LandonWillis

Category: Latin

  • Word of the Week No 6: Animadvert

    Animadvert: to criticize openly and harshly; to censure;  to notice or observe; to turn the mind to; to consider; to make an animadversion

    Animadvert comes from the Latin word Animadvertere, which means “to notice,” and itself comes from three separate Latin words, anima meaning “mind,” ad meaning “to”, and vertere meaning “to turn”. So, together it means “to turn the mind towards”. Originally this word in English carried a similar meaning of “to notice” or “to consider”, but that meaning fell away, when the newer meaning of criticism or censure replaced it. Now, the word as a whole is mostly obsolete. 

    “The lawyer animadverted on the legality of the case.”

    “Cicero famously animadverted against his many opponents.”

  • 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.

  • Word of the Week No 2: Samaria

    The Bible is full of interesting words and etymologies. And, surprisingly often, it actually explains them to us.

    One example is found in 1 Kings 16:24, where it says:

    “24 He [Omri, King of Israel] bought the hill of Samaria from Shemer for two talents of silver and built a city on the hill, calling it Samaria, after Shemer, the name of the former owner of the hill.”

    So, if you’ve ever wondered what “Samaria” meant, there you have it. It’s named after some guy (or maybe a family/clan) who owned the hill on which Samaria was built.

    And, over time the name for the city spread to also mean the region surrounding the city. Eventually, it even became its own politically recognized region.

    But, in 27ish BC, right before the time of Jesus, Herod the Great renamed the city to “Sebastia”. And while I believe that Jerome only ever uses the word Samaria in the Vulgate, Sebastia was the official Latin name. In fact, Sebastia is still the name of the village that exists in modern-day Samaria.

    So, where did Herod get the name Sebastia? Well, it was actually a pretty common place name for new cities at the time. This is because it comes from the Greek word sebastos, which means “revered” or “holy”. This is just the Greek translation for the Latin word Augustus, which was what the emperor Octavian liked to call himself. So, Herod renamed the city to “Sebastia” as a sign of respect to the practice of emperor worship, seeing the emperor as “revered” and “holy”.

  • What does “disciple” even mean?

    When you read through the Gospels, they are constantly talking about how Jesus’ disciples did this thing or that thing… but what is a disciple? I mean really, if someone says the word “disciple” is there anything you think of other than those twelve guys that followed Jesus around? Is there anytime you would use the word “disciple” in a nonreligious context? Probably not.

    But that’s not how it was for first century Christians who heard about Jesus and his disciples. Why? Well, to understand that we have to dive into a bit of Greek, Latin, and English.

    First of all, the word that is commonly translated into English as “disciple” was originally the Greek word Mathetes. However, this was not a brand new word used to describe these men. Instead, it was simply the word for “student”.

    Now, Mathetes really means something a bit more specific than just “student”. It typically refers either to an apprentice or a philosophy student. This makes sense though, because those were just about the only two kinds of students in the ancient world. There were plenty of Mathetais (plural of Mathetes) who were studying how to be doctors, or leather workers, or stone masons. And there were also Mathetais who studied philosophy, like the students of Aristotle or Plato.

    This idea of a Mathetes being a student goes even a bit further though. Think for a second; in first century Israel what sorts of people would be students of philosophy or religion? The Pharisees! We actually see this clearly laid out in Matthew 22:15-16:

    “15 Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap Him in His words. 16 They sent their disciples to Him…”

    In the original Greek, the word used in these verses is a form of the word Mathetes. This makes perfect sense. The Pharisees had their own students, as did individual Rabbis. Followers of John the Baptist and Moses were also called Mathetais/disciples/students.

    With this in mind, everything about the Gospels makes just a bit more sense. Consider these verses from Matthew 5:1-2, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount:

    “Now when Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to Him, 2 and He began to teach them.”

    When translated more accurately as students, we read:

    “Now when Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on a mountainside and sat down. His students came to Him, 2 and He began to teach them.”

    So, if first century Christians would have recognized the followers of Jesus as “students”, why do we use the obscure word “disciples” when talking about them?

    Why we Use the Word “Disciple”

    Like so many things in English, this goes back to Latin. You see, back in the 100s and 200s and 300s AD, when people like Jerome were translating the Books of the New Testament into Latin from the original Greek, they translated the word Mathetes quite literally. These men used the Latin word Discipulus when translating Mathetes.

    And Discipulus is just the Latin word for “student”. So, props to the Romans. They translated it well.

    Then, a thousand years later, in maybe the 1200s or 1300s or so, English started to be something like what we know today. And as some English speaking Christians wanted to talk about the students of Jesus, they looked at the Bible to see what His students were called. But, since the Catholic Church was in absolute control at the time, the only Bibles available (for the most part) were in Latin. So, these Christians looked at the Bible, saw it said that Jesus’ followers were called discipulus, and decided “Nice, that’s difficult to pronounce. Let’s call ’em disciples. It’s close enough.”

    Now, that is obviously not entirely accurate, but I feel like it paints the picture quite nicely. The Catholic Church was generally not in favor of translating the Bible into any language other than Latin. So, languages began to stop translating certain words in the Bible, but just transliterate them from Latin. (Transliterate pretty much means to just steal a word from another language and maybe change its spelling a little.)

    This is exactly what happened with this word. It went from Mathetes->Discipulus->Disciple. The Greek was translated into Latin, and the Latin was transliterated into English. This happens with plenty of words from the Bible. It commonly goes

    Greek Original->Latin translation->English transliteration.

    Overall, I think it’s very fascinating to understand the original meanings behind these words. It helps us to more clearly understand just what Jesus is doing and saying. The word “disciple” obviously isn’t incorrect, but it does give us a poor idea of just what these men truly were: students.