LandonWillis

Category: Languages

  • What on Earth is Mount Zion?

    Zion is a fun little word, because it’s got a big ‘ole history of being confusing.

    The earliest record we have of the word is 2 Samuel 5:7:

    “7 Nevertheless, David captured the fortress of Zion—which is the City of David.”

    So, the fortress of Zion was a stronghold of the Jebusites (a people who controlled the city of Jebus, more famously known as Jerusalem). And so, the whole mountain/hill that the fortress was on started to be called Mount Zion (also associated with the “Ophel”, but that’s a word for another day).

    What does the word “Zion” mean? No clue!

    Alright, well I have some clue. Pretty much, the current best guess seems to be that the word Zion comes from Hebrew ṣiyyôn, which means “castle” or “fortress”. This would make it literally be “the fortress of fortress” or “Mount Fortress”. It seems like a logical enough explanation, especially since plenty of languages name places like that (think of the Sahara Desert, where “Sahara” is just the Arabic word for desert). However, there are plenty of other guesses, and nobody really knows for sure where the word “Zion” comes from.

    So, we’ve got this mountain that had a fortress called Zion, so that mountain is called Mount Zion. Is that the end of it? No, of course not!

    There was another mountain, located just a couple thousand feet away, which was called Mount Moriah. This is the same mountain where Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac, and where Solomon built the first temple.

    After Solomon built the temple on Mount Moriah, it started to be called “the Temple Mount”. However, for whatever reason, the term “Zion” also started to refer to the Temple Mount/Mount Moriah.

    So, we’ve now got two mountains being called “Mount Zion”, one because there had been a fortress called Zion on it, and the other because of some sort of symbolic reason.

    Then, about a thousand years later, just after the time of Jesus, the Jewish historian Josephus was writing his books. And, by that time Jerusalem had grown a whole lot bigger. Thanks to this growth, Josephus mistakenly started calling a bigger mountain near the center of Jerusalem “Mount Zion”. And guess what? The name stuck.

    So, now we’ve got three mountains called “Mount Zion”.

    And, in addition to all of that, the term “Zion” started to refer symbolically to: Jerusalem, the entire land of Israel, the spiritual Kingdom of God, the people of God, and the coming New Jerusalem.

    Alright, that was a confusing word to write about, but that’s the gist of it. Zion can mean a lot of different things.

  • Word of The Week No 8: Tortiloquy

    Tortiloquy: crooked talk, crooked speech

    Tortiloquy is a weird word. The only surviving record of this being a word anywhere ever (that I’ve found at least) is from a single book, Thomas Blount’s Glossographia.

    Thomas Blount was a lexicographer(someone who writes dictionaries) in the seventeenth century. In 1656, he published his book, Glossographia, in which he covered some eleven thousand strange and rarely used English words. One of these words is tortiloquy.

    Blount says that this comes from Latin Tortiloquium. However, this does not appear to be a real Latin word in any dictionary. But, it could indeed come from the Latin words tortilis, meaning “twisted” or “crooked”, and loqui, meaning “to speak”.

    My best guess though is that he more or less made this word up all on his own because I can’t for the life of me find “tortiloquy” or tortiloquium referenced anywhere else ever aside from Thomas Blount’s dictionary.

    “The politician denied all accusations of tortiloquy earlier in his career”.

    “The crude mobster spoke nothing but tortiloquy”.

  • Word of The Week No 7: Obstreperous

    Obstreperous: loud, noisy, clamorous, defiant, disobedient, unruly

    Obstreperous comes from the Latin word Obstrepere, which means “to make a loud noise” or “to roar against”, and itself comes from two other Latin words, ob meaning “against” or “right before”, and strepere meaning “to make a noise”. So, Obstrepere literally means “to make a noise against”, or in other words, “to be defiant”.

    “The obstreperous children constantly got themselves into trouble.”

    “Tim did not like how obstreperous his new dog was.”

  • 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 3: Tanakh

    What on earth is the “Tanakh”?

    It’s a Hebrew word. Specifically, the Hebrew word for the Books of The Old Testament. Another way to translate it would be “the Hebrew Bible”.

    But, where did the word come from originally? Well, it’s actually an acronym. Hebrew words didn’t have vowels, so the original word in Hebrew was TNK. Each of those letters comes from the name of a section of The Old Testament. When brought together, they spell TNK, which eventually became pronounced and spelled as “Tanakh”.

    The first letter, “T” ,came from the Torah. Torah is the name for the first five Books of the Bible. It literally means “instruction” or “teaching”.

    Next, we have the letter “N”. This came from the Nevi’im. The Nevi’im is the section of The Old Testament containing most of the prophetic and historical Books. Nevi’im literally means “the prophets”.

    And finally, we’ve got “K”. We get this letter of the acronym from the Ketuvim, which just means “the writings”. Basically, the Ketuvim are just the “other” category of Books in the Hebrew Bible. It’s got some poetry Books, some songs, some wisdom, some prophets, and some history.

    Torah (T) + Nevi’im (N) + Ketuvim (K) = TNK = TaNaKh

    So, that all adds up to give us the whole of The Old Testament. But, the Hebrews also had another word to refer to the Tanakh.

    Miqra literally means “that which is called out”. However, you have to remember that until relatively recently, most people could not read and write. Because of this, the Hebrew Bible would have to be read aloud to an audience. So, it can also be translated “that which is read”. In either case, the word Miqra is another common word to refer to the Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament.

  • What’s the difference between the Pentateuch and the Torah?

    When people talk about the first five Books of The Old Testament, you’ll commonly hear the words “Pentateuch” and “Torah” thrown around. But what exactly do they mean?

    Well, first of all, “Torah” comes from the Hebrew word Torah, which literally means “instruction” or “law”. This was the word that the Jews would typically use to talk about the “five Books of Moses”.

    But, when Alexander the Great spread the Greek language across the region of Israel, this new class of Greek speaking Jews also wanted a word in Greek to refer to these first five Books. So, they named it the Pentateuch, which just means “the five books”. You can clearly see the root word Pente, which is Greek for “five” (think how a “pentagon” has five sides). And the teuch part is from Greek teukhos, which means “book” or “a case for scrolls”.

    However, the Jews also had another way to refer to these Books in Hebrew. They could call them the Chamishah Chumshei Torah, which means “the five fifths of the Torah”. (they could also just call it the Chumash, which means “a fifth”, but that was less common).

  • 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”.