Originally Posted by app_engine
One more digression:
It's really an interesting discussion `How to determine the ORIGINAL owner (language) of any single WORD...'
It's not just going back 2000 years, it should be in fact going back much beyond that (to around BC 2200, about 4200 years back, when the languages were confused at the tower of Babel according to Bible History)...
With the language academics claim some 3000 languages being spoken in the world and many of them part of a fewer language `families' (the major families listed by philologists - Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asian, Japanese and Korean, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian, and Black African)...it would be really, really difficult for anyone to place a single word to where it originally belonged:-))
End-digression