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According to Wiktionary, שלמה (pronounced /ʃloˈmo/ in Modern Hebrew) is the Hebrew version of Solomon. The pronunciation seems to follow reasonably well from the spelling, and as far as I can tell, it was spelled the same way in Biblical Hebrew.

The descendants look quite a bit different from the Hebrew pronunciation:

Ancient Greek: Σολομών (Solomṓn), Σαλομών (Salomṓn), Σαλωμών (Salōmṓn), Σολομῶν (Solomôn), Σολωμών (Solōmṓn)
    → Gothic:  (saulaumōn)
    Greek: Σολομών (Solomón)
    → Latin: Solomon
        → English: Solomon
Classical Syriac: ܫܠܝܡܘܢ‎ (šlemūn)
    Arabic: سليمان‎ (Sulaymān)
        → English: Suleiman
        → Turkish: Süleyman

It seems reasonable to me that the /ʃ/ shifted to a /s/, and most of the languages added a vowel between the /s/ and the /l/, and that Syriac and Arabic changed the vowels.

However, I don't understand where the /n/ at the end came from. I'm not aware of any other Biblical names that ended in an open vowel in Hebrew and shifted toward having an n.

mic
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  • It's worth noting that the vowel symbols, or nekudos, weren't added until 700ce https://jewishaction.com/religion/jewish-culture/language/real-story-hebrew-pronunciation/ Also there are mystical Greek traditions that it became Sol-om-on hence 3 single syllable representations for deity (from 3 cultures). Obviously, take this with a grain of salt, but note that it was the Greeks who influenced the Latin/English spelling. https://gnosticwarrior.com/solomon.html –  Mar 15 '22 at 17:03
  • @bias From that same page, though: "It is important to note that although the written vowels came about in 700 ce, they reflect a much older oral tradition." – Draconis Mar 16 '22 at 17:23
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    (Also, I'm not sure I'd call Manly P. Hall a "mystical Greek tradition". His work is very modern and very American.) – Draconis Mar 16 '22 at 17:30
  • @Draconis and complete nonsense. Those ideas warrant vastly more than a grain of salt – Tristan Mar 17 '22 at 10:16

2 Answers2

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For the vowels, pay close attention to the nəquddoth (vowel dots)! Between the shin and the lamedh is a shəwa mark; sometimes this indicates an extra-short vowel, sometimes no vowel at all. But historically, shəwa was always pronounced (shəwa na) if it came after the first consonant in the word. So at the time of the Septuagint, the name was pronounced something like Shəlōmō.

When Greek-speakers tried to transcribe this word for the LXX, they ran into some difficulties. Ancient Greek didn't have [ʃ], only [s]. So they wrote the first letter as a plain sigma ("s").

Similarly, Ancient Greek didn't have any extra-short vowels corresponding to shəwa na, so they made do with the letters they had: in this case, it was sometimes transcribed with a short alpha ("a"), sometimes with an omicron ("o"). You'll also sometimes see shəwa transcribed with epsilon ("e"), depending on the word; this is closer to the modern pronunciation.

Finally, in Ancient Greek, it was extremely rare for names to end in -ō. It was much more common for them to end in -ōn (Glaucōn, Cleōn, Zēnōn). So the translators stuck a nu ("n") on the end to make the name look more like a name. This is also why English "Moses" ends in "s" when the Hebrew Mōshe (מֹשֶׁה) doesn't: -ē is a feminine ending in Greek, not a masculine one, so the translators changed it to the very common and masculine -ēs (Achillēs, Sōcratēs, Diogēnēs), and this version persisted.

One might expect the Latin of the Vulgate to then remove this -n again, since the same "type" of name in Latin ended in plain -o (Cicero, Scipio, Piso). That's why we now talk about "Zeno's Paradox" instead of "Zenon's", even though he was Greek and spelled his own name with an -n. But the Vulgate tends to follow the Greek with extreme precision where names are concerned, so "Solomon" (and "Moses") persisted.

P.S. Chromium fails beautifully when it tries to render the question title… enter image description here

Draconis
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    Do you think the Classical Syriac version ending in -n was influenced by the Greek, or was because of a native Syriac process? – mic Jul 02 '19 at 01:51
  • @MiCl I unfortunately speak no Syriac, but I'm guessing it was a separate process. – Draconis Jul 02 '19 at 03:01
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    It was (of course) not "the Greeks" who produced the LXX, but Hellenised Jews. – fdb Jul 02 '19 at 10:37
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    Nor was it "the Romans" who produced the Vulgate, – fdb Jul 02 '19 at 10:38
  • Closer to the time these books were written, was it pronounced with a /ə/? In other words, is the loss of the /ə/ in the Hebrew form of the name since the time of the Septuagint a new sound shift or a restoration of the original pronunciation? – Jetpack Jul 02 '19 at 16:04
  • @fdb Fair; I'm using it as shorthand for "Greek-speakers" and "Latin-speakers" but I can correct that. – Draconis Jul 02 '19 at 16:35
  • @Jetpack I'm not sure; the farthest back I know of the shəwa na was pronounced, but I don't know if it comes from an original vowel being shortened, or from epenthesis between consonants. – Draconis Jul 02 '19 at 16:36
  • What a clear answer. +1 – anomaly Jul 02 '19 at 21:40
  • Note that "coincidence" is basically not opposite to "correlation", whereas the often found prefix "mere" or "pure" would require that the data is pure--but it is not. It is quite painful that a lot of the scholarship is based on ancient oral transmission, to the point that older layers are just unreliable, so that a short answer like this one sadly cannot do it justice. It is comprehensive, but not extensive. All that bickering just to say, the radical s-l-m can be easily compared to PIE terms in "solar", "solemn", "salt", or *sk-l- … while 7 is often compared to shev'a "7". ... – vectory Jul 03 '19 at 05:50
  • All the while -n remains unexplained. It is inconceivable that you would once expect ultra orthodox oral transmission to be ultra reliable, but handwave away any concern about an added -n. So, if I may, -n strikes me as a case marker, in comparison to e.g. dialectal (hence obscure) North Ger. Gen. Mutter-ns, Dat. bei Muttern (sometimes even Nominative); Also see Freud'ian and compare plural ambiguity in "at the Simpsons[']" (which is an English concern, but how European is it really?). Also cp "in Fried-en" (peace, nom. "der Friede[n]"), apparently an n-stem. – vectory Jul 03 '19 at 06:07
  • Re Moses: compare also Jesus and Isaias – Colin Fine Jul 03 '19 at 12:36
  • Latin -ō, -ōnis, -ōni, -ōnem, -ōne, -ōniānus; Catalan -ó, French -on, Italian -one, Portuguese -ão, Spanish -ón – Locoluis Jul 05 '19 at 18:43
  • @Draconis Thank you for the answer but if I'm reading this right, the answer boils down to "Greek translators added it because the name didn't fit with their naming conventions without it". Is that the gist? – rosends Aug 18 '19 at 19:34
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    @rosends For the final -n? Pretty much. – Draconis Aug 18 '19 at 19:48
  • Do you have sources for the -o/-n suffix? I mean, why didn't they change Plato? –  Mar 15 '22 at 16:54
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    @bias Plato’s name is Greek to begin with, so there would be no need to ‘change’ it. Also, the Greek form is Πλάτων, which does indeed have a final -n. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Mar 15 '22 at 19:50
  • @Draconis You may want to add that it was unusual for male names to end in -ō. Examples like Λητώ show that names in -ō did exist in fairly common parlance, but they were generally female. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Mar 15 '22 at 19:59
  • @JanusBahsJacquet And, yet, the Hebrew historian Josephus spelled it "Solomon" (70-100ce) why would he do so? –  Mar 18 '22 at 02:05
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    @bias Presumably for the same reason people spell it "Solomon" while writing in English: that's the conventional spelling English-speakers will be familiar with. Josephus was writing in Greek, so he used the standard Greek spelling of the name. – Draconis Mar 18 '22 at 02:35
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Our friend Draconis has given a very good answer, especially for the final /n/. I have only a few words about the Aramaic and Arabic forms.

The Syriac form šlīmōn seems to be a re-Semitisation of the Greek Σαλωμων (Σολωμων etc.), apparently attached by folk etymology with Aramaic šallīm “complete, perfect”. Arabic Sulaymān is borrowed from Syriac or another Aramaic language, but revocalised to more closely resemble typical Arabic patterns.

fdb
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