Monday, December 10, 2012

Calling all bloggers/writers!

pen, pad & keyboard


Calling all writers/bloggers/entrepreneurs...

I'm on the look out for guest posters/editorial writers/advertisers on the following topics:

Manga
Fish
Ninjas
Harley Davidson
Motorbikes
Car Accidents
Causes of Plane Crashes
Tortoises
Gothic/Alternative Lifestyle Choices
Pagan
Wiccan
Nature
Natural Remedies
Quick & Simple Cooking/Recipes
Grammar Nazi
Spelling Nazi
Fans of 60s-90s Advertising

If you can fill any one of these areas of interest, please contact me through my blogger profile, or via comment on this post and I shall get back to you within 48 hours.

If you require further information, you can contact me as above, or check out the other blogs I have via my blogger profile.

Also starting a "Predictions Unravelled" blog and looking for a regular poster and ideas-man to help us get creative.

Thanks for reading!

~Moondial~

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Monday, September 24, 2012

The Etymology of God

I have always been fascinated by the Etymology of words. Where they come from, what Language originally spawned them, how the spellings and meaning have changed over time etc etc.

One word that always got me thinking was "God". Not just how the concept of 'God' came into being, i.e what made a man get up one day a think "I bet there's a higher consciousness behind all this' but also the word GOD itself.

Ostensibly it is not a name. Like the Concept itself, it just conveys an idea!

And across the world it is the same. The Japanese word for God is 'kami' (there are no capital letters in Japanese btw). Scholars have still not agreed on the etymology of 'kami'. They are all agreed that it is a VERY Old word. It has several different uses, it can mean Paper or Bite, Hair or Above.
Shinto priests, however, look to the word 'kagami' which means Mirror - miru. They point out that 'kagami' is the symbol of the Soul but the Soul of man contains ego "or ga." Kami is the soul of man (kagami) without the ego (ga).

Interestingly 'kami' is also the root of the word Thunder - 'kami-nari' where 'nari' means Sound. Literally 'the Sound of God' - Thor? :)

The Chinese for God was originally 'Shangdi' This comes from the ruling Shang dynasty, 17th-11th centuries BC, where the appellation of 'di' turns Shang, a Royal surname. into something meaning "High Sovereign/Emperor", "God Above"

The Mayan word Ahua means God or High-King. But this is a general word. In the Mayan culture each God had a different name and 'Job'!
Incidently the Mayan Supreme Deities, the First Mother, Ix Chel, and First Father, Hun Nal Ye, are nown as the Creator Couple whose offspring are all the other gods. She was born six years before the First Father, also known as Junab K’uj, the God of Maize, who is responsible creating the cosmos and mankind as we know him/her to be today.

Of course, the name/s of God in the Middle East are very similar. Hebrew elohim (God or/of gods), Arabic 'ilah (a or the God), and Biblical Aramaic 'Elaha (God) all share the Proto-Semetic word 'el as their root.

The Native American word for God is, in general, Gitche Manitou - literally 'Great Spirit' - and it is interesting to note that, although the Native American were quite diverse and spoke many languages, the word for God, Gitche Manitou, was approximated in every one of them.

And so, with many, many, omissions to be sure, we come to the English 'God'. Scholars have argued for many a year over the etymology of God because the exact history of the word 'God' is unknown. The word God is a, linguistically speaking, fairly new arrival into the European lexicon. Certainly, the word, God, itself, was never used in any of the ancient Judaeo-Christian scripture manuscripts that were written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek or Latin.

According to the best efforts of linguists and researchers, the root of the present word God is the Sanskrit word 'hu' which means "to call upon, invoke, implore".

So God is just a word for something you "call upon, invoke or implore". There is no name.
Even the Judaic word YHWH or Yahweh is not a name. It simply means "I Am Which I Am" This was apparently said to an Old Testament character when he asked 'God' what his name was . . .

However, our use of 'God' is Germanic in ancestry, which itself goes right back to Indo-European tribes @ 4,500 BC in Central Asia. These were a group of people called Aryans. (Yes, the same ones Hitler claimed ancestry with.) They were Pastoral, Horse-breeding, Bronze Age People who spread into Europe and the Middle East. In fact, not only are they, in part, our Ancestors and the founders of some of our current European Tongues, but they are also the founders of the Race that eventually became the Farsi - Persians - Iranians. That is why the ancient Persian word for God is Khoda.

The Farsi Iranians are, in fact, our cousins. That's a turn-up for the books, eh? :)

Ciao for now x

http://www.wikipedia.org/
http://www.nihonbunka.com/shinto/blog/archives/000098.html
http://www.yucatanadventure.com.mx/maya-gods.htm
http://wahiduddin.net/words/name_god.htm

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Sunday, March 16, 2008

English - A Funny Language

This was recently e-mailed to me by a friend:

We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes;
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.

You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice,
But the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
When couldn't the plural of pan be called pen?

The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows, not vine.
And I speak of a foot, and you show me your feet,
But I give a boot - would a pair be called beet?

If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
If the singular is this and plural is these,
Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be nicknamed kese?

Then one may be that, and three may be those,
Yet the plural of hat would never be hose;
We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.

The masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim!
So our English, I think you will all agree,
Is the trickiest language you ever did see.

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.

And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(they rhyme with suite and straight and debt)

A moth is not a moth in mother.
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there.
And dear and fear for bear and pear.

And then there's dose and rose and lose --
Just look them up -- and goose and choose.
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.

And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk it when I was five,

And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five!