Thanks for all the help, everybody. Some great departure points for investigation on this thread.
But you can see how quickly this topic gets way out of hand, and why it’s so difficult to distill applicable info. The original question concerns the etymology of a word. Now we’re back to a discussion of modern-day ethnology.
Btw, I know folks who would assert quite the opposite, that modern Palestine was established explicitly as a Jewish homeland, therefore Palestinians are by definition Jewish, not Arab.
Thing is, though, that’s all irrelevant to the topic, and should be spun off on another thread.
Oops… New to the mechanics of this board. Didn’t realize my post wouldn’t appear below the cited posting, but rather at the end of the thread (dunno why, since it’s obvious if one looks).
At this point, the topic has swung back around, and like I said, lots of relevant info, will help very much, even if ultimately there is no iron-clad bulletproof answer, as is often the case with word origins.
When it was established the whole of the British Mandate of Palestine or even most of it wasn’t meant to be a Jewish homeland, it was menat to contain a Jewish homeland (it marked the area into which Jewish immigration was to be allowed). The term Palestinian when first used (i.e. from the start of British rule) it was quite often used to refer to Arabs and Jews in the area, including Jewish immigrants.
The article on Philistines in Encarta says they were definitely “Indo-European,” and that they came from Crete. Encarta doesn’t buy the theory that they were Pelsagians (i.e. non-Greek people who lived in Greece before the Greeks came). Their place of origin was said to be “Caphtor,” and Encarta identifies Caphtor as someplace in Crete. I don’t know how anyone can make a positive I.D. with such scanty data. AFAICT, the Philistines being either Indo-European or Semitic, or none of the above, remains an open question and we’ll probably never know for sure.
That’s Pelasgians. Sorry, should have proofread before posting. The Pelasgian theory sounds as good as anything else to me. Why? Because the time when the Sea Peoples began raising hell around the southern and eastern Mediterranean coasts corresponds to about the same time the Mycenean civilization was starting to fall into turmoil. This is the sort of thing that could set migrations of marauders in motion, and if the Philistines were non-Greeks from Greece, they might have been fallout from ethnic conflict over in the Aegean.
If I’m not mistaken, the name Pelasgian is Greek (what the Greeks called the people of the Aegean seacoasts who preceded them there), and is thought to be derived from a Greek word for sea: [symbol]pelagoV[/symbol] pelagos. (Don’t ask me how that extra s got in there.) So pelagos ‘sea’ > PeLaSgioi ‘sea people’? > PLST. (I might be able to explain the final -T. In Afro-Asiatic it’s the feminine ending, and country names are traditionally feminine, at least in Egyptian, Arabic, and Berber.)
Your perhaps sarcastic reference to Merritt Ruhlen’s etymological methods may not be so far off the mark. Because in Egyptian and Semitic, where only the consonants were recorded, it’s the consonantal outline of a word that counts for etymology (yes, I know the old jibe that goes “etymology is a science in which consonants count for little and vowels not at all”). But seriously, that’s mainly how Semitic and Egyptian etymology is done. I hadn’t noticed that before, thanks for pointing it out. It sounds as plausible as any other theory I’ve heard, so who knows?
Given the history of the area, I suspect “Palestine” is derived from a word that means : “place where you get your @ss kicked just for breathing”, but I could be wrong… :rolleyes: