Words for Granted - An etymology and linguistics podcast

Today's episode serves as an epilogue to the series on Biblical etymology. Secular means 'unaffiliated with religion,' but originally, it was a word used to describe the measurement of long spans of time. Roughly equivalent to a century, the saeculum, as it was known in Ancient Rome, was celebrated with pagan rituals (ironic), theater, and games. Over the course of the episode, we trace the development of the saeculum from antiquity to the 19th century philosophical movement of secularism.

The word 'God' is not derived from the original Biblical texts. Rather, it's a term from Germanic paganism that was adapted to Christianity. In the original Hebrew of the Old Testament, God is called by many names, and these diverse titles don't necessarily translate clearly into English. In today's episode, we dissect a handful of Hebrew terms for God that are used in the original Hebrew of the Bible.

In the Bible, the word Hell is a common English translation of three Greek and Hebrew words, but the meanings of those words hardly resemble Hell as we know it today. In addition to the etymology of 'hell' itself, this episode explores the doctrinal implications of those original Biblical terms.

The letter J is a direct descendent of the letter I. Based on their dissimilar sounds, it's an unlikely genetic connection, and today's story explores how this development took place. To keep the theme of Biblical etymology going, we examine this development through the evolution of the name Jesus.

Greek gods. Golden Age heroes. Our conscience. Guardian angels. Evil spirits. All of these things and more were once associated with the word daimon, the Ancient Greek predecessor of the Modern English 'demon.' Originally a neutral term that did not imply good or bad, today's episode looks at how this pagan Greek term became the embodiment of evil spirits.

On average, the word 'church' appears in English bibles 115 times. However, kuriakon, the word from which 'church' derives, only appears in the original Greek text twice, and its usage has nothing to do with a place of worship. The word 'church' is a translation of ekklesia, a different Greek word meaning 'assembly.' In this episode, we examine the long and complex history of how the translation of how ekklesia was codified as 'church' and how this translation probably isn't correct.

Up until Modern English, the English language distinguished between its singular and plural second-person pronouns. Thou was the singular, and ye was the plural. Today, these have been replaced by a single pronoun, 'you.' Thou and ye are common Biblical pronouns in English, but there's more to their usage in the Bible than just preserving an old linguistic tradition. In today's episode, we examine the semantic implications of these archaic pronouns in English translations of the Bible.

Today's episode serves as an introduction to an extended series on Biblical etymology. In it, we discuss the difficulties of translating ancient texts--particularly holy texts--into modern languages. Over the course of this series, we'll gain insight into the overall development and evolution of Judaism and Christianity from the unlikely perspective of etymology.

When compared to the other numbers between ten and twenty, the words for eleven and twelve stick out like a sore thumb. If they followed the construction of the rest of the teen numbers, they'd be called one-teen and two-teen, but of course, this isn't the case.

The emergence of the words algebra and algorithm can be traced back to the life of one man, an Arabic mathematician named Al-Kworizmi. Today's episode looks at the history of Al-Kworizmi's works and their impact on the Western world, particularly on European languages.