Re: Hollow Syria (was: Contemporaneous protolanguages)

On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 18:09, Ray Brown wrote:
> On Wednesday, September 29, 2004, at 09:39 , Steg Belsky wrote:
> > On Sep 29, 2004, at 9:12 AM, Ray Brown wrote:
> >> Ancient usage is quite clear about_Coele Syria_ (Greek: koile: Syria =
> >> "hollow Syria"). It was that hollow (or valley)
> >> in ancient Syria (forget the modern political boundaries) which lay
> >> between Libanus (Gk. Libanos) "Mt. Lebanon"/ "Jebel Liban" and
> >> Antilibanus (Gk. Antilibanos) "Jebel esh-Sharqi".
> >> The position of the "Syrian hollow" remained the same irrespective of
> >> any
> >> Egyptian pharoah. They may have thought themselves gods - but they
> >> weren't
> >>
> >>   :)
> >>
> >> Ray
> >
> > Ah, but does the Syrian Hollow extend southwards along the
> > African-Asian Rift, down towards where the Libanos and Antilibanos
> > become the Mountains of Judea and Moab, respectively, on either side of
> > the Dead Sea?
> > Or is it just up there in the Lebanese part?
>
> Interesting point - but I don't think Syria extended that far south.
> Without checking every reference I cannot be 100% certain, but my feeling
> is that it was only the Lebanese part that was called Coele Syria by the
> ancients.
>
> The mountains n the east of the rift do continue unbroken from Antilibanos
> to the mountains of Moab, but the western lot appear to have a gap in
> Galilee.
>
> Interestingly I doscover that while the Romans declined Syria the Latin
> way, they retained the Greek endings for Coele; so we have:
> Nominative   Coele Syria
> Accusative   Coelen Syriam
>    Genitive   Coeles Syriae
>
> As far as I know, the dative is not attested; but I guess it would be
> Coelei Syriae. The ablative would be a little problematic - there wasn't
> one in Greek     :)
I think the usual way of handling that would've been to use the Latin ablative
with the Greek genitive - the Greek genitive had much of the ablative
functionality - if my memory serves me right ;) - and the remainder got taken
over by the dative.
>
> Ray
> ===============================================
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> ray.brown@freeuk.com
> ===============================================
> Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
> which is not so much a twilight of the gods
> as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]
--
Wesley Parish
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