LandonWillis

Category: English

  • Word of the Week No 5: Bible

    Where does the word “Bible” come from?

    It first started out as the Greek phrase ta biblia to hagia, which literally means “The Holy Books”. Christians seem to have first started using this phrase to talk about the Bible as a whole by the 2nd or 3rd century.

    This got translated into Latin as Biblia Sacra, which also means “Holy Books”. However, that word Biblia is in something called the neuter plural in Latin. So it is a plural word (it means “books” not “book”), but it looks like it could be a feminine singular word. Thanks to this, during the Middle Ages, Biblia Sacra began to just mean “Holy Book”.

    That is where many languages now get their word for “Bible”. It’s just the Latin word Biblia, which, by the end of the Middle Ages, meant “book”.

    But, this wasn’t the common Latin word for the Bible until around the 800s AD. Rather, Jerome (the man who did a lot of work with translating the Bible into Latin in the 300s) and other Romans would have commonly used the word Bibliotheca, which literally means “library”. This is where we get the lesser used English word “bibliothec”, which used to be our common word for “the Bible” back in Middle English.

    Both of those words, though, Biblia and Bibliotheca, clearly have a similar root Bibli-. So, where do these words come from originally?

    Well, they both go back to the Greek word Biblion, meaning “a scroll” or “a book”. The Greeks got this word from the Ancient Egyptian word for papyrus, Byblos. And, it seems that the word was introduced into Greek through the city of Byblos, which was probably named that because they were an exporter of Egyptian papyrus.

    Overall, the word used for the Bible has a long and interesting history. But, in most languages that I’ve seen it just ends up going back to the word for “book”. So nice and simple.

  • Word of the Week No 4: Amen

    This is one of my favorite etymologies just because it’s so nice and easy. So, where do we get the word “Amen”? We get it from the Old English word “Amen”, which got the word from Latin “Amen”, which got the word from Greek “Amen”, which got the word from Hebrew “Amen”.

    Isn’t that just amazing? Over thousands of years, the word is still the same. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any word go through so much time and so many languages without any changes.

    But, what did this word “Amen” mean in Hebrew? Well, it seems that it could be used as a noun, an adjective, or an adverb. So, it could mean “truth”, “true”, or “truly”.

    It’s related to the Hebrew verb aman, which means “to be firm”. So, if you have “Amen” soil, it’s firm soil. Or if you make an “Amen” statement, you are making a true/firm statement.

    Whenever we see Jesus in the Bible saying “Truly, truly I say to you” or “Verily, verily I say unto you”, He’s just using the word Amen. It would be a perfectly correct translation to write that Jesus said “Amen, amen I say to you”. That’s what the Greek authors did when they included the Hebrew term Amen in their writings of what Jesus said. They just wrote it with Greek letters instead of Hebrew letters.

    However, Luke’s Gospel is very fascinating on this front. Apparently, when he wrote the phrase “Truly, truly I say to you”, he actually translated the word Amen into the Greek word Alethos, which also means “truly”.

    Every English Bible I’ve ever seen takes the same strategy that Luke did. They translate all those “Amen”s as “truly” and “verily” and “faithfully” instead of just keeping the word as “Amen”.

    This also explains why people will sometimes shout out “Amen!” when they agree with something. It’s like shouting “absolutely!” or “that’s true!”.

  • Cash, Cattle, And Coins: Where We Get Our Words For Money

    People have used lots of different things to barter and measure wealth throughout history. But, most seem to trace back to either coins or cows.

    For example, the word “money” comes from the Latin moneta, which is a shortening of the phrase Juno Moneta, the temple in Rome where they minted coins. So, “money” is named after the place where they make coins.

    However, a very different example is the word “cash”. This comes from the Latin word capsa, which is just a box or a case (the word “case” also comes from capsa). Originally, “cash” could just refer to a cash box, where you would collect money, such as if you had a small business. But, over time, “cash” started to just be a general term for the money itself.

    Another word is “pecuniary”. Pecuniary is a big word that just means “having to do with money”. It comes from the Latin word pecus, meaning “cattle”. This is because, for a long time, wealth was measured in how much livestock you owned. In fact, the common word in Latin for “money” was pecunia.

    And this is not unique among European languages. Many words in other languages have their roots tracing back to cattle. One example is in Spanish, where the word for “to earn wages” is ganar, and the word for “cattle” is ganado.