…] [N]ame of several mountain ranges in Greece and the Near East, especially at the borders of Thessaly and Macedonia; seat of Zeus and of the gods (ll[iad]). <P[re-]G[reek]> […]

Probably originally an appellative 'mountain', and without a doubt Pre­-Greek […] Perhaps Myc[enaean] _u-ru-pi-ja­ (jo-)_ points to an original P[re-]G[reek] _*u-_, which is one of the phonemes that could be reflected as Gr[eek] _ο_ (though the interpretation of the Myc[enaean] word is debated). Was the original word _*Ulump(-)_ ?"


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## fdb

...Although the town of Olympia (the location of the Olympic games) is not on a mountain; it is perfectly flat.


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## origumi

fdb said:


> This link refers to the Aramaic (Syriac) word bēmā (Western Syriac bīmā) “pulpit”. This is again a loanword from Greek bēma.


Bama = high place (usually used for pagan worship) appears in the Hebrew Bible (Numbers, Judges, Kings, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Micah, Chronicles), mostly in the plural form bamot.
Bima = stage (in the theater, synagogue) was borrowed from Greek βήμα in the Hellenistic period.

So ancient Semitic origin is possible.

See also:
http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/במות (Hebrew)
https://www.safa-ivrit.org/form/bama.php (Hebrew)


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## apmoy70

fdb said:


> ...Although the town of Olympia (the location of the Olympic games) is not on a mountain; it is perfectly flat.


...not to mention that in some ancient and modern regiolects, the name is *Elympus*, and not *Olympus* which is quite inexplicable.


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## ahvalj

apmoy70 said:


> ...not to mention that in some ancient and modern regiolects, the name is *Elympus*, and not *Olympus* which is quite inexplicable.


Well, one of the main symptomes of a substrate origin in Beekes' dictionary is the seemingly random alternation of phonetic variants in Greek words attested in various dialects and polises, which is compared with similar phenomena occurring with loanwords in the world's languages: speakers try to adapt foreign sounds to their pronunciation habits, plus, since the meaning and structure of many borrowings is not transparent, people tend to adjust it to what they consider more appropriate pronunciation. Ancient Greeks of later times are notorious for modifying foreign personal and tribal names etc.


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## Perseas

ahvalj said:


> Well, one of the main symptomes of a substrate origin in Beekes' dictionary is the seemingly random alternation of phonetic variants in Greek words attested in various dialects and polises, which is compared with similar phenomena occurring with loanwords in the world's languages: speakers try to adapt foreign sounds to their pronunciation habits, plus, since the meaning and structure of many borrowings is not transparent, people tend to adjust it to what they consider more appropriate pronunciation. Ancient Greeks of later times are notorious for modifying foreign personal and tribal names etc.


In my opinion, this is irrelevant to our subject, Olympus.


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## fdb

origumi said:


> So ancient Semitic origin is possible



βῆμα (Doric βᾶμα) originally ‘step’, then ‘walkway’, goes with βαίνω ‘to walk’, IE *gwem, and has cognates all across IE.


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## sotos

ahvalj said:


> Probably originally an appellative 'mountain', and without a doubt Pre­-Greek […] Perhaps Myc[enaean] _u-ru-pi-ja­ (jo-)_ points to an original P[re-]G[reek] _*u-_, which is one of the phonemes that could be reflected as Gr[eek] _ο_ (though the interpretation of the Myc[enaean] word is debated). Was the original word _*Ulump(-)_ ?"



Why "without a doubt Pre-Greek", since with the rhotacism seems relative to _oros _(mountain). The suffix -mpos (-mbos, -mvos) is found in other words too and sounds very Greek to me, e.g. koryfe (top) / korymvos (top)  http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper...tic+letter=*k:entry+group=153:entry=ko/rumbos


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## ahvalj

sotos said:


> Why "without a doubt Pre-Greek", since with the rhotacism seems relative to _oros _(mountain). The suffix -mpos (-mbos, -mvos) is found in other words too and sounds very Greek to me, e.g. koryfe (top) / korymvos (top)  http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper...tic+letter=*k:entry+group=153:entry=ko/rumbos


The introduction in Beekes' dictionary (downloadable from the above link) explains this methodology. The suffix -_mpo_- is absent in other IE languages. Are _ὄρος_ or its unproblematic derivatives attested anywhere with _λ_?


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## sotos

ahvalj said:


> The suffix -_mpo_- is absent in other IE languages.



Unattested, let's say. Reasonable, since many IE languages were written some 2000 years after the Greek. Words are lost constantly without waiting someone to write them down.


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## ahvalj

sotos said:


> Unattested, let's say. Reasonable, since many IE languages were written some 2000 years after the Greek. Words are lost constantly without waiting someone to write them down.


That's true, but recently researchers began to narrow the scope of accepted PIE forms by excluding those words that don't fit the well-established patterns. For example, Beekes, as well as the entire Leiden school, believes that PIE lacked the phoneme _a_, so all cases when a reconstructed word contains this vowel are evaluated for the possibility of explaining it by the influence of the neighbor second laryngeal (*_hₐenti_>*_anti>ἀντί_; *_lehₐiu̯os_>*_laı̯u̯os>λαιός_) or by onomatopoeia (_mama, papa_). This may look too restrictive, but they are trying to make the reconstruction more scientific and formalized. Likewise, if a certain formant (-_mpo_- in our case) is not attested in several languages, it is regarded as suspicious. If, then, it is attached to a root without a clear IE etymology (_ol-u-_), and occurs in the language abounding in obviously substrate words, it is considered much safer to classify this word as non-IE — until, at least, some new evidence of the contrary appears.

By the way, I don't quite understand the Greek attitude towards the pre-Greek substrate. Why being heirs of an ancient mediterranean civilization is considered less prestigious than being descendants of Pontic–Caspian nomads?


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## Perseas

ahvalj said:


> Why being heirs of an ancient mediterranean civilization is considered less prestigious than being descendants of Pontic–Caspian nomads?


 If you have something relevant to the subject, please say it. I don't believe again that such language and style contribute to this discussion.


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