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Etymology of mortal, mortality and murder | ||
Tags: Etymology | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6034 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes  5 sounds | Message 2 of 11 19 October 2008 at 4:19pm | IP Logged |
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By the way, do you happen to know if "athanatos" means something in modern Greek? :)
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 11 20 October 2008 at 7:07am | IP Logged |
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"θάνατος" still is the word for "death" in Modern Greek, just as it was in Ancient Greek (they had a God named Thanatos, the brother of Morpheus (the sleep)). "Aθάνατος" is a derived adjective meaning immortal or 'undead' (I don't know whether it also applies to vampyres, but it has been used about the main character in the film Highlander). I have looked the word up in Google and found out that it also is the Greek word for the hardy agave, the name of a society for the defense of the Christian religion and the name or part of the name for several companies. So yes, it means a lot in Modern Greek.
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| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6034 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 4 of 11 20 October 2008 at 10:06am | IP Logged |
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Ok, thanks. I was told that my first name (which is Atanas) derives from the Greek word "athanatos" so I wanted to investigate this.
I wonder how this came to be used as a first name ^_^ 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Theodisce Octoglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5886 days ago 127 posts - 167 votes Speaks: Polish*, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Czech, French, English, German Studies: Italian, Spanish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Portuguese | Message 6 of 11 27 December 2008 at 5:33am | IP Logged |
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I can hardly believe that Latin could lack as basic word as "death". I believe the similartities between Greek and Latin in this case are caused just by the common development of Proto-Indo-European. The word similar to mors appears also in Slavic languages: it is śmierć in Polish from the earlier form smrt which is in my opinion the same as Latin mors.Oh, and to murder is mordować in Polish, a murder is ein Mord in German etc. So it is rather not a borrowing from Greek. Edited by Theodisce on 27 December 2008 at 5:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Theodisce Octoglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5886 days ago 127 posts - 167 votes Speaks: Polish*, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Czech, French, English, German Studies: Italian, Spanish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Portuguese | Message 8 of 11 27 December 2008 at 11:35am | IP Logged |
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Isn't it because we lack any early Latin full size texts?
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