Easter is closely related to Austria. The aus- or aur- Indo-European root meant to rise or shine, and was quite an important word because they worshiped the (rising) sun. Among the derivatives are aurora (Latin for dawn), East itself, the Ostrogoths, the Orient, an origin (dawn), and the country of Austria (Österreich in German — the east kingdom.) To abort is literally to “un-arise” (cf. dis-appear), and an aborigine is run together from the Latin phrase ab origine, from the beginning, denoting the original inhabitants of a territory. (The Latin phrase has been felt so strongly that it has prevented the word from mutating into typical English pronunciation, which would presumably have been a-BOR-i-jin.)
Hormone is an extremely obscure relative of “aurora”. Greek horme meant to arouse, and hormon meant to set in motion, both from the “rise and shine” sense. Hormone was coined in the early 20th century to name substances which “kick-started” the action of some bodily organ.
Easter was a pagan Germanic name for their sunrise festival on the first day of Spring, when the Sun returned across the equinox. The early missionaries appropriated the name for their own festival on about the same date. (Christmas is on December 25 to provide an alternative to pagan Yule festivals at the Winter Solstice. The actual date of Jesus’s birth is unknown. The only hint in the Gospels is the comment about “shepherds in the hills keeping watch over their flocks by night,” and this is an activity that takes place in late summer in Palestine.)
It’s no coincidence that the Christian Easter is near the first day of Spring, because it is tied to the date of the Jewish Passover (the Last Supper was a Passover Seder), and that seems to have been another “sun-crossing-over” festival originally. The Vernal Equinox was also the time in many cultures when the old god died and then, usually three days later, arose again from the dead at sunrise, symbolizing life returning to Earth with the end of Winter and the coming of Spring. (Christianity speaks of Jesus rising “on the third day”, but the gospels are quite definite that the interval was only a day and a half — early Friday afternoon to sometime before dawn on Sunday. Cf. a tertian fever, where the chills and fever happen every other day.)
All Souls’ Day or Hallowmas is on top of another pagan holiday — November 1 was New Years Day (Samhain) in the Keltic calendar, and New Years Eve (i.e., Halloween) was traditionally the night when the sidhe (supernatural folk) roamed the world. (The other big Keltic festival was their mid-year day, Beltane, i.e., May Day, but the Christians didn’t confiscate that one, the workers did.) Under Christianity, the other Keltic quarter-days became Lammas (loaf-mass) on August 1st, and Candlemas on February 2nd. Lammas, Hallowmas, Candlemas, and Beltane were the quarter-days in Scotland well into the 20th century.
Keltic spelling and pronunciation are odd by English standards — Samhain is pronounced “SAWeen”, more or less, and sidhe is pronounced “she”. Beltane had three syllables in Old Irish — “BELtini” — although the more usual pronunciation is now “BELton”. Banshee is a phonetic version of Keltic bean sidhe, woman of the fairies; a banshee’s wail was supposed to portend a death. Like many other Gaelic terms, the familiarity of these words in English is due to Sir Walter Scott.
One of the earlier Gaelic terms adopted into English was Tory. It was first used to describe the Irish guerrillas fighting Cromwell in the 1640’s — it’s a phonetic spelling of toraighe, pursuer. It came to mean “Catholic advocate” in general, particularly a member of the “Royalist” party which favored James II. After he was deposed, the term stayed on to mean “political supporter of the king” and then “conservative”, 180 degrees from where it started. I suppose Tories do not like being reminded that their name means “terrorist”.
If a Gaelic word has /S/ before /E/ or /I/, it is pronounced like English /SH/. For example, the personal name Sinéad is “shin-ADE” and Siobhan is “shi-VAWN” — both are Gaelic forms of Jane. So is Síne, but that’s usually spelled phonetically as Sheena these days. Seamus is “SHAME-us”, Sean is “Shawn”, and so on. In recent news, a young Irish actress named Saoirse Ronan was up for an Oscar; if you’ve been paying attention, you might make a good guess that her name is “SURsha”. Sinn Fein, the Irish political party, is “sheen fane”. Moving away from /S/ but sticking to Irish Gaelic, Caitlin is pronounced “KATE-lin” by the unwary, but it’s really “cat-LEEN” (or sometimes “cotch-LEEN”)just as Máirín is normally anglicized to Maureen. These examples are all Irish so I can evade any attempt to explain Welsh spelling vs. pronunciation.
Orientation, getting one’s directions straight, shows that the original important direction was East, not North, and in fact for many centuries the word literally meant to face the east, particularly for constructing churches and digging graves. The Indo-European words for north and south were the same as the ones for left and right, proving the same point. The word for north or left also meant “lower”, presumably from the position of the sun when facing east. (See the discussion of “deus” and “day” below for another set of rise-and-shine words.) For that matter, the southern territory of Yemen means “on the right” in Arabic and is therefore related to the Hebrew name Benjamin, son of the right [hand]. That just as easily translates as “son of the South”, though, since the biblical tribe of Benjamin lived in southern Judea. Right-wing complainers about Barack Obama’s first name should meditate on that American icon, Ben-Yemini Franklin.
The opposite of the Orient (rising) is the Occident, setting. Latin cadere means to fall, and that which falls to us can either be an occasion (literally, to fall against), a chance (originally a gambling term, i.e., the fall of dice), a case in the legal sense, or an accident. If you have fallen for good, you’re a cadaver and will probably decay. A person who does so is decadent. The falling sound at the end of a musical piece is either a cadence or a cadenza, depending on whether one is French or Italian. Cascade is another derivative, as is a deciduous tree, where the leaves “fall away”. See chair for a most unlikely relative. West, by the way, seems to be another Indo-European “setting” word. Both Latin vesper and Greek hesperos mean “evening”, but Sanskrit avas means “downward”.
PS — Why do Americans insist that China and Japan are in the “Far East”? They may be in that direction as seen from Europe but they are in the WEST as seen from the United States, and I think we should not continue with this effete reminder of England! England and France would then become the Near East, and Russia, Israel, Egypt, and Iran the Far East, since India is more or less half way around from North America. The British distinguished between the Near East (the Levant, Arabia, Egypt, Turkey), the Middle East (Persia, India), and the Far East (China, Japan), and we’re stuck with it.
This habit is catching. The Romans referred to Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, etc. as the Levant, from Latin lev-, to rise, as in levitate, and Japan is from the Chinese jih-pun, sun-rise; the islands are in the east as seen from China. The first notice of the place which came to Europe was via Marco Polo, who spelled the Chinese he heard as Chipangu. Over the centuries the Japanese language changed the Chinese jih- (sun) to ni-, so that their own name for their country is rendered as Nippon in English, often translated as the “Land of the Rising Sun” — note the rising sun on the Japanese flag. This makes perfect sense to the Chinese, but is illogical for the Japanese themselves! It does seem odd that “Austria”, “Levant” and “Japan” translate to the same thing in English, but then so do Anatolia (from a Byzantine Greek word for “rising”) and Saracen (from Arabic sharqi, east, literally “rising”.) A sirocco is an east wind, also from the Arabic, and a Hebrew misrach is the plaque on the wall of a synagogue indicating the direction of Jerusalem. As we might expect by now, that Semitic SHRQ- root for “rising” and “east” also meant both “light” and “enlightenment”.
07Apr11 The country of Lebanon looks like it might be related to Levant, particularly because /B/ and /V/ are often interchanged. Good guess but no cigar — LBN- is the Semitic root for “white” and the country is named for the snowy mountains (the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges) that dominate the interior of the country, very obvious in this satellite photo of the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Therefore, Lebanon translates into Spanish as “Sierra Nevada”.
Sometimes the directions don’t have anything to do with geography. Consider sentences like “The largest Western economies are the USA, the EU, and Japan.”
