Devshirme

I just finished a fascinating thriller called Impact by Douglas Preston.  His books, both solo and with Lincoln Child, are the kind that keep me up at night so I can read as much as possible, even though the loss of sleep will haunt me the next day – they are that good.  This book is about as close to science fiction as I get in my reading.  Preston depicts a small Maine fishing village, a California space research lab, Cambodian illegal gem traders, and Washington bureaucrats all with stunning depth and, as far I can imagine, accuracy.  He also throws in the occasional fun word like desuetude or quincunx.  Desuetude I kind of knew, or at least could figure out from context, but quincunx threw me for a loop.  You can look it up – it is basically four things in a square with a fifth in the middle, like the pips on the five side of a die.  The only thing I could figure out from the word itself is that it had something to do with the number five.  There are lots of words like this – tricycle, quartet, etc.  But there are also words with a number root that have lost their original meanings.  Decimate means to kill ten percent of something but it is now used to denote a total rout.  I had thought section meant one-sixth of something, but Merriam Webster does not seem to bear this out and traces the origins to a Latin word for to cut.  Sextant, the thing sailors would use to figure out where they were, has origins in the number six, so maybe that is what I was thinking.  There are others but I am blanking…

That is the name of the book I made reference to in yesterday’s sermon when I was talking about theories of the first language spoken by our earliest ancestors.  Several people asked me about in the maw of chaos that is coffee hour at the Cathedral.  The book is great – here it is 10 in the morning and I am already looking forward to reading it tonight after basketball.  In the chapter entitled First Words the author writes about the language that was spoken by the band of adventurous people who took the fateful step out of Africa into the rest of the world.  The idea is that to be as advanced as they were they must have been able to communicate.  There is of course no recorded evidence of what the language sounded like, and there are no archaeological remains, but genetic research, among other innovative research, gives us some insight.  The part that really interested me was the research involving sign languages, especially ones that are developing, where we can see how they are being built.  This is what I mentioned in the sermon as my story – the fact that gesturing seems to be something we are wired to do.  I got some laughs when I mentioned that I am Greek and Italian – of course I am going to talk with my hands!  But it is true.  Think of this next time you are on the phone and gesturing and remember that the person on the other end of the line can’t see you.

Each culture also has its own particular gestures, while others seem to be universal.  The small clusters of people who speak ancient Greek in southern Italy actually have hand gestures different than their Italian-speaking neighbors – these gestures are closer to those used in Greece.  What a wonderful, interesting world in which we live!

Once in a while in scripture there is an intersection between Greek mythology and the Old or New Testament writings.  The one that immediately springs to mind is Japheth, one of Noah’s sons.  I imagine his name comes from Iapetus of Greek myth – his story is here.  A more obvious connection is in Matthew 3:9b, where John the Baptist says “For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones.”  The quote contains a pun if you were to translate it into Hebrew – banim – sons – and ‘banim – stones.  In Greek the pun is not obvious – lithon and tekna – but in the myth of Deucalion’s Flood Deucalion throws stones that became men, with laas and laos being nearly the same word.   Jim Morrison, a devotee of esoteric knowledge and myth, used elements shared with these stories in his song The Soft Parade: “Catacombs, nursery bones, winter women growing stones, carrying babies to the river.”

Was there a myth floating around the eastern Mediterranean/Near East back in the day associating children and stones?  I have not come across anything similar in Assyrian or Egyptian mythology but I have only scraped the surface.  Any feedback here is appreciated.  Incidentally, I would at times clash with classmates at the seminary who thought it inappropriate to make connections between scripture and mythology or other religious traditions.  S.H. Hooke puts it nicely in Middle Eastern Mythology:

“To say, as we have done, that the gospel writers used the forms and language of myth to describe the events which had taken place before their eyes, is not to deny the reality of these events, but to affirm that they belonged to an order of reality transcending human modes of expression; belonging, indeed, to what Berdiaev has called ‘metahistory’. “

Due to my father’s job Saudi Arabia was a huge part of my life while I was growing up, and my subsequent interest in Islam, Arabic and the Near East means that I still have much interest in what is happening over there (my interest also stems from a natural concern for human rights).  Daniel Pipes has an excellent article on recent developments over there.  I do have one minor problem with the article, though, and it is a pet peeve of mine: using the word “gender” when you mean “sex”.  Gender refers to grammar and should be used when discussing writing or language, while sex is used for, well, everything else.  There is not, then, “gender studies” or “gender discrimination” but rather “sex discrimination”.  The term sexual harassment is about the only use of the word that I ever see done correctly.  I think that the battle is lost on this one, though, and there is no turning back.

I was reading this David Pryce-Jones article when I came across the reference to Mers El-Kebir and a peculiar WWII episode where the British fired on and sank French naval vessels so that they would not fall into the hands of the Germans.  I say peculiar, but the history of the war is filled with all sorts of unusual stories and one could probably spend a lifetime reading all of them.  Mers El-Kebir is the Francophone transliteration of the Arabic al-mers al-kabeer, which means “the big harbor”.  The Wikipedia article has a good account of the battle. More here.

I like to go on little “Language Adventures” here on the blog from time to time, but sometimes these adventures become catastrophes.  Here is the story of a recent one that I was actually going to triumphantly blog about before the train wreck happened.  I had always wondered why the name Gustav, so popular in most European countries, was not popular in Greece – in fact, I have never met a Greek with that name, and, as a friend says, my Facebook friends list reads like the Athens phone book so I have a pretty good sized sample.

I was spurred into action to find out more while watching the Veggie Tales St. Nicholas video with Vaia.  (These videos, by the way, are lots of fun and teach good lessons, as opposed to most other mindless video/tv entertainment).  The movie is a hoot, and much of it takes place in the Greek world back in the day.  And there is a Greek character named Gustav.  This got me thinking, and I had a moment of clarity where I figured out the etymology of the name: Gustav must be a metathesis of Augustus – Avgustos, minus the Greek “os” ending, become Avgust, which metathesizes into Gustav.  Brilliant, right?  Wrong, at least according to the Wikipedia article on the name.  It is apparently of Old Norse origin, although there is also a theory that it has Slavic roots.  So, false cognate – Gustav is not related to Augustus.

It has been a while since we had a language adventure here on the blog.  I recently started doing research on the ancient Greek terms for the color green and relating them to other Near Eastern languages.  That project will make an appearance at some point, but for now I thought I would post some stuff from the Kurdish dictionary which I bought this summer, and which has turned out to be a fascinating reference work due to the language’s Indo-European heritage mixed with the influence of various strains of Islam.  The first definition given is for the English (from Latin) A.D. (year of our lord) which is translated as milAdi, from the Arabic root wld relating to birth.  The last definition given is for Zoroastrianism, so there we have the Persian influence and the common Indo-Iranian connection.  The second part of the book is a Kurdish to English dictionary.  Opening it up at random I came upon page 254 where the word ordu is defined.  It means army in Kurdish and is the root of both the language name Urdu (aka Hindustani) and the English word Horde, as in the Golden Horde.  Urdu was a great administrative language during the British Raj, and has elements of Hindi, Arabic, Turkish, English and Persian.  If you are a language geek like I am, well, it does not get any cooler than this.  More tomorrow…

We have a series of emails going back and forth about a new sign for the St. Spyridon Preschool and one missive included the phrase “Enrolling Now” which reminded me of the following story, which I emailed to the committee:

This is not important but I thought I would share a story with all y’all that I remembered when I read the “Enrolling Now” reference.  When I went to school in England I used to go skating at an ice rink several miles from the dorm.  While walking there I would pass by a public school (in England a public school is what we would call a private school and vice versa) that had a sign saying Enrol Now.  I remember thinking, what a bunch of idiots to misspell a word on a school sign!  In a phone conversation with my father I regaled him with this story and he informed me that enrol is a legitimate variation of enroll and was indeed how he learned to spell it in school during the 1940s here in Massachusetts (he sometimes spells things in the English manner, which tells me that that was the curriculum back then).  So apparently that is how they spell the word in England (my spell check is flagging it but that is probably because I have it set to American English), and the joke was on me.

One of our Gospel readers for the Agape service this Sunday will be Jody Athanasiou, who will be reading from her grandmother’s Portuguese bible.  In preparation for this she has gone through many of her grandmother’s religious books and stuff and sent me some cool pictures – here is one:

This is courtesy of Robert Irwin and his superfabulous book Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism & Its Discontents.  It is a serious work but there are many fun moments.  On page 30 he talks about the enthusiasm with which translators in Medieval Spain took on the works of Islamic science, including some of the more dubious sciences or pseudosciences:  “They translated works on astrology, alchemy, numerology, omplatoscopy (divination from the cracks on scorched sheep’s bones), geomancy (divination from marks in the sand) haruspication (divination from entrails), and similar recondite practices.”  A great read, and I highly recommend it.