languages

From Yehoshua to Geez

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First there was the Hebrew name יְהוֹשֻׁעַ (Yŏhōšūaʿ, Yəhōšūaʿ, Yehoshua, Joshua), meaning approximately YHWH saves or (is) salvation. This sequentially became Hebrew/Aramaic יֵשׁוּעַ (Yēšūaʿ, Yeshua, Jeshua), Greek Ἰησοῦς (Iesous), Latin IESVS and Iēsūs, English Jesus (and occasionally Jesu) and Josh (and many other forms in many other languages), and slang Jeez/jeez/Geez/geez.

Joshua is most famously the Hebrew leader Joshua the son of Nun , but also Joshua the high priest (Ezra 5:2) and several others (using the spellings interchangeably). Jesus of Nazareth “who is called the Messiah(/Christ)” was named “because he will save his people from their sins” but the name also belonged to Bar-Jesus called Elymas (a magos/sorcerer: Acts 13:6-12), Jesus called Barabbas (a notorious prisoner Matt 27:16–17) and Jesus called Justus (a Jewish Christian in Rome Col 4:11). There was nothing unusual about the name. 

It is most likely that Jesus of Nazareth, an Aramaic-speaking Jew, was addressed and referred to in his lifetime as Yeshua. The novel Me and Jeshua by Eleanor Spence imagines the childhood of Jesus, as narrated by his cousin Jude. (There is no (semi-)authoritative reference for the book.) A recent translation of the bible by Sarah Ruden (which I posted about here) uses transliterations from the Greek, including Iēsous, Simōn Petros, Andreas, Iakōbos and Iōannēs (which I commented “mak[es] them sound more Greek than they really were”). 

In English-speaking countries, the name Jesus has been and is vanishingly rarely used, but the many other forms in many other languages are used to varying degrees, most famously Spanish Jesús (/xeˈsus/).

There is also “the name of Jesus” (Phil 2:10-11) at which “every knee shall/should/will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”, which clearly doesn’t happen every time anyone says the name Jesus. 

In the bible, and and many cultures, a name represents the very essence of a being (human or divine). The bible has many instances of naming and re-naming, always significant for that being.

T S Eliot probably had this in mind when he wrote The Naming of Cats. He explains: “a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES”, the name that the family use daily; a name that’s particular, peculiar, and more dignified, that never belongs to more than one cat; and especially:

But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover—
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular name.

(Afterword: Note that the commandment against taking “the name of the Lord thy/your God in vain” (Ex 20:7, Deut 5:11), specifically refers to את־שם־יהוה, et-shem-YHWH this-same name of YHWH. I am rapidly approaching the limits of my theological knowledge, so I’ll stop here.)

Dong

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In Korean, a dong (동) is an administrative area basically equivalent to a suburb in English-speaking countries. One video by vlogger Mike from Korea (an American long-term resident) sees him walking from Seoul to Uijeongbu. One commenter, presumably Korean, says “Welcome to my dong”.

In Vietnamese, a dong (đồng) is the unit of currency. Some years ago a friend told me that he’d seen an ad for foreign investment in Vietnam with the tagline “Put your dong in”. I can’t immediately find any confirmation of this, among other things.

In English, a dong is

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Dancing with the czars

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A few days ago, an Australian news website stated that Trump’s border tsar was going to Minneapolis. Another stated that Trump’s ‘border czar’ was going to Minneapolis.

I am far more familiar with the spelling tsar, and would only ever use either to refer to eastern European monarchs (tsar for Russian and czar for south Slavic), not people holding positions of power in US politics or public life. 

Czar is the earlier spelling (from Latin caesar (classically pronounced with a /k/, compare German kaiser)) and was more used until about 1900. The two spellings traded usage for most of the 20th century, then tsar has been the most common since about 1990. If anything tsar refers to Russian monarchs (compare Russian Царь) and czar refers those people in US politics or public life. With the resources I have access to, I can’t find when when czar was first used in that way. US industrial magnates and the Russian monarchy overlapped by several decades (compare also ‘barons of industry’).

I have never knowingly encounteredczar in reference to Australia or any other country. (Wikipedia says US and UK.) The second website saw fit to use inverted commas around the phrase. I can’t immediately think what term we would use in Australia to refer to a person of equivalent power. Maybe, fortunately, we don’t have (m)any, as the Australian prime minister has less power to make such appointments. Intriguingly, most similar words come from other languages: boss (Dutch), supremo (Italian or Spanish), honcho (Japanese) and mogul (Persian or Arabic). ‘White House Border Czar’ seems to be Tom Homan’s actual title (Wikipedia, citing the Annual Report to Congress on White House Office Personnel, 1 July 2025). The first news source has a further article in which the commentator writes “The ‘White House Border Tsar’ (yes, that is his actual title)”. 

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Apostrophes, catastrophes and other strophes

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Apostrophes and catastrophes have something in common, which is strophes, but it may not be immediately obvious what sections of Greek or later poetry have to do with punctuation marks or disasters. στροφή  strophḗ means “a twist, turning about”from stréphein “to turn”, and was the first part of a choral ode, followed by the antistrophe. Now it can be any section of a poem (possibly distinguished from a stanza (“a standing”) in that it doesn’t (have to) have a fixed or repeating length, meter or rhyme scheme), or an exclamatory figure of speech, often introduced by O! (“O for a muse of fire and/or the wings of a dove …”)

Etymologically, an apostrophe is a turning away and a catastrophe is a turning down. There’s some rule of pronunciation which turns strophe (with a long o) into catastrophe and catastrophic (with a short o). I have never encountered apostrophic (stressed like catastrophic), but it’s in dictionaries. Maybe the pub menu poster in my previous post was apostrophic. 

The Free Dictionary lists 15 words that end in strophe (or 16 if you count strophe itself). These are (I was going to add a definition to each, but it got complicated):

* ecocatastrophe (but eco-catastrophe)
eucatastrophe 
* psilostrophe
catastrophe
antistrophe
* monostrophe
* hypostrophe
* peristrophe
* katastrophe
apostrophe
epistrophe
anastrophe
* enstrophe
* ecstrophe

The words with an asterisk are not recognised by Pages for Mac or WordPress. 

The only one I’ll talk about further is eucatastrophe. With respect to Tolkien, eucatastrophe doesn’t work for me. A good catastrophe? Shouldn’t this rather be an anastrophe (a turning up, which I have just noticed is on the list above, but Dictionary.com defines it as an “inversion of the usual order of words”) or a eustrophe (a good turning)?

Triple negative

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Some time ago, Language Log discussed a language usage in the web comic Dumbing of Age by David Willis. Since then I have been reading it every day. One recent daily strip has one character saying, in her idiolect, “Ah still don’t ever tell no authority figures nothing”.

Screenshot

(Don’t worry about who these people are and what they’re talking about.)

Proscriptivists proscribe double negatives because, logically, two negatives make a positive. “I didn’t do nothing” means I did something. But no-one ever said it to mean that, and no-one ever seriously understands it to mean that. They don’t prescribe triple negatives, even though, logically, three negatives make a positive. “I didn’t do nothing to nobody” means I did something to nobody.

Language isn’t logic or mathematics. For those people who use double negatives of this kind (of which I am not one), it isn’t negative times negative equals positive, but rather negative plus negative equals negative (which is equally logical and mathematical). Triple negatives don’t attract as much comment because they are so much rarer. Some languages require double negatives. I don’t know whether, in those languages, single negatives are a non-standard option or just plain wrong. 

A few days ago I posted something on Facebook about a recent international event. My wife asked me about it and I said “No-one’s disagreed with me”. I had to explain that this is not the same as saying “Someone’s agreed with me”. 

Shad and other names

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An advertisement on a local bus advises of the existence of a local businessman with the given name of Shad, whose surname and business I didn’t note (except that his surname isn’t Roe and not Anglo/Saxon/Celtic), which probably defeats the point of the advertisement but is irrelevant to this post. (I could search online but won’t) Inevitably I started thinking about the name Shad. It is possible that it’s a name from a language/culture I am unaware of, but to me it most strongly brings to mind the biblical Shadrach, one of the three young men in the book of Daniel, who were thrown into and miraculously saved from a fiery furnace after refusing to worship a golden image in the time of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzzar. Their Babylonian names of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (which probably invoke the Babylonian gods Aku and Nebo) are better known than their Jewish names of Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah (which contain the strongly Jewish elements -iah and -el). 

I have a vague memory of encountering the name Meshach somewhere recently, but I can’t remember where. Wikipedia lists 13 real and 6 fictional people with the given or surname Shadrach or Shadrack, including Azariah Shadrach, but not any Meshachs or Abednegos. There probably aren’t too many Abednegos these days, but William Abednego “Bendigo” Thompson was a 19th century English boxer whose nickname indirectly lives on in the Australian city of Bendigo (a local boxer gained that nickname because his fighting style resembled Thompson.

Of the Hebrew names, Wikipedia lists four biblical and 13 other people named Hananiah or related spellings, including Ananias (with even more on its page for that name); two biblical and 10 other people named Misael or Mishael; and 10 biblical and four other people named Azariah. 

Azariah means “God has helped” or “Helped by God”, and is presumably pronounced a-za-RYE-a, as in Jeremiah. The name Azaria is related. In Australia, this is most famous as the given name of Azaria Chamberlain (a-ZAH-ree-a), a baby who disappeared from a camping site at Uluru/Ayers Rock in 1980, officially found to have been taken and killed by a dingo (not, as widely believed at the time, to have been killed by her mother, not helped by a rumour that the name means “sacrifice in the wilderness”). This was later the basis of the movie Evil angels/A cry in the dark, released less than two months after the parents Lindy and Michael were exonerated by the Northern Territory Court of Appeals of all charges filed against them. In the USA and probably other countries, it is most famous as the surname of actor and producer Hank Azaria (a-ZAIR-ee-a). 

Various sources on the internet suggest the biblical connection for Shad, but also a change of pronunciation and spelling from Chad, which is a completely different name.

Peace and goodwill

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Following sebmb1’s comment on my previous post, I investigated the Greek original and English translations of Luke 2:14. I am not a Greek scholar or theologian, but I do the best with what I know or can find. 

Bible Hub provides nine sources for the Greek text. Five read Δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις θεῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς εἰρήνη ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας (eudokias) and four read εὐδοκία (eudokia). Either way, it is a relatively rare word. There are 3 (or 4) occurrences of εὐδοκία and 2 (or 1) of εὐδοκίας. 

εὐδοκία can be nominative, dative or vocative singular, and εὐδοκίας can be genitive singular or accusative plural. To the best of my ability, the best options are either (most simply) (with εὐδοκία) on earth, peace; to all people, goodwill or (with εὐδοκίας) on earth peace, to all people of goodwill. The first would seem to include all people without distinction; the second would seem to indicate that there is a subset “all people of goodwill”. The task then is to discern who they (or we) are. ἀνθρώποις is most often translated men, but it clearly includes women (and children), because there are also ᾰ̓́νδρες and γῠναῖκες. 

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Kangaroo powder

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I noticed a packet of 콩가루 (kong-ga-ru) on the kitchen table. For all the world that looked like it should be kangaroo, but obviously wasn’t. I asked my wife, who told me that it is soybean powder (Wikipedia’s article about the Japanese equivalent). Kangaroo is 캥거루 (kaeng-geo-ru). (I would spell it 캥가루, kaeng-ga-roo). The first recorded spelling is kanguru (Sir Joseph Banks, 12 July 1770) and the reconstructed Guugu Yimithirr spelling is gangurru, referring to eastern grey kangaroos.

Adapting a recent comment on another post: If we don’t know the Guugu Yimithirr rules of pronunciation, we shouldn’t try to use Guugu Yimithirr words.

Hell is bright

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The small town of Hell, Michigan is known only for its unusual name and occasionally freezing over. 

This evening a German organist named Felix Hell played a recital in Sydney. Beforehand, some of us were discussing his unusual surname. The scope for jokes in English is obvious, but what does it mean in German? I had to check. Fortunately it means bright, changing him from happy hell to happy bright. Conversely, hell (English) is Hölle. I can’t remember that I’ve encountered either hell (German) or Hölle in the course of singing or reading about German. I’m slightly surprised that none of the moderately- to highly-experience classical choristers knew either word. 

Back to Hell, Michigan, there is no acknowledged reason for its name. Wikipedia lists four theories: German travellers arrived one sunny afternoon and said “So schöne hell!” (So beautifully bright!); early explorers faced difficult conditions including mosquitoes, thick forest cover and extensive wetlands; early settler/businessman George Reeves paid the local grain farmers with home-distilled whiskey, leading their wives to comment that their husbands had gone to Hell again at harvest time; and Reeves answering the question of what the town should be called with “I don’t care. You can name it Hell for all I care”.

Some people don’t find hell a joking matter.

éclaircissement and other English words

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Earlier this week Faizan Zaki from Dallas won the 2025 Scripps National Spelling Bee, correctly spelling éclaircissement (the clearing up of something obscure: enlightenment). 

My first thought was “congratulations”. My second thought was “That’s not an English word …”. But there’s nothing on the Scripps website or in the official rules which specifies that the words in the competition will or must be “English”. The pool of words is drawn from Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, which simply shifts the selection of “English” words to MW rather than Scripps. MWUD doesn’t specify “English” it is title, but is billed as “the largest, richest dictionary of American English”. 

What is an “English” word? Simply mentioning or even using (once) a foreign word in an otherwise English sentence doesn’t make it English. There must be some pattern of use as an English word. Some thoughts I have are: if a word is written with foreign spelling or diacritics, is pronounced in a foreign way, is only used in foreign contexts, either takes foreign morphology (noun plurals, verb tenses or adjective comparatives or superlatives) or doesn’t take English morphology, and is used with the same meaning as in a foreign language and has a perfectly good English equivalent, then it’s a foreign word. If it is written with English spelling (with no diacritics, obviously), pronounced in an English way, used in English(-speaking  country) contexts, takes English morphology and has a (if only slightly) different meaning, then it’s probably an English word. Obviously there’s a sliding scale, because some of those may apply but not others.

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