Yauna
/ˈjau̯.naː/noun
An Old Persian name for the Ionians and, more broadly, the Greeks.
Did you know?The name survives in several distant traditions, including Hebrew Yāwān, Sanskrit Yavana, and Persian Yaunā, all ultimately connected with the Greek Ionians.
Etymological Timeline
Proto-Greek, 2nd millennium BCE
Greek
*Iāwones
“An early name associated with the Ionians, a Greek-speaking people of the Aegean coast”
Archaic Greek, c. 8th–6th century BCE
Greek
Iōnes
“Ionians; inhabitants or descendants of the Ionian Greek communities”
Achaemenid period, c. 6th–4th century BCE
Old Persian
Yaunā
“Ionians, and by extension Greeks known to the Persian Empire”
Achaemenid period, c. 5th century BCE
Imperial Aramaic
Yawnān
“Greeks or Greek lands, borrowed from the Persian designation”
Biblical Hebrew
Hebrew
Yāwān
“Greece or the Greeks”
Modern historical usage
English
Yauna
“The Old Persian ethnonym for the Greeks”