12 Languages - "Sure!"

As I haven't posted anything for a long while, I wish to at least fill your brains with some food for thought. My goal is to someday become a polyglot, or multilingual. So everyday I'll make the effort to learn one word in 11 languages (and 1 dead language for fun). To start us off:

12 Languages - Sure!

Chinese (T): Dangran! 當然！
French: Bien sûr!
German: Sure!
Greek: Sigoura - Σίγουρα!
Hindi: Zarura ज़रूर!
Italian: Certo!
Japanese: Tashika ni! 確かに！
Korean: Mullon! 물론!
Latin: Certus
Portuguese: Claro
Russian: Koneshno! Конечно!
Spanish: Claro

Practice that! Just be careful what you're saying "sure" to.

- A Dakota Lopez blog.

"Paradise" Found

During my final year of schooling in High School, I was placed into a group of four students and asked to try and create our own utopia. I was never a studious student (doesn't seem like it right?), but this was a topic worthy of my invested time. I went home, brainstorming different facets of a "utopia" and I did a bit of research online. I wasn't fond of the word utopia, however, so I searched "paradise" in it's place. This search was far more rewarding, for the search on a utopia was too... idealistic and suited for personal pleasures.

Paradise, over time and much misconception, has changed in meaning drastically since it's origin, particularly from the meaning of its original root to the beliefs within Christendom and other religions.  Early Christians (anyone who followed in Jesus' footsteps) believed that paradise would be a restored Garden of Eden that would cover the entire earth as Matthew says the happy shall "inherit the earth" (Matt. 5:5). Some time after Jesus' death, seemingly within a short period of 2 centuries, Bishop Irenaeus (now considered Martyr and Saint) merged the ideas of a paradise and a heaven into one. Many Christians today believe this doctrine as truth, while some groups have reverted back to believing the doctrine that the earth will become a paradise after a global expurgation of evil.

The word Paradise can be traced back down the ages to the Old English (Anglo Saxon) PARADIS which came from the Latin PARADISUS which goes further back to the Greek PARÁDEISOS and even farther back to the Old Iranian (Avestan) PAIRI-DAEZA... That's a mouthful, but I find it amazing nonetheless.  The Old Iranian word pairi-daeza meant literally "a wall that surrounded a park or garden". The Persians were very meticulous about this practice about making a wall around their gardens or orchards to the point where they encouraged the Greeks into carrying out this practice, and a Greek mercenary (Xenophon) who spent time in the Iranian army called it a parádeisos.

In the 2nd century BCE, a group of seventy Greek men (a septuagint) translated the Hebrew word for paradise (Gan-Edhen) as parádeisos in reference to the Garden of Eden. And this was appropriate, as the Garden of Eden was evidently an enclosed park area. Over time, around the 13th century CE, Old English adopted the word into their language as paradis, now paradise.

I find it interesting to note the Hebrew word for paradise, though. It makes perfect sense, but it still astounds me. The Hebrew word for paradise is "GAN-EDHEN" which literally means Garden of Eden. This is what my group ended up calling our supposed utopia: Gan-Eden. But it just occurred to me to try and dig a little deeper. Our word "garden" sounds like a shortened gan-edhen, does it not? I looked it up, but the farthest back the word seems to go is the German GARTEN... I wouldn't be surprised (maybe I would actually) if our word for garden traced all the way back to the Garden of Eden.

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If you find any research on this matter, I'd be glad to look into it, as I'm just as curious myself. If you have any other questions you'd like to ask me about this article or others, please do so in the comment area below. Also, if you have any ideas as to future topics of discussion TELL ME.

Strongly Entrenched in Amor

A great friend of mine recently began a blog called Memoirs of a Modern Amorist and I think that it's what drove me into wanting to start this blog finally. Because in all honesty, I've been mulling this whole idea of a knowledge blog over in my mind for quite some time now and have talked to a few people who thought it'd be a great idea. But who knows until you try right?  Anyway, so the title of his blog, which I'll abbreviate as the MoMA (not referring to the Museum of Modern Art), struck me as so simple, but with such an aura of creativity about it.  I loved it.  I was enamored by it.

Get it? Enamored by it? Maybe not. Yet.  You see, the word AMORIST is one of the many English words that derive from it's Latin root: AMOR = to love. In fact, many languages use the exact same word for Love. The Spanish and Portuguese AMOR (pronounced the exact same way), the Italian AMORE, the French AMOUR, and the list goes on.  Amorist itself means one dedicated to Love or one who writes about it, which my friend working the MoMA blog is doing just so.  So ENAMORED would mean that he's inspired me with Love.

Other words derived from the Latin amor include AMOROUS, AMATORY, and yes, even AMATEUR! For those sports fans out there, amateur comes from the Latin AMAT which means he/she Loves.  Amateur literally means Love of sport.  We also see amor in the Italian name for cupid "AMORETTO" (pl. amoretti).

Speaking about mythical creatures of Love, let's talk about some of the Pagan gods of Love.  There are many.  But have you ever noticed that the mythology of the Greeks, the Romans and the Egyptians are all the same?? Well... that's another story for another day.  But the Greek god Aphrodite and the Roman Venus are one and the same, with the same mythology and history, and their whole thing was about amor.  Aphrodite gave us a nifty little-big word in English. Can you guess it? APHRODISIAC, which is anything that makes you... well want to make Love.  Unfortunately Venus got her own word, but it's not as pleasant. VENEREAL. Nope, not pleasant at all.

Anyway, a little bit of our usage of the word Love is lost to us today.  Instead of saying "I Love her/him," we may say a half-hearted "I like her/him".  This is not the case for most other languages though.  In fact, there is no word in most languages to describe the word for simply "liking" someone/thing else.

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If you do find yourself needing some Love advice, please check out my friends blog, the MoMA. He has great, practical advice for the casual dater to those lost in translation, and all you need to do is ask him a question and he'll be willing to answer it for you.

The "Werewolf"

Being the young man that I am, I Love monster movies.  Well... not always. I'm a big critic, and many monster flicks today are meant for the general public and tend to have tragically Hollywoodesque storylines.

Anyway, I Love the lore that these monsters are based on.  I'm not going to go into too much depth as to how myths about werewolves began, or whatever, but I do want to take a closer look at the name. "Werewolf." We know it literally means man-wolf, but what does the "WERE" come from.

Well, I hadn't ever given it any thought until this one day in a Latin class of mine.  We had just learned that the Latin word for man was "VIR".  The letter V in Latin is pronounced the exact same way we in English would pronounce the letter W.  The rest of the word is pronounced as it would be in the Spanish language, so by rolling the R at the end of VIR it sounds like you're pronouncing "weed".

At this point, it still hadn't clicked to me; the similarity of VIR and WERE.  Soon though, a classmate of mine mispronounced vir and said "were".  I mulled the two over in my mind a little and after class I asked the teacher if there was any connection.  He said he didn't know, but that it would make sense because it meant man-wolf.

Sure enough, there is some connection between vir and were, as I read here.  The Old English word for man is "WER", coming directly from a Germanic language.  But both the Germanic and Latin origin of the word come from the same family of languages (if I get around to it someday, I'll attempt to cover what exactly the Indo-European language family is).

So yes! There is a connection between the Latin word for man and the monsters we see on tv and read about in books.

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Also brought out in the article were other words that are derived by vir: Virile and virility. Vir can also be a word to describe masculinity, so virile has to do with it's strength. Other words include virtue and virtuous (signs of strength or manliness).

But the really cool thing brought out in this article (besides the origin of the word werewolf) was that our word "world", although hidden over time, literally means "man-age".