There is actually an English adjective "wood" meaning "violently mad", cf. Norse oðr, Proto-Norse woðaz with the same meaning and regarded to be the origin of the name Odin/Wodan.
that's interesting bc my mom used to live in a town called Winnsboro. the "winns" is pronounced exactly like how we pronounce "wednesday" (where the "wednes" has the same root as "woodnes") so maybe they are the same town name but evolved in different ways. But idk bc it might just come from the old word "wynn"
I think it's interesting that one of the more common names for Odin in England (just based on theophoric place names) was "Grim" -- going backwards up the etymology tree you get Old English grīma, Proto-Germanic *grīmô, Proto-Indo-European *gʰrey- ... and if you go down a DIFFERENT tree you get the Greek χρῑ́ω (khrio), becoming χριστός (khristos), becoming "Christ" in modern English An unexpected cognate to say the least!
I'm curious what Khristos would become in English, but I only get as far as reducing it to gʰrey + tos (past participle ending). I want to know what that -σ/s- is doing in there.
Isn't the word "khristos" pertaining to the action of pouring oil? As in annointing kings with oil. As far as I know the word Christ is a translation of the Hebrew term Messiah, which means the annointed one. In the ancient Near East the ceremony of appointing a king included the pouring of olive oil over the head of the enthroned.
You can hear it in use in the opening line of Norway's 2024 entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, _Ulveham_ by the band Gåte: "Eg var meg så ven og fager ei møy" = "I was so beautiful and fair a maiden"
I like Lūca for Loki because the Old English lūcan, in addition to meaning "to lock", also means "to intertwine" or "to tangle", so Lūca would mean something like "Tangler"--a reference to his invention of the fishing net as well as his skill as a schemer. It also gives him a spiderlike quality--a likeness with other trickster deities such as Anansi and Iktomi. The Faroese word for cobweb, "lokkanet", means Lokke's (Loki's) web, as does the Swedish "lockanät".
It seems like the modern English surname "Locke" might come from lock + an agentive, so English Loki could just be Locke. Also, the "Tue" spelling for English Tyr seems like it's taken directly from "Tuesday", which seems like it has that E from a fossilized genitive, so the actual spelling might be more like "Tu" or "Tew"
So satisfying to learn about the common ancestor of "Zeus" and "Jupiter", who sound nothing alike: "Dyews ph²ter". I don't know why, but I like that I know this now.
Always find it interesting to learn which PIE words ended up in which modern languages. Of all those mentioned in the vid, only one of them came down to Welsh natively (I.e. without being borrowed), said being dyews, which gave us Welsh Duw /dɨu̯/. Though we do have Welsh versions of a few of the mentioned gods, Gwener, from one of the Latin declension of Venus. Jupiter/Jove = iau. In fact, most days of the week in Welsh come from the Roman gods: Monday - Dydd Llun - lunar day Dydd mawrth - Mars day D. Mercher - Mercury D. Iau - Jupiter D. Gwener - Venus D. Sadwrn - Saturn day Sunday- D. Sul - solar day
However, one of the Welsh words meaning "fair" or "beautiful" is gwyn (or it's feminine form, gwen), so that might be connected more directly to the PIE root
@@TheAnalyticalEngine Was thinking about mentioning gwen, because, obviously, it sounds a lot like Simon's reconstruction of what an English venus might have sounded like. But I don't think any of gwen/gwyn's PIE cognates appeared in the video. Though I might have missed something
@@jacobparry177 It's a different root... gwyn is from Proto-Celtic *windos, as in the name of the fort on Hadrian's wall, Vindolanda, which corresponds to Welsh gwyn + llan.
@@jacobparry177 @TheAnalyticalEngine Yes, I too was tempted to connect it to Gwen......but was wondering if that means ''fair'' refering to hair and/or complexion? ''Gwyn'' in modern welsh means ''white''
Regarding the point of Brahman/barrow, there actually is a cognate deity much, well, "closer to home", namely the Irish Brigit (Gallo-Roman and Romano-British "Brigantia"), whose name literally translate to 'august one' or 'exalted one'. The name is also associated with Burgundy (and as such also the Danish isle of Bornholm), as well as the Pre-Roman kingdom of the Brigantes, the area of which approximately coincided with most of the Lancashire, Yorkshire, Northumberland, and Cumberland. The deity Brigit is also associated with the Saint Brigid (via some synchronism, I imagine), it seems, but I must admit my knowledge of this topic only reches as far as the Wiktionary and Wikipedia articles do.
At some point I think you can get rid of the 'I might make a mistake' disclaimer, your videos are more accurate than basically anything on this subject on the Internet
More than anything I think it's to be careful unless new research appears in the future. You could make a video in 2024 that could, potentially, be complete nonsense by 2030. Doesn't impact us in the here and now of course.
I would like to input that the Great Vowel Shift fails for [u:] before labial and velar consonants, as evidenced by rúm -> room, brúcan -> brook, súcan -> suck, thúma -> thumb. Therefore, I would expect Lúca to become Looker or Lucker instead.
@LeifTunteri-s7r What you said really isn't conflicting with what I said, but neither is it relevant to what I said. First off, most words (stress on "most") with modern "oo" comes from Old English long o, but some instances are derived from long u when the long u is before a labial or velar consonant (so m, f, v, k, g). But my point isn't "where oo come from", but rather "what the u in Luca would have become", which would become oo or u, not ou, thanks to the velar consonant /k/ that follows it.
@@antonyreynyeah but that's the seemingly irregular i-umlauted form from Old English Wēden. Even then, it's also the genitive singular, Wēdnes. He's not wrong because he's using the regular more common and expected form Wōden
"Wooden" does have a somewhat religious meaning. The praise "to knock wood" is in reference to an old prayer technique of using wooden beads on a string to count the number of times one prayed. The beads were moved along the string one at a time after each recitation of "Our Father" or "Hail Mary" or some other prayer. The phrase to knock wood is in reference to the wooden beads being moved along the string in prayers and is thought to bring good luck just by saying the phrase without actually bothering to pray. Or just hitting a piece of wood instead to avoid tempting fate.
@@staffanlindstrom576 Ah interesting, in Dutch and German it can mean both woman and wife. Also another interesting interaction, is that the cognate of the English word 'wife' in Dutch, which is 'wijf', is a pejorative, similar in meaning to 'bitch'.
@@buurmeisje Interesting. There is an obsolete Swedish word "viv" which also means "wife" with nothing pejorative about it. If you know Swedish and German you can often guess the meaning of written Dutch, the spoken language is something else. The same with Danish.
I love to discover old roots of words and speaking German and even Polish makes it so easy to understand many indo-European. "Ogien" for example in Polish is related to the snaskrit word "Agni" i just realized and its pretty fun to always have a clue still after thousands of years
Yes, I love these too. ''Ignis'' is Latin for fire (so looks close to ''Agni''. In Romany the word for fire is ''Yog'' (though,i think, some dialects have ''Og'') and Urdu ''Aag'' ...being descended from Sanskrit. Interesting comparison is English-Polish....''Night''-''Noc'' and ''Might''-''Moc''...and the Old English word ''Rada'' is the same in Polish
@@SEDATEDSlothRecords6083 It's a different word that means council or counsel, like the Ukrainian parliament. In Old English IIRC it was "ræd" (in modern German "Rat"). I think Slavic borrowed it from Germanic in medieval times though. Usually for real cognates the Germanic people mess up all the PIE consonants :)
It's so strange, I was talking about this to a colleague at work today how older concepts are contained within modern words, speaking about God's names in particular. Then I run your video about it this evening. Thanks Simon, I always enjoy your videos.
Friday is from Frig's day, Frig being the Germanic goddess associated with Venus. English days are mostly named after Germanic gods associated with each planet Sunday from the sun Monday from the moon Tuesday from Tiw (Mars) Wednesday from Wodin (Mercury) Thursday from Thor (Jupiter) Saturday directly from Saturn
I think it's the only indo-european language to preserve this sound. With other IE [w] sound coming from sound shift (Like poland ł from /ł/ to [w]. which fun fact i think happened recently in 20th century) or coda/final of [u] (Like in French Ou as in Oui [Wi])
@@NewLightning1its definitely not the only Indo-european language to preserve it. Elfdalian is another Germanic language which preserves it. I think some Indo-Iranian languages also have it.
Not only should we not use "Norse" mythology to approximate old English mythology, we shouldn't even use it to fully approximate Norse mythology on whole since the bulk of our knowledge comes from Iceland and we know that other Nordic countries may have had different lesser gods or even revered an unknown or god while not acknowledging the existence of other figures (i.e. Loki in Denmark). I just stumbled across you and absolutely love what you do.
The comments about Thor's name meaning thunder blew my mind as in Dutch the word for Thursday is donderdag (literally thunderday) which is very interesting. I knew there was an association with Thor but I didn't realise donder/thunder is an actual translation of his name!
That didnt blow mind as much…Thunder=thor=thors day thunder day = Thursday..not that surprising but its fascinating the stuff the Vikings gave us (us as in Ireland and England and eventually all English speaking world)
I think you mean they lack a certain exotic mystique that compared to the foreign language versions. But these reconstructed English language equivalents sound as commonplace as the name we know sounded in their own languages. Kind of nice to reapise how down to earth and familiar these mythological figures were
@@NicholasShanks No, no, 'e speaks another dialect, if the spelling is common English, it looks amazingly like "Woeden"(Dutch Spelling) the form Middle Dutch SHOULD have been using if talking about the Lord of Valhalla had been a common thing (In between Old Dutch "Wuodan" and modern Dutch "Woen", nowadays only used to indicate the day before Donder (=Thunder) day ), instead of "Wen".
Interesting thought experiment, thanks Simon 👍. The bit on Jupiter/Jove etc gave me a proper 'penny dropping' moment. P.S. Just noticed the excitable comments. Fwiw, put me in the 'Simon's slide is good way to address the issue'.
The verbs "ween" and "win" are distantly related to the root of Venus, I ween. There could also be English dialect words related to it through borrowings from Old Norse "vænn", "vænleikr" or "vinr".
There actually is one archaic English word related to "vænn" via the related noun "ván" or "vón" in the form of "wone" or "wonne" (dwelling, wealth, house).
Come on, Simon, you do not need to be apologetic to proverbial linguistic "flat-earthers". If devout Hindus disagree with the idea of PIE, this doesn't mean they as people don't deserve respect, but their views certainly do not deserve any respect whatsoever. Imagine if an evolutionary biologist had to apologise to creationists - that would be ridiculous.
@@johnantony797 I can imagine. I will say, though, the meme status of nationalists from the Indian subcontinent is legendary, especially the people claiming that all languages come from Tamil or Sanskrit, and I'm sure there's a lot of religious people from the area that have nothing to do with that sort of nonsense, just like there are devout Christians who don't believe in young earth creationism.
If education is for everyone, then it is also for those who have beliefs we heavily disagree with. This is not the place to convince Sanskrit "flat-earthers" that their beliefs are wrong, it's a place to learn about old names for Gods and historical sound changes. I say we should welcome as many people as we can to this place.
@@joshuahillerup4290as with other current events, people interested in science/humanities tend to assume “no news is good news” relative to their media consumption habits, until we all have historical hindsight to say X was a very bad and predictable thing
These videos are great. And it's fun to try to predict the outcome while watching, before seeing what you got to with more attention to detail. Perhaps you could do this with other categories, like Latin words for trees (or something less random - endonymic country names?).
The reason the Týr/“Tue” god in Germanic mythology isn’t as central as Zeus or Jupiter is because it likely isn’t the same god. As you noted Zeus and Jupiter come from “Dyews”, the name of the Indo-European Sky Father god, while Týr comes from “deywos”, the generic term for a god. They are of course cognate but are two different words in Proto-Indo-European. So the name Týr or Tue seemingly comes from a deity being referred to simply as “the god”. So it could be a descendant of the god Dyews but I don’t see how that’s necessary, it was seemingly a different figure that for whatever reason started being referred to in a general way simply as “the god”. Roman sources identify him with the Roman god Mars in fact.
For words such as the reflex of *wenh1os you should keep in mind that by the Old English period any z-stem noun had just as much of a chance of descending from the PG “main stem” as it would of had of descending from the oblique stem. The PIE genitive singular was *wenh1esos, which would have yielded PG **winiziz due to metaphony. So the Old English word could have either descended from the main stem **wen- or the oblique stem **win-, but from what I’ve seen there seems to be more of a tendency towards the oblique stem, so both the Old English and Modern English words would most likely be something like **win.
A number of Latin words found their way into German and Dutch via Proto-Germanic. It might be interesting to reconstruct what the word Venus would be like in modern English if it had made its way from Latin, through Proto-Brittonic, into Old English. Or alternatively, from Latin through Proto-Germanic, into Old English. At least for me, the significance of the name is lost if you ignore the Latin context in which it gained its significance.
Germanic by that time. Germanic is at least as old as Latin...specially Dutch is very conservative when it comes to pronunciation of words...Keizer, Kaas, Vijver Zolder Kelder Paard ( Pereferid = side-horse), there are more Latin words hiding in Dutch. For Germanic words hiding in Italian...look for words having to do with meat and pigs... and food..
I'm not sure what specific morphology you're suggesting for OE lūca (< **lūkô? an an-stem from the verb *lūkaną?), but wouldn't we expect a-mutation to have applied here just as it does with loc < luką (not that this doesn't happen in the verb *lūkaną > lūcan, but here the high vowel has likely been restored by analogy to the 3rd person present, and indeed many of the other verb forms, where the stem is not followed by an a)? That would give something like OE lōca > ME loke? look?
@@LemoUtan lux and lucifer are unrelated. Remember that because of Grim's Law Latin c corresponds to Germanic h. The English cognate (sensu lato) of lux is "light" (< Old English lēoht, note that gh is a Middle English spelling convention and was not actually voiced) It is related to Latin luxus (whence English luxury) though, where a suffixed -s caused the expected g to devoice
@@gavinrolls1054 of course, but the verb seemed the likely source, and we'd expect a-mutation regardless of the specifics, as there aren't other sources of ū that wouldn't have been lowered in this position
What a fun video. I'm sure others have pointed out that Odin (the Norse cognate to Anglo-Saxon Woden) seemed to have a link with trees. Famously he was entangled and hung from one. I like the idea that, if you extrapolated it out, Wooden would be the God so people would describe things like a "treen stool" instead.
My wife is of Indian origin and we discuss nationalism quite often. Grievances over empire-the Benghal Famine, for instance-make a lot of conversations awkard but they can be had. But India is a confident country and though they are polite they just don’t care what our position is. They find it hilarious we have a man of Indian heritage as a Prime Minister and they think it is (a) an affront to me being white, and (b) somehow Rishi has pulled off the trick of the century seizing the British state. It just goes to show how our polity is not racial which contrasts strongly with other states. Good video!
3:37 that's me. Most people around me yod drop though I've noticed that people of South Asian descent, even third generation like me yod drop less than others in Canada.
Thanks for another interesting video, Simon. :) A few notes you may find interesting. Your Wen for Venus reminds me of the Welsh wen meaning white or pure. Found in Bronwen. For Tuesday : the Finnish word taivas means sky. Also geal is the Scottish Gaelic word for white. For Wednesday : Woden had a dialectic form Weden. For Loki : consider that Lucifer is supposed to be the origin of luck.
You mention a Jackson Crawford video about "why we should be careful of using classical mythology too much in interpreting Old Norse mythology". Could you provide a link? I'd like to follow up on that.
I'd like that too; my guess is that the gap in time and culture is so large, and the contexts are so different, and the recording scribal tradition for the Old Norse mythologies was already aware of classical mythology, and classical mythology itself is such an extraordinary melting-pot of demonstrably different religious traditions - that trying to draw meaningful links between one and the other involves too many assumptions, interpretations, qualifications, and translations to get a good ratio between signal and noise in the comparison.
The gap in time and culture is not so large. Avoiding parallelomania is one thing, but dismissing comparisons entirely is mostly a leftover from the culture wars (search for a national epic, national histories, and so on) of the late 19th century and early 20th century (Grundtvig, Árnason, Moe etc). Avoiding links altogether is a surefire way to produce nothing but noise.
The first outsiders to write down much about Norse culture would have been writing in Latin, and the temptation was always there to translate the Norse gods into the most similar member of the Roman or even Greek pantheon. It was common until recent times to translate foreigners' names, and in England, clerics writing church records or legal reports used to replace English Christian names (but not surnames) by their French or Latin equivalent. A labourer called Bill or Will might go down as "Guillaume" or "Gulielmus." William Shakespeare's baptismal record says "Gulielmus Shakspere." That does not mean that the priest actually said "Gulielmus."
The English word win has a secondary meaning such as appealing as in the old Bible expression winsome words. So it may have survived but began to die out in the mid 20th century.
Actually, ū only diphthongized to /aw/ before coronals, which is why its "room" and not "roum", so the equivalent of Loki woukd likely be Looker not Loucker In addition, the ONorse suffix -i usually came from PGerm -ô, which became OEng -a, so Loki would come from **lukô. This would be OE *Loca, and Modern *Loke :) Great video though, keep up the good work!
I had always dreamed of reviving proto Indo-European words that didn’t make it into some of the daughter languages. I love it when a PIE words makes it into most later branches like the word for “I” such as I (*éǵh₂ in PIE, ego in Latin, ego in Ancient Greek, Ik in proto Germanic, aham in Sanskrit) but I totally hate it when this doesn’t happen and since I’m no expert, I can’t really reconstruct lost words by myself
Another example is the word for Son which is present in Germanic languages , ancient Greek (υἱός), Baltic (lithuanian: sūnus), Slavic (Russian: сын-syn) All from PIE “*suHnús” (Hellenic though took the U-stem version “*suHyús”) BUT LATIN LACKS THIS WORD AND I HATE IT!! I want to know so bad what the italic version of the English word “son” is just like I know what the italic version of sun (sol) is, of night (noctis) is, of milk is (mulgeō), of heart (cordis) is, of horn (cornu), of hope (cupidus) is, of hundred (centum) is…
This has been my area of interest for over two decades teaching English and an exchange about the Name of God as YHWH or Giove with the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1997. Lately I have been interested in Ancient Egyptian words that survive in modern languages. For some time I have thought that the correct pronunciation of the names of their gods was important to gain some insight into how they thought.
People are excessively keen on making Jupiter a Germanic god too. Tiw/Týr is from the o-grade form of the ‘sky’ word, which seems to have just meant ‘heavenly one’ or ‘god’ in general, not the zero-grade form that was paired with the word for ‘father’ and seems to have been the name of the head of the pantheon. If Tiw/Týr were consistently used as a name, or if that name had some suggestion of being a celestial, fatherly or kingly god, then OK maybe. But in the Norse sources, ‘týr’ is as frequently a word for ‘god’ as it is the name of a particular one, because it’s found in a dozen names of Odin. For example, Odin is called Hangaguð or Hangatýr, both meaning ‘hanged god’. By contrast, Týr as a unique character doesn’t really do anything but get nommed twice by canines. Maybe his role reduced over time, or maybe he was never a particularly big deal. If Tiw/Týr being called just ‘god’ makes him Zeus, then what about Freyr? His name is just ‘lord’. Doesn’t that make him sound like the top dude? In Latin, the feminine form of the word is found as ‘Bona Dea’ (‘the good goddess’). All it would take would be for the ‘Bona’ to be dropped (perhaps permitted by some other word such as ‘diva’ or ‘domina’ becoming the ordinary word for goddesses in general, just as ‘guð’ and ‘ás’ took over from ‘týr’ in Old Norse), and ‘Dea’ would then a proper noun referring to her. But no one thinks that she is Jupiter or the queen of all the gods. Tiw/Týr isn’t Dyḗus ph₂tḗr.
@@mesechabe the verb "win" or "to win" is also related to *wenh₁- through the proto germanic word "winnan" which means " to labor, strive, seek after something. In that sense, *wenh₁- relates to beautiful and something desireable. Winnan became the verb to seek something (implied to be desireable).
ISTR that Venus/Aphrodite was not an original member of the IE pantheon. Before borrowings from Greek culture, Venus was an innovated deity unique to Rome, later synchretized heavily with Aphrodite. Aphrodite had origins in middle-Eastern paganism as Astarte and was imported by the Greeks. So while you can carry the PIE root forward, there was no deity attached to the root to cement it into the language.
@acajoom "ISTR" = "I seem to recall", so I don't remember where I first heard it, but a quick check of the Wikipedia article gives the same information *and* turns up citations (which is the important bit when getting info from Wikipedia).
@@JonBrase You mixed things up a bit or your memory has. Wikipedia talks about various modern scholars over the centuries making their own hypothesis of what the name means or comes from to finally accept the original from Hesiod. If you spoke Greek you would know what the name means. Now where wikipedia or others talk about paganism they talk about Christianity from the middle ages and forward. Nothing to do with ancient Greece. If you are interested to learn more I encourage you to read Greek writings and focus on what the ancient Greeks themselves said because this is a mythological deity (as every deity even today).
There's the question of the meaning of the name, and there's the question of the origins of the mythological figure, and those are two separate questions (actually *three* separate questions because the Greeks and the Romans used different names). The big point is that the mythological figure was introduced well after the divergence of the Indo-European languages, so even assuming the root used by the Romans had survived in English, there would not be a deity associated with it because Venus was not part of the original Indo-European pantheon.
@@JonBrase The Romans came later. You are questioning a Greek name or the origin of the Greek myth. Most Greek words/names have an etymology which you can learn from the word or the name itself what it actually means. If you think Greek mythology is copying earlier myths, there are plenty of theories you can dig in and associate with, but you would agree this would be an attempt to just eliminate something you can't.
This reminds me of how the names of Norse gods changed in Swedish over the centuries. If I remember correctly, Freya became Fröa, and Sleipnir became Släppner, for example. But we seem to have reverted to the Icelandic versions at some point, and the old folk versions of the names sound really weird to me now ... Like, way too casual, and not as cool.
Tiw/Týr must have been important enough to have a day named after them just after Sun's day (Sunday) and Moon's day (Monday), Tiw's/Týr's day (Tuesday) and only then comes Wodan/Odin's day (Wednesday), and Thor's day (Thursday) etc.
Unfortunately that's the problem with relying on the existing Sagas that were written centuries after the Norse had converted to Christianity. In those stories Tyr is very minor yet, as you have rightly pointed out, he appears to be significant enough to include with Odin and Thor. So is this the case of something we are missing entirely about the Norse pantheon, or it's just a regionalisation where the Germanic Pagan Anglo-Saxons felt Tyr was more important than the Norse Pagan Icelandics did? Who knows.
@@ekmad Unfortunately, the English weekdays are a calque from the Latin deities. We can tell from that that Tyr was considered the Germanic equivalent of Mars by the followers of Germanic religions, but not how important he was. Consider also that the Romans got their dies Martis from the Greek, hemana Ares, but Ares was a fairly minor Greek deity (relatively - he was arguably #12) and Mars was a major Roman one.
God has always been associated with the tree (wood, Yggdrasil), since creation emerges like from a hidden root and branches out into the multiplicity of creation.
My own name, Gwyn is the masculine form of "Wen" which means "beautiful" or "blessed" in Modern Welsh. Surely this must share a derivation with the Latin ['Wenus].
@@gwynedwards8526 wait no sorry I was bimbobrain and read it wrong: gwyn derives from PIE *weyd- (a root meaning "see", which became the word for white in Celtic languages), not the bit I was reading from. Gonna edit.
Your logic is sound but how can we be sure the same changes would have happened had these words remained in use? Some sounds split while leaving some words with the older pronunciation (e.g. FOOT & STRUT).
That's a good question - in a lot of cases, those splits were fairly environment-driven (in the FOOT-STRUT case, the FOOT vowel stayed adjacent to labial consonants, but turned into the STRUT vowel in other environments). However, there are random exceptions (like 'put' and 'putt' being pronounced differently even though the environments are identical), so it's always possible the words would have been subject to something like that.
@@simonroper9218 Thanks for your reply. In regards to words relearnt from books, do you think we should try to restore their original pronunciation or is the common practice of adopting new pronunciations based upon older spellings preferable?
ooooh 9:48 I didn't realize there were nasalized vowels (like ã) in proto-germanic. I speak portuguese and these nasal vowels do a lot of heavy lifting that pretty clearly differentiates portuguese/galician from its other latin cousins. super interesting.
1:51 Didn't English progress this way in actuality, with the Old English "wyn" deriving from the same root and giving us the modern "winsome" (also beauty, in a sense)? Of course, the deity is lost along the way.
As a slightly different alternative for Loki, does anyone have a similar construction for something like "the locked one"? Not that he was doing the locking, more like he himself had been locked away (or had his mouth sealed up that one time)?
Believes don't deserve respect. Only people deserve respect. Believes and ideas are to be criticized and if necessary even ridiculed. Because this is how we improve and make progress as a species.
Wait, so _tue_ is the name of an Old English pre-Christian god; an online etymology notes “the god Tīw being equated with the Roman god Mars,” which we can see in the French word for “Tuesday” _mardi._ _But_ also “this _tue_ word is cognate with [the ancient Greek] _Ζεύς”_ 3:42 who was the father of Ares (the Greek counterpart to Mars). So how did that work?
@@gavinrolls1054 Rereading it, yeah, it _is_ hard to follow. Sorry! The video says _tue_ is the name of an Old English pre-Christian god. That god is equated with Mars (according to online etymologies) but his _name_ is a cognate of Zeus, who was the _father_ of the Greek counterpart of Mars. So we have a god who is the equivalent of one god but whose _name_ is a cognate of the name of that god’s _father._ Why? It’s like the god was named after the wrong guy. (French doesn’t have that confusion-the day after Monday, _mardi,_ is clearly named after Mars-but I suppose the Romance languages had only the Roman gods to contend with and not their old English counterparts.)
I used to live near a village called 'Woodnesborough' - 'Woden's hill' and the 'Wood-' part is homophonous with 'wood'.
Is it pronounced "woonsbruh" /'wʊnzbɹə/?
There is actually an English adjective "wood" meaning "violently mad", cf. Norse oðr, Proto-Norse woðaz with the same meaning and regarded to be the origin of the name Odin/Wodan.
@@Nemo_Anom I wikipedia'd it - apparently it's /ˈwɪnzbrə/ because of course it f**king is.
@@midtskogen "violently mad"
So, ran Amok?
that's interesting bc my mom used to live in a town called Winnsboro. the "winns" is pronounced exactly like how we pronounce "wednesday" (where the "wednes" has the same root as "woodnes") so maybe they are the same town name but evolved in different ways. But idk bc it might just come from the old word "wynn"
Please keep making these, hypothetical construction is so much fun.
literally linguistic sandbox fun
I FINNA SCREAM YES FR
"Freyja also means lady."
Thinks: cognate with Frau!
And cognate with 'first' and 'prime'.
My brain too
People confuse Frigg and Freyja all the time.
@@midtskogenwhat
Guess what: "Frau" originally meant "lady"!
But the counterpart "fro" =Lord became "froh" =happy. Weird.
I think it's interesting that one of the more common names for Odin in England (just based on theophoric place names) was "Grim" -- going backwards up the etymology tree you get Old English grīma, Proto-Germanic *grīmô, Proto-Indo-European *gʰrey- ... and if you go down a DIFFERENT tree you get the Greek χρῑ́ω (khrio), becoming χριστός (khristos), becoming "Christ" in modern English
An unexpected cognate to say the least!
And then there's that old story about Odin being sacrificed in an elevated position on a wooden tree. Sounds familiar!
Grima Wormtongue
Every road does really lead back to Odin @OverlySarcasticProductions
I'm curious what Khristos would become in English, but I only get as far as reducing it to gʰrey + tos (past participle ending). I want to know what that -σ/s- is doing in there.
Isn't the word "khristos" pertaining to the action of pouring oil? As in annointing kings with oil.
As far as I know the word Christ is a translation of the Hebrew term Messiah, which means the annointed one. In the ancient Near East the ceremony of appointing a king included the pouring of olive oil over the head of the enthroned.
"Ven" in modern (new) Norwegian still means "beautiful".
@@marryof995I don't know why you'd think that. That has a completely different initial. It's related to “sheen” in English.
Yep, also spelt væn
Oddly, we have "vain" and "vanity" in English, but those words are unrelated in etymology to Venus/Wenos
You can hear it in use in the opening line of Norway's 2024 entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, _Ulveham_ by the band Gåte: "Eg var meg så ven og fager ei møy" = "I was so beautiful and fair a maiden"
kjære vene!
We use freyja in compound words with that meaning in Icelandic, húsfreyja is a maid and flugfreyja a stewardess.
I like Lūca for Loki because the Old English lūcan, in addition to meaning "to lock", also means "to intertwine" or "to tangle", so Lūca would mean something like "Tangler"--a reference to his invention of the fishing net as well as his skill as a schemer. It also gives him a spiderlike quality--a likeness with other trickster deities such as Anansi and Iktomi. The Faroese word for cobweb, "lokkanet", means Lokke's (Loki's) web, as does the Swedish "lockanät".
That detail about "lokkanet" is so cool! The way history and culture survives in language always fascinates me
It seems like the modern English surname "Locke" might come from lock + an agentive, so English Loki could just be Locke. Also, the "Tue" spelling for English Tyr seems like it's taken directly from "Tuesday", which seems like it has that E from a fossilized genitive, so the actual spelling might be more like "Tu" or "Tew"
Is this where the name Lucas comes from? Or is that another origin?
The name Lucas appears to come from Latin, so I don't think it's related to Loki/Luca.
Lūca lives on the second floor…
So satisfying to learn about the common ancestor of "Zeus" and "Jupiter", who sound nothing alike: "Dyews ph²ter". I don't know why, but I like that I know this now.
satisfying is the right word
Same!
There is another universe where Jupiter is spelt Deupater. Our universe's Catholic church probably would have hated that
@@Murglie suppose the catholic church never would develop from that linguistic permanence. say your gods name, give them power!
When you write them all out next to each other you can really see how they got Zeus and Jupiter from it
Always find it interesting to learn which PIE words ended up in which modern languages. Of all those mentioned in the vid, only one of them came down to Welsh natively (I.e. without being borrowed), said being dyews, which gave us Welsh Duw /dɨu̯/.
Though we do have Welsh versions of a few of the mentioned gods, Gwener, from one of the Latin declension of Venus. Jupiter/Jove = iau. In fact, most days of the week in Welsh come from the Roman gods:
Monday - Dydd Llun - lunar day
Dydd mawrth - Mars day
D. Mercher - Mercury
D. Iau - Jupiter
D. Gwener - Venus
D. Sadwrn - Saturn day
Sunday- D. Sul - solar day
However, one of the Welsh words meaning "fair" or "beautiful" is gwyn (or it's feminine form, gwen), so that might be connected more directly to the PIE root
@@TheAnalyticalEngine Was thinking about mentioning gwen, because, obviously, it sounds a lot like Simon's reconstruction of what an English venus might have sounded like. But I don't think any of gwen/gwyn's PIE cognates appeared in the video. Though I might have missed something
@@jacobparry177 It's a different root... gwyn is from Proto-Celtic *windos, as in the name of the fort on Hadrian's wall, Vindolanda, which corresponds to Welsh gwyn + llan.
@@jacobparry177 @TheAnalyticalEngine Yes, I too was tempted to connect it to Gwen......but was wondering if that means ''fair'' refering to hair and/or complexion? ''Gwyn'' in modern welsh means ''white''
Thats interesting, cause in Irish only Mon, Tues and Saturday are Latin. And only Jan, Feb, March, April and July for the months.
Regarding the point of Brahman/barrow, there actually is a cognate deity much, well, "closer to home", namely the Irish Brigit (Gallo-Roman and Romano-British "Brigantia"), whose name literally translate to 'august one' or 'exalted one'. The name is also associated with Burgundy (and as such also the Danish isle of Bornholm), as well as the Pre-Roman kingdom of the Brigantes, the area of which approximately coincided with most of the Lancashire, Yorkshire, Northumberland, and Cumberland. The deity Brigit is also associated with the Saint Brigid (via some synchronism, I imagine), it seems, but I must admit my knowledge of this topic only reches as far as the Wiktionary and Wikipedia articles do.
could've done the Germanic deity/adjective *Burgundī but oh well
At some point I think you can get rid of the 'I might make a mistake' disclaimer, your videos are more accurate than basically anything on this subject on the Internet
But that's his most important trademark, he's basically using that disclaimer before his name like others would have a 'Dr.' 😅
My thoughts exactly! He's so humble yet so brilliant.
@@EvenRoyalsNeedToUrinate “Dr.”, short for “Disclaimer”
More than anything I think it's to be careful unless new research appears in the future. You could make a video in 2024 that could, potentially, be complete nonsense by 2030. Doesn't impact us in the here and now of course.
At least any other popular productions on the topic.
2 seconds in and I already know it's a banger
I would like to input that the Great Vowel Shift fails for [u:] before labial and velar consonants, as evidenced by rúm -> room, brúcan -> brook, súcan -> suck, thúma -> thumb. Therefore, I would expect Lúca to become Looker or Lucker instead.
@LeifTunteri-s7r What you said really isn't conflicting with what I said, but neither is it relevant to what I said.
First off, most words (stress on "most") with modern "oo" comes from Old English long o, but some instances are derived from long u when the long u is before a labial or velar consonant (so m, f, v, k, g).
But my point isn't "where oo come from", but rather "what the u in Luca would have become", which would become oo or u, not ou, thanks to the velar consonant /k/ that follows it.
This was wonderful, Simon. Calling Odin "Wooden" is mind-blowing. And as an American yod-dropper, please coalesce your yods all you want.
Also wrong as we have the modern anglo saxon evolution of Woden in Wednes (day) so it needs no conjecture. Cheers from Mercia
@@antonyreyn there are also placenames named after woden which ended up with other vowels in them, like wensley, wansdyke and wanstead
@@antonyreynyeah but that's the seemingly irregular i-umlauted form from Old English Wēden. Even then, it's also the genitive singular, Wēdnes. He's not wrong because he's using the regular more common and expected form Wōden
"Wooden" does have a somewhat religious meaning.
The praise "to knock wood" is in reference to an old prayer technique of using wooden beads on a string to count the number of times one prayed. The beads were moved along the string one at a time after each recitation of "Our Father" or "Hail Mary" or some other prayer. The phrase to knock wood is in reference to the wooden beads being moved along the string in prayers and is thought to bring good luck just by saying the phrase without actually bothering to pray. Or just hitting a piece of wood instead to avoid tempting fate.
Your vids have been slappin recently
Interesting how the 'frow' did survive in Dutch and German as 'vrouw' and 'Frau' respectively.
In Swedish it is "fru".
@@staffanlindstrom576 I thought woman is Swedish is something like 'kvinna'
@@buurmeisje Correct, "fru" means "wife". So "my wife" is "min fru".
@@staffanlindstrom576 Ah interesting, in Dutch and German it can mean both woman and wife. Also another interesting interaction, is that the cognate of the English word 'wife' in Dutch, which is 'wijf', is a pejorative, similar in meaning to 'bitch'.
@@buurmeisje Interesting. There is an obsolete Swedish word "viv" which also means "wife" with nothing pejorative about it. If you know Swedish and German you can often guess the meaning of written Dutch, the spoken language is something else. The same with Danish.
I love to discover old roots of words and speaking German and even Polish makes it so easy to understand many indo-European. "Ogien" for example in Polish is related to the snaskrit word "Agni" i just realized and its pretty fun to always have a clue still after thousands of years
Yes, I love these too. ''Ignis'' is Latin for fire (so looks close to ''Agni''. In Romany the word for fire is ''Yog'' (though,i think, some dialects have ''Og'') and Urdu ''Aag'' ...being descended from Sanskrit. Interesting comparison is English-Polish....''Night''-''Noc'' and ''Might''-''Moc''...and the Old English word ''Rada'' is the same in Polish
@@shanephelps3898 cool comment. Always a pleasure to learn. My polish is kinda rusty so.. rada means "happiness" in this one or I'm mistaken?
@@SEDATEDSlothRecords6083 It's a different word that means council or counsel, like the Ukrainian parliament. In Old English IIRC it was "ræd" (in modern German "Rat"). I think Slavic borrowed it from Germanic in medieval times though. Usually for real cognates the Germanic people mess up all the PIE consonants :)
@@grammarpenguin ahh Rada like German "Rat". Radosc in polish mean happiness that's why I assumed rada has to do with it
in Javanese only the 'gni' part survives becoming 'geni' (fire)
Thank you so much! It was exceptionally interesting to me as a Scandinavian gods worshiper.
It's so strange, I was talking about this to a colleague at work today how older concepts are contained within modern words, speaking about God's names in particular. Then I run your video about it this evening. Thanks Simon, I always enjoy your videos.
i absolutely adore these kinds of videos! please make more!
Really cool video as usually!
Venus In Welsh is Gwener. Dydd Gwener (Venus Day) is our Friday. All our other days are named after the planets.
The planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury etc.) were Gods before they were planets though.
@@ekmadikr
venus is a planet
And the Welsh name Gwen means holy or pure
Friday is from Frig's day, Frig being the Germanic goddess associated with Venus.
English days are mostly named after Germanic gods associated with each planet
Sunday from the sun
Monday from the moon
Tuesday from Tiw (Mars)
Wednesday from Wodin (Mercury)
Thursday from Thor (Jupiter)
Saturday directly from Saturn
I love these types of videos, and I dearly hope you make more!
wake up babe new simon roper just dropped!!
Well this is my favourite video of yours!! Love hypothetical stuff.
Thank you. That was fun.
I also appreciated your aside thought about an alternate word treen, had the use of the god name Wooden continued in English.
English is incredible conservative in the pronunciation of semivowel w
I think it's the only indo-european language to preserve this sound. With other IE [w] sound coming from sound shift (Like poland ł from /ł/ to [w]. which fun fact i think happened recently in 20th century) or coda/final of [u] (Like in French Ou as in Oui [Wi])
@@NewLightning1its definitely not the only Indo-european language to preserve it. Elfdalian is another Germanic language which preserves it. I think some Indo-Iranian languages also have it.
@@gavinrolls1054 Yes, Balochi has /w/.
I don't said it is the only
@@aureltoniniimperatorecomun4029 Nobody said that you said it was the only one.
Not only should we not use "Norse" mythology to approximate old English mythology, we shouldn't even use it to fully approximate Norse mythology on whole since the bulk of our knowledge comes from Iceland and we know that other Nordic countries may have had different lesser gods or even revered an unknown or god while not acknowledging the existence of other figures (i.e. Loki in Denmark).
I just stumbled across you and absolutely love what you do.
I've been wondering about questions like this for the last year! Very interesting, thank you.
Very fun. Thanks, Simon.
The comments about Thor's name meaning thunder blew my mind as in Dutch the word for Thursday is donderdag (literally thunderday) which is very interesting. I knew there was an association with Thor but I didn't realise donder/thunder is an actual translation of his name!
That didnt blow mind as much…Thunder=thor=thors day thunder day = Thursday..not that surprising but its fascinating the stuff the Vikings gave us (us as in Ireland and England and eventually all English speaking world)
I love these types of videos!
In the name of Wooden, Thunder, Lock, 'Fro and Fry... seems a bit undignified :P
You forgot Wen
Seems so to you, but, for a person who believes thunder is an epic guy smacking his mallet, not so much
I think you mean they lack a certain exotic mystique that compared to the foreign language versions. But these reconstructed English language equivalents sound as commonplace as the name we know sounded in their own languages. Kind of nice to reapise how down to earth and familiar these mythological figures were
"by thunder!" is probably a bit old-fashioned now, but still works
@@NicholasShanks No, no, 'e speaks another dialect, if the spelling is common English, it looks amazingly like "Woeden"(Dutch Spelling) the form Middle Dutch SHOULD have been using if talking about the Lord of Valhalla had been a common thing (In between Old Dutch "Wuodan" and modern Dutch "Woen", nowadays only used to indicate the day before Donder (=Thunder) day ), instead of "Wen".
Vän in relatively modern Swedish is Beautiful.
But just to be clear, not current Swedish? Vän means friend
@@jefficah1295 Current but less in everyday conversation (It is pronounced diffidently friend is "vänn" and beautiful is "vään").
@@jefficah1295 Vän (friend) and vän (beautiful) are homographs (but not homophones).
Interesting thought experiment, thanks Simon 👍. The bit on Jupiter/Jove etc gave me a proper 'penny dropping' moment.
P.S. Just noticed the excitable comments. Fwiw, put me in the 'Simon's slide is good way to address the issue'.
Maybe “Wooden” as Odin would cause the word for things made of wood to be described as “Woodic”, similar to “Metallic”.
another really interesting vid. cheers
The verbs "ween" and "win" are distantly related to the root of Venus, I ween. There could also be English dialect words related to it through borrowings from Old Norse "vænn", "vænleikr" or "vinr".
What about English "to seize" and German "sieg", maybe originally meaning "victory"?
I see Guinevere
There actually is one archaic English word related to "vænn" via the related noun "ván" or "vón" in the form of "wone" or "wonne" (dwelling, wealth, house).
Barrow, but also Berg, mountain in German. My Scottish grandmother pronounced the d in Wednesday, Wednzdi.
This is still a typical Scottish way of pronouncing it.
Come on, Simon, you do not need to be apologetic to proverbial linguistic "flat-earthers". If devout Hindus disagree with the idea of PIE, this doesn't mean they as people don't deserve respect, but their views certainly do not deserve any respect whatsoever. Imagine if an evolutionary biologist had to apologise to creationists - that would be ridiculous.
Hard agree. Not all devout Hindus are like this either, mind.
@@johnantony797 I can imagine. I will say, though, the meme status of nationalists from the Indian subcontinent is legendary, especially the people claiming that all languages come from Tamil or Sanskrit, and I'm sure there's a lot of religious people from the area that have nothing to do with that sort of nonsense, just like there are devout Christians who don't believe in young earth creationism.
If education is for everyone, then it is also for those who have beliefs we heavily disagree with. This is not the place to convince Sanskrit "flat-earthers" that their beliefs are wrong, it's a place to learn about old names for Gods and historical sound changes. I say we should welcome as many people as we can to this place.
Given how Indian politics has been moving lately I think showing a Hindu supremacist deference is a bad thing
@@joshuahillerup4290as with other current events, people interested in science/humanities tend to assume “no news is good news” relative to their media consumption habits, until we all have historical hindsight to say X was a very bad and predictable thing
These videos are great. And it's fun to try to predict the outcome while watching, before seeing what you got to with more attention to detail.
Perhaps you could do this with other categories, like Latin words for trees (or something less random - endonymic country names?).
The reason the Týr/“Tue” god in Germanic mythology isn’t as central as Zeus or Jupiter is because it likely isn’t the same god. As you noted Zeus and Jupiter come from “Dyews”, the name of the Indo-European Sky Father god, while Týr comes from “deywos”, the generic term for a god. They are of course cognate but are two different words in Proto-Indo-European. So the name Týr or Tue seemingly comes from a deity being referred to simply as “the god”. So it could be a descendant of the god Dyews but I don’t see how that’s necessary, it was seemingly a different figure that for whatever reason started being referred to in a general way simply as “the god”. Roman sources identify him with the Roman god Mars in fact.
For words such as the reflex of *wenh1os you should keep in mind that by the Old English period any z-stem noun had just as much of a chance of descending from the PG “main stem” as it would of had of descending from the oblique stem. The PIE genitive singular was *wenh1esos, which would have yielded PG **winiziz due to metaphony. So the Old English word could have either descended from the main stem **wen- or the oblique stem **win-, but from what I’ve seen there seems to be more of a tendency towards the oblique stem, so both the Old English and Modern English words would most likely be something like **win.
Thanks, simon!
This is fascinating!!!
Hey man, what you do with your yods is nobody's business but yours ✊🏻 stay strong, brother
Shakespeare uses the coincidence between wood and wood in midsummer nights dream. In his day there survived a wood meaning "mad, possessed".
Still was in Yorkshire in the 19th century "1828 WOOD: mad, rhyming with food. This word is rarely used." W. Carr, Dialect of Craven (ed. 2) p. 268
Thank you for these excellent videos.
A number of Latin words found their way into German and Dutch via Proto-Germanic. It might be interesting to reconstruct what the word Venus would be like in modern English if it had made its way from Latin, through Proto-Brittonic, into Old English. Or alternatively, from Latin through Proto-Germanic, into Old English. At least for me, the significance of the name is lost if you ignore the Latin context in which it gained its significance.
Germanic by that time. Germanic is at least as old as Latin...specially Dutch is very conservative when it comes to pronunciation of words...Keizer, Kaas, Vijver Zolder Kelder Paard ( Pereferid = side-horse), there are more Latin words hiding in Dutch. For Germanic words hiding in Italian...look for words having to do with meat and pigs... and food..
this video really coalesced my yods
6:54 Wooden very much _is_ worshipped a god in Los Angeles.
I'm not sure what specific morphology you're suggesting for OE lūca (< **lūkô? an an-stem from the verb *lūkaną?), but wouldn't we expect a-mutation to have applied here just as it does with loc < luką (not that this doesn't happen in the verb *lūkaną > lūcan, but here the high vowel has likely been restored by analogy to the 3rd person present, and indeed many of the other verb forms, where the stem is not followed by an a)?
That would give something like OE lōca > ME loke? look?
Not to mention Latin lux (and hence its bearer, lucifer)
@@LemoUtan lux and lucifer are unrelated. Remember that because of Grim's Law Latin c corresponds to Germanic h. The English cognate (sensu lato) of lux is "light" (< Old English lēoht, note that gh is a Middle English spelling convention and was not actually voiced)
It is related to Latin luxus (whence English luxury) though, where a suffixed -s caused the expected g to devoice
well the thing is you don't need a verb to attach -a/*-ô to, it can be practically anything
@@gavinrolls1054 of course, but the verb seemed the likely source, and we'd expect a-mutation regardless of the specifics, as there aren't other sources of ū that wouldn't have been lowered in this position
What a fun video. I'm sure others have pointed out that Odin (the Norse cognate to Anglo-Saxon Woden) seemed to have a link with trees. Famously he was entangled and hung from one. I like the idea that, if you extrapolated it out, Wooden would be the God so people would describe things like a "treen stool" instead.
My wife is of Indian origin and we discuss nationalism quite often. Grievances over empire-the Benghal Famine, for instance-make a lot of conversations awkard but they can be had. But India is a confident country and though they are polite they just don’t care what our position is. They find it hilarious we have a man of Indian heritage as a Prime Minister and they think it is (a) an affront to me being white, and (b) somehow Rishi has pulled off the trick of the century seizing the British state. It just goes to show how our polity is not racial which contrasts strongly with other states. Good video!
3:37 that's me. Most people around me yod drop though I've noticed that people of South Asian descent, even third generation like me yod drop less than others in Canada.
You know me too well, I'm always yammering on about coalescing yods.
Thanks for another interesting video, Simon. :)
A few notes you may find interesting.
Your Wen for Venus reminds me of the Welsh wen meaning white or pure. Found in Bronwen.
For Tuesday : the Finnish word taivas means sky. Also geal is the Scottish Gaelic word for white.
For Wednesday : Woden had a dialectic form Weden.
For Loki : consider that Lucifer is supposed to be the origin of luck.
Love doing this with Old Norse words. Very fun to imagine these words existing in modern English.
Published just 20 minutes ago and already 400 views+. There is still some hope on TH-cam.
40 minutes, 780 views.
That is, in fact, interesting. Thank you.
Awesome video!
You mention a Jackson Crawford video about "why we should be careful of using classical mythology too much in interpreting Old Norse mythology". Could you provide a link? I'd like to follow up on that.
I'd like that too; my guess is that the gap in time and culture is so large, and the contexts are so different, and the recording scribal tradition for the Old Norse mythologies was already aware of classical mythology, and classical mythology itself is such an extraordinary melting-pot of demonstrably different religious traditions - that trying to draw meaningful links between one and the other involves too many assumptions, interpretations, qualifications, and translations to get a good ratio between signal and noise in the comparison.
@@LordJazzly Well it's also because all the texts about Norse mythology were written by Christian monks so they obviously aren't super trustworthy.
a youtube search of "crawford tyr" will point you in the right direction. There are two or three of his to watch
The gap in time and culture is not so large. Avoiding parallelomania is one thing, but dismissing comparisons entirely is mostly a leftover from the culture wars (search for a national epic, national histories, and so on) of the late 19th century and early 20th century (Grundtvig, Árnason, Moe etc). Avoiding links altogether is a surefire way to produce nothing but noise.
The first outsiders to write down much about Norse culture would have been writing in Latin, and the temptation was always there to translate the Norse gods into the most similar member of the Roman or even Greek pantheon.
It was common until recent times to translate foreigners' names, and in England, clerics writing church records or legal reports used to replace English Christian names (but not surnames) by their French or Latin equivalent. A labourer called Bill or Will might go down as "Guillaume" or "Gulielmus." William Shakespeare's baptismal record says "Gulielmus Shakspere." That does not mean that the priest actually said "Gulielmus."
I like this video a lot, what a great idea.
1:13 You know the Swedish word "vän"? It means beautiful and is a poetic word.
To be clear. It's homograph, but not homophone to the other words "vän" which means friend. Cognate of wini.
The English word win has a secondary meaning such as appealing as in the old Bible expression winsome words. So it may have survived but began to die out in the mid 20th century.
Interesting and informative to say the least 🤔
Awen/Aven - ‘aphprodite’ in Welsh!
Possibly ‘On’ (Hieropolis) in Egypt too! Dedicated to Ven-us (hA-Ven)???
Actually, ū only diphthongized to /aw/ before coronals, which is why its "room" and not "roum", so the equivalent of Loki woukd likely be Looker not Loucker
In addition, the ONorse suffix -i usually came from PGerm -ô, which became OEng -a, so Loki would come from **lukô. This would be OE *Loca, and Modern *Loke :)
Great video though, keep up the good work!
I had always dreamed of reviving proto Indo-European words that didn’t make it into some of the daughter languages. I love it when a PIE words makes it into most later branches like the word for “I” such as I (*éǵh₂ in PIE, ego in Latin, ego in Ancient Greek, Ik in proto Germanic, aham in Sanskrit) but I totally hate it when this doesn’t happen and since I’m no expert, I can’t really reconstruct lost words by myself
Another example is the word for Son which is present in Germanic languages , ancient Greek (υἱός), Baltic (lithuanian: sūnus), Slavic (Russian: сын-syn)
All from PIE “*suHnús” (Hellenic though took the U-stem version “*suHyús”)
BUT LATIN LACKS THIS WORD AND I HATE IT!! I want to know so bad what the italic version of the English word “son” is just like I know what the italic version of sun (sol) is, of night (noctis) is, of milk is (mulgeō), of heart (cordis) is, of horn (cornu), of hope (cupidus) is, of hundred (centum) is…
Ah yes, the English gods Wooden, Lock, Thunder, Fry and Fro. Their names truly inspire awe, don't they?
This has been my area of interest for over two decades teaching English and an exchange about the Name of God as YHWH or Giove with the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1997. Lately I have been interested in Ancient Egyptian words that survive in modern languages. For some time I have thought that the correct pronunciation of the names of their gods was important to gain some insight into how they thought.
great video thank you
Another banger!! 🤠💜
People are excessively keen on making Jupiter a Germanic god too. Tiw/Týr is from the o-grade form of the ‘sky’ word, which seems to have just meant ‘heavenly one’ or ‘god’ in general, not the zero-grade form that was paired with the word for ‘father’ and seems to have been the name of the head of the pantheon.
If Tiw/Týr were consistently used as a name, or if that name had some suggestion of being a celestial, fatherly or kingly god, then OK maybe. But in the Norse sources, ‘týr’ is as frequently a word for ‘god’ as it is the name of a particular one, because it’s found in a dozen names of Odin. For example, Odin is called Hangaguð or Hangatýr, both meaning ‘hanged god’. By contrast, Týr as a unique character doesn’t really do anything but get nommed twice by canines. Maybe his role reduced over time, or maybe he was never a particularly big deal.
If Tiw/Týr being called just ‘god’ makes him Zeus, then what about Freyr? His name is just ‘lord’. Doesn’t that make him sound like the top dude?
In Latin, the feminine form of the word is found as ‘Bona Dea’ (‘the good goddess’). All it would take would be for the ‘Bona’ to be dropped (perhaps permitted by some other word such as ‘diva’ or ‘domina’ becoming the ordinary word for goddesses in general, just as ‘guð’ and ‘ás’ took over from ‘týr’ in Old Norse), and ‘Dea’ would then a proper noun referring to her. But no one thinks that she is Jupiter or the queen of all the gods.
Tiw/Týr isn’t Dyḗus ph₂tḗr.
Saga writer: tl;dr Tiw long, didn't read.
bro wrote a whole essay for a point the video didn't make. yes I agree with you. but no, he admitted the form was from a different grade.
Isn't the Old English "Wynn" related to wenhos? Wynn, meaning, joy, pleasure, etc.
Not to mention, “winsome.”
@@mesechabe the verb "win" or "to win" is also related to *wenh₁- through the proto germanic word "winnan" which means " to labor, strive, seek after something. In that sense, *wenh₁- relates to beautiful and something desireable. Winnan became the verb to seek something (implied to be desireable).
And "wish".
different ablaut form though
Rq for anyone watching, not all Hindus believe sanskrit was the original human language. It is not an essential part of our belief system
ISTR that Venus/Aphrodite was not an original member of the IE pantheon. Before borrowings from Greek culture, Venus was an innovated deity unique to Rome, later synchretized heavily with Aphrodite. Aphrodite had origins in middle-Eastern paganism as Astarte and was imported by the Greeks.
So while you can carry the PIE root forward, there was no deity attached to the root to cement it into the language.
Do you have any source about Aphrodite borrowed by the Greeks from middle-eastern paganism ?
@acajoom "ISTR" = "I seem to recall", so I don't remember where I first heard it, but a quick check of the Wikipedia article gives the same information *and* turns up citations (which is the important bit when getting info from Wikipedia).
@@JonBrase You mixed things up a bit or your memory has. Wikipedia talks about various modern scholars over the centuries making their own hypothesis of what the name means or comes from to finally accept the original from Hesiod. If you spoke Greek you would know what the name means. Now where wikipedia or others talk about paganism they talk about Christianity from the middle ages and forward. Nothing to do with ancient Greece. If you are interested to learn more I encourage you to read Greek writings and focus on what the ancient Greeks themselves said because this is a mythological deity (as every deity even today).
There's the question of the meaning of the name, and there's the question of the origins of the mythological figure, and those are two separate questions (actually *three* separate questions because the Greeks and the Romans used different names).
The big point is that the mythological figure was introduced well after the divergence of the Indo-European languages, so even assuming the root used by the Romans had survived in English, there would not be a deity associated with it because Venus was not part of the original Indo-European pantheon.
@@JonBrase The Romans came later. You are questioning a Greek name or the origin of the Greek myth. Most Greek words/names have an etymology which you can learn from the word or the name itself what it actually means. If you think Greek mythology is copying earlier myths, there are plenty of theories you can dig in and associate with, but you would agree this would be an attempt to just eliminate something you can't.
Do you have a link to the video by Jackson Crawford mentioned at 4:15 ?
This reminds me of how the names of Norse gods changed in Swedish over the centuries. If I remember correctly, Freya became Fröa, and Sleipnir became Släppner, for example. But we seem to have reverted to the Icelandic versions at some point, and the old folk versions of the names sound really weird to me now ... Like, way too casual, and not as cool.
People are entitled to their beliefs and feelings, but this does not need to apologise to anyone when you are presenting facts.
Tiw/Týr must have been important enough to have a day named after them just after Sun's day (Sunday) and Moon's day (Monday), Tiw's/Týr's day (Tuesday) and only then comes Wodan/Odin's day (Wednesday), and Thor's day (Thursday) etc.
Unfortunately that's the problem with relying on the existing Sagas that were written centuries after the Norse had converted to Christianity. In those stories Tyr is very minor yet, as you have rightly pointed out, he appears to be significant enough to include with Odin and Thor. So is this the case of something we are missing entirely about the Norse pantheon, or it's just a regionalisation where the Germanic Pagan Anglo-Saxons felt Tyr was more important than the Norse Pagan Icelandics did? Who knows.
@@ekmad Unfortunately, the English weekdays are a calque from the Latin deities. We can tell from that that Tyr was considered the Germanic equivalent of Mars by the followers of Germanic religions, but not how important he was. Consider also that the Romans got their dies Martis from the Greek, hemana Ares, but Ares was a fairly minor Greek deity (relatively - he was arguably #12) and Mars was a major Roman one.
not true, since the weekday names are just calques from Latin based on equivalencies, not importance
We have two words for Zeus in Greek Ζεύς Zeus Δία Dia (means god in a lot of modern romance languages now)
This is great!
Nynorsk or new-norwegian Ven means beautiful. So it might actually have followed that route
God has always been associated with the tree (wood, Yggdrasil), since creation emerges like from a hidden root and branches out into the multiplicity of creation.
banger of a video
PIE *wénh₁-os may not have come into PGmc but *wenh₁-i-s did. It’s the OE wine meaning “friend”.
What about Norse vænn, modern Norwegian ven, meaning beautiful?
Yes! In Scandinavian languages the word for friend is "ven". Etymologically related to venus.
My own name, Gwyn is the masculine form of "Wen" which means "beautiful" or "blessed" in Modern Welsh. Surely this must share a derivation with the Latin ['Wenus].
Doesn't appear to? (EDIT: the following is wrong) -'Gwen' looks like it derives from a PIE word meaning 'spirit'-
@@caffetiel Maybe a FF then, do you know which PIE root?
@@gwynedwards8526 wait no sorry I was bimbobrain and read it wrong: gwyn derives from PIE *weyd- (a root meaning "see", which became the word for white in Celtic languages), not the bit I was reading from. Gonna edit.
@@caffetiel Ahh that makes more sense to me. Thanks for clarifying x
Great video, does anyone have a link to the Jackson Crawford video that's mentioned? I looked but couldn't find it!
Your logic is sound but how can we be sure the same changes would have happened had these words remained in use? Some sounds split while leaving some words with the older pronunciation (e.g. FOOT & STRUT).
That's a good question - in a lot of cases, those splits were fairly environment-driven (in the FOOT-STRUT case, the FOOT vowel stayed adjacent to labial consonants, but turned into the STRUT vowel in other environments). However, there are random exceptions (like 'put' and 'putt' being pronounced differently even though the environments are identical), so it's always possible the words would have been subject to something like that.
@@simonroper9218 Thanks for your reply. In regards to words relearnt from books, do you think we should try to restore their original pronunciation or is the common practice of adopting new pronunciations based upon older spellings preferable?
Wodan is already associated with wood through the name of the Ash tree. Ash is a rune that means god, and Wodan's spear was carved from an Ash tree.
no.. æsc is the name of a rune, and æsc is just the word ash. you're thinking of óss which is another rune name which means god.
really injowed this shorter video
ooooh 9:48 I didn't realize there were nasalized vowels (like ã) in proto-germanic. I speak portuguese and these nasal vowels do a lot of heavy lifting that pretty clearly differentiates portuguese/galician from its other latin cousins. super interesting.
proto germanic had lots of nasal vowels. though funnily enough, ą is the only one that isn't phonemic haha
1:51 Didn't English progress this way in actuality, with the Old English "wyn" deriving from the same root and giving us the modern "winsome" (also beauty, in a sense)? Of course, the deity is lost along the way.
different grade of the root
next time I say 'adios' in Spanish or 'adeu' in Catalan I will remember it comes from 'sky father' 😀
More please on Loki Louck Luca. Connections to the modern name Lucca / Luka would be interesting rabbit Warren to go down.
Very interesting. Thx.
As a slightly different alternative for Loki, does anyone have a similar construction for something like "the locked one"? Not that he was doing the locking, more like he himself had been locked away (or had his mouth sealed up that one time)?
Believes don't deserve respect. Only people deserve respect.
Believes and ideas are to be criticized and if necessary even ridiculed. Because this is how we improve and make progress as a species.
Wait, so _tue_ is the name of an Old English pre-Christian god; an online etymology notes “the god Tīw being equated with the Roman god Mars,” which we can see in the French word for “Tuesday” _mardi._ _But_ also “this _tue_ word is cognate with [the ancient Greek] _Ζεύς”_ 3:42 who was the father of Ares (the Greek counterpart to Mars). So how did that work?
what are you actually asking? this comment is really hard to follow
@@gavinrolls1054 Rereading it, yeah, it _is_ hard to follow. Sorry!
The video says _tue_ is the name of an Old English pre-Christian god. That god is equated with Mars (according to online etymologies) but his _name_ is a cognate of Zeus, who was the _father_ of the Greek counterpart of Mars. So we have a god who is the equivalent of one god but whose _name_ is a cognate of the name of that god’s _father._ Why? It’s like the god was named after the wrong guy. (French doesn’t have that confusion-the day after Monday, _mardi,_ is clearly named after Mars-but I suppose the Romance languages had only the Roman gods to contend with and not their old English counterparts.)