The Derivation of the Greek Word Paean

In Neue Jahrb. 43. 385 ff. (1919) L. Deubner revives the idea that the word paean is originally an apotropaic cry for help, without particular verbal signification and derived from Cretan magic. It develops, he maintains, from the wild leap of the Cretan medicineman into the song of Apollo; and, comparing the word with ejaculations such as λ∈λ and λαλαi he includes also the refrain of the marriage hymn In the course of a long discussion of the paean he dismisses among other ‘Irrlichter’ the derivation of the word proposed by me in 1911 at a meeting of the American Philological Association, and afterward published in the Classical Review. Most of my arguments are summed up by Deubner in an ‘etc’. I have discussed the matter further in Troy and Paeonia (New York, 1925) and as I had not read Deubner's article at the time of my last writing on the subject, I should like now to consider some of his statements which appear to me wrong or misleading, and to strengthen by a new emphasis my suggested derivation for paean.