Etymology
Compare Ancient Greek λέκος (lékos, “dish, pan”), λεκάνη (lekánē, “basin, dish”) (whence English lecanomancy). Walde and Hoffmann, and Pokorny, suppose these words inherited from PIE and connected with words meaning "crooked", such as Latin licinus (“bent upward”), luxus (“dislocated”); the root Pokorny assigns[1] is, in updated reconstruction, *Heh₃l- (“to bend, to turn”). De Vaan objects on phonological and semantic grounds (plates are not crooked) and favours Ernout and Meillet's assumption that Greek and Latin instead share a Mediterranean cultural loanword from substrate languages.[2]
References
- “lanx”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
- “lanx”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
- lanx in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.
- “lanx”, in Harry Thurston Peck, editor (1898), Harper's Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, New York: Harper & Brothers
- “lanx”, in William Smith et al., editor (1890), A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, London: William Wayte. G. E. Marindin
De Vaan, Michiel (2008) “lanx”, in Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 7), Leiden, Boston: Brill, →ISBN, page 326
