Pelasgians - Etymology

Etymology

Much like all other aspects of the "Pelasgians", their ethnonym (Pelasgoi) is of extremely uncertain provenance and etymology. Michel Sakellariou collects fifteen different etymologies proposed for it by philologists and linguists during the last 200 years, though he admits that "most...are fanciful".

An ancient etymology based on mere similarity of sounds linked pelasgos to pelargos ("stork") and postulates that the Pelasgians were migrants like storks, possibly from Egypt, where they nest. Aristophanes deals effectively with this etymology in his comedy The Birds. One of the laws of "the storks" in the satirical cloud-cuckoo-land, playing upon the Athenian belief that they were originally Pelasgians, is that grown-up storks must support their parents by migrating elsewhere and conducting warfare.

Gilbert Murray summarizes the derivation from pelas gē, ("neighboring land"):

"If Pelasgoi is connected with πέλας, 'near', the word would mean 'neighbor' and would denote the nearest strange people to the invading Greeks ..."

Julius Pokorny derives Pelasgoi from *pelag-skoi (Flachlandbewohner, or "flatland-inhabitants"); specifically, Bewohner der thessalischen Ebene ("Inhabitants of the Thessalian plain"). He details a previous derivation, which appears in English at least as early as William Gladstone's Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age. If the Pelasgians were not Indo-Europeans, the name in this derivation must have been assigned by the Hellenes.

The ancient Greek word for "sea", pelagos, comes from the same root, *plāk-, as the Doric word plagos, "side" (which is flat), appearing in *pelag-skoi. Ernest Klein therefore simply interprets the same reconstructed form as "the sea men", where the sea is the flat.

Klein's interpretation does not require the Indo-Europeans to have had a word for "sea", which living on the inland plains (if they did) they are likely to have lacked. On encountering the sea they simply used the word for plain, "the flat". The flatlanders also could acquire what must have been to the Hellenes a homonym, "the sea men". Best of all, if the Egyptians of the Late Bronze Age encountered maritime marauders under this name they would have translated as Sea People.