Amedeo

Semantic Discovery of Mount Zion

This is how it all started. A few days ago, I was reading an article about the discovery of the Greek statue of Hera, from about 200 B.C., near Mount Olympus [the home of Zeus and the council of the gods]. The article mentioned that the spot (to which the statue had been carried and presently discovered) was not far from the Dion, which was discovered some two years ago.

The Dion in question was a temple or sanctuary of Zeus and contained a statue of Zeus. Dion was a new word for me; so, for a moment I wandered why a sanctuary of Zeus was called a Dion. At the same time I said to myself that the word sounds like zion (pronounced "zee-on" on this occasion). So, I wandered whether Dion and Zion were synonymous words. [From now on, I am going to omit the constant underscoring when I talk about words.]

As I pointed out in other studies, the name ZEYS (transliterated into Zeus, according to the pronounciation of y as a u), has a shift of Z to D in the other grammatical cases. So, "of Zeus" = "Dios". Obviously then, the word "dion" is composed of the etym "di-" and the etym "-ion" (as in hermaion: the temple or santuary of Hermes). Hence "dion" means precisely "the santuary of Zeus" and, by not contracting sounds, it should be written as Diion. ("Zeus/Dios" denotes the huge daylight or luminous sky; its etym is found in the Latin dies, deus, diana, etc.)


Back on the range, Zion is a variation of the old English Sion, which is also the French and the Italian name, which goes back to the Latin Sion. "Sion" is the word used in translating Scriptures from Greek. The Greek word in question is Seion. (The difference between Seion and Sion is like the difference between Seilenos and Silenus.)

A duplication of a vowel (as in the case of diion) is normally such that the two vowels are slightly different in sound, as one vowel is upwards in pitch and the other is downward, or vice-versa: they are not vowels of identical pitch. Now, we know that the vowels are actually a sound
with different pitches, the scale being written by means of these letters, "U, O, A, E, I." (Other vowels fit into other positions of this scale.) So, it is quite possible that "seion" ("seio^n") in facts records a descending i and an ascending i: the descending sound is lower in pitch than an ascending sound, wherefore the writting is by the letter e and by the letter i. At any rate, the single i of Sion and of Dion involves a slurring or equalization of the different vowels of the sounds (which we call "contraction" of sounds). // There is also the fact that non all people of a given culture had or have an exactly similar pronunciation. So, a Roman historian recorded the saying of some people that their leader was a certain Chrestos, whereas Greeks always wrote Christos.)

"Dion", "zion" [zee`-on], and "sion" are variations of one word, which is a Greek word which means "temple or sanctuary of Zeus." Or: "seion," "siion," "diion," and "ziion" are variations of one Greek word, which is identical in meaning with any of the words with the single i spelling.

The Greek "seion" is a rendition of the Scriptural Hebrew word "siyyon," as I found out in a Jewish theological article. The Kerux article does not give the meaning of the word, for the Jews do not know the meaning of many of their words such as Siyyon, Yahweh, and even El/Elohim which is a Semitic word but not originally their own. (I know all about the fake Semitic etymologies they have constructed.) But they certainly knew the denotations of the words they used, otherwise they would not have used them. So, they used "siyyon" ["zion" in modern English] as the name of a mount or heights in Jerusalem. So, they and we say "Zion" or "Mount Zion" to name one and the same thing. Why is the mount called Zion rather than Bethel (the house or abode of El) or Olympus nobody knows, because nobody knows the meaning of the word "siyyon". But in fact, psamists (as in Psalm 48) talk about Zion precisely as the temple or abode of God [El] or the Lord [Yahweh].

"Great is the Lord [=Yahweh], and most worthy of praise, in the CITY OF OUR GOD [= El], his holy mountain." In other words, there is a mountain or mount which is the city (the architectural dwelling place) of God, and it is there that Yahweh dwells.

The psalmist goes on to say that "Mount Zion" is the city of the great king, and that God is in its citadel. The whole picture is somewhat clear: There is a mount on which construction has been done. (Sometimes the "city" constructed on a mount is called a hamlet.) This city has a fortress or stronghold or citadel or acropolis, in which God dwells. So, the citadel is what we also call a temple or sactuary of a god. (In Athens, the acropolis culminates in the temple of Athena. In Rome, the acropolis on the Capitoline hill culminates in the the temple of Juppiter [Zeus] and Minerva [Athena], but then it was replaced by a church to a dark [Arab] Madonna from Galilee, a virgin other than Athena and Minerva.)

Why did not the Israelites call that house of God BETH-EL rather than ZION? Because they never named that temple which they found when they occupied Jerusalem. They used the name employed by the Jerusalem residents, a non-Semitic name. It is clear from what the psalmist continues to say, that the citadel with that temple were not things that the Israelites constructed; they were already in pre-Israelitic Jerusalem: When the kings [of Israel] joined forces and advanced together, the saw the citadel, were astounded, and fled in terror. It is only the speaking psalmist, a resident of Israelitic Jerusalem, that thinks of Zion as the temple of his God or Lord. In the very same psalm, he speaks of "we"meditating in God's temple. / Of course, in other books of the Bible, a speaker or writer presents God telling his people how to construct the temple, with specifications of all kinds. Actually this blueprint was produced by someone one who made measurements of the existing temple, wherefore, it is interesting to know what that temple was like which the proto-Greeks excogitated by their own minds. / The awesome temple the psalmist is talking about cannot be the temple which Solomon allegedly built AFTER the occupation of the city.

Finally the psalmist gives a clearer picture of the Zion (city) that lies on the mount: a fortress or halmet with towers and ramparts and citadels (where the Lord and the great king, David, dwelled). Eventually a temple of Yahweh was caused to be constructed by non-Jewish King Herod, and eventually the Arabs built the temple of El or Allah on the mount. A Church to St. Mary of Mount Sion was constructed in the area by the occupying Crusaders, but no trace of it remains, except perhaps for a similar but later remodeled church of St. Mary of Sion in Axum, Ethiopia, in connection with the exploits of the Templars and the ark.

We know from Eblaite sources that Yahweh existed in non-Israelitic Palestine, and I have shown that Yah was not a Semitic god, but rather a Caucasian god that became the central god of the Latins, the pristine Yah(weh) being identical with Ju(piter). Aside from later identifications, Jupiter and Zeus are different gods, and until now I had no evidence that there was a Zeus among the proto-Greek speaking people in the pre-semitic Levant. It was on different grounds that I stated that the proto-Greek speaking population (or southern Caucasians) extended, in the course of time, from the Euphrates River to the Tiber River.

Chris Weimer

Actually, diion isn't a "contracted" word, in the Greek sense, as Attic contracts, but is regular in construction.

The Z in Zion comes from the different ways to transliterate the Hebrew צִיּוֹן which you failed to mention, oddly enough.

Diion is not a real word, and is only made up by you with faulty Greek knowledge.

This is utter garbage. The first is downright false, the second is ignorant of the evolution of the pronunciation of eta.

Quite possibly the most ignorant thing I've ever read. Where did you get zion from? It's certainly not connected from your earlier posts. Nor sion, since Zeus (genitive Dios) contains no initial S.

No, not siyyon, but tziyyon, the s in ts being rather antiquated.

What? The Jews do what?? Since when have you asked every single Jew the meaning of Elohim, eh? Where do you get off misrepresenting the opinions of every Jew? Moreover, no Semitic words are "Jewish" - they're Semitic for a reason!

Apparently, you have your own fake etymologies.

Did you miss the fact that there's a real mountain called Zion near Jerusalem?

Jupiter actually comes from the slurring of Di to a /j/. Jupiter = Dies-pater, and the name is found throughout Indo-European languages.

Do you have any evidence for the assertions that the Levant was ever proto-Greek?

This, like the rest of your post, is utter crap.

Ben C Smith

I was waiting for the connection to Deion Sanders... but it never came.

Ben.

Steven Avery

Hmm.. I was thinking Dion Demucchi (Dion & the Belmonts).

Did some nice music in his early believer albums.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Kosh

Sorry, but Bob Marley pronounced it "Z-eye-on".

End of argument.

spin

Linguistics 101 could have saved you nearly all of this. Its rule 1 says to know something about the languages you are messing with.


spin

Amedeo

You must have learned the art of higher criticism, which does not require you to pinpont any mistakes. In effect you stated that my statement do not agree with orthodox information; so, it is incorrect in the same way that a students reply to a teacher question is. However, we cannot speak of any incorrectness on my part, since you are not presenting any taught information relatively to which my statements are incorrect.

In simpler words for simple minds: your remarks were a waste of breath.

spin

I must admit that butterfly linguistics is a kind of art, mainly a visual art. You don't need to know how transliterations and related sounds in different languages function. You just need to gull the gullible, so if it looks ok to the untrained eye, then I guess you'll be happy.

How is the Hebrew TSADE normally transliterated into Greek and vice versa? How is the Hebrew DALET normally transliterated? Both of these you need to demonstrate fits into your stuff. That's Linguistics 101. There you'll find that languages are sets of systems and to deal with them you need to be systematic.

George Bernard Shaw showed what a little ingenuity and dexterity of letters in English can do when he showed that "fish" should be spelt ghoti. You don't need to know anything about the system involved in the phonology of languages to play such games.

First you make the blunder of working from English representations of foreign words, as though that was indicative of anything about the original languages. Then you should realise that the Hebrew letter TSADE does not exist in either Greek or English so the equivalents of the letter will not be accurate. Of course you should realise that the "etym" [sic] -ion- is not transliterated into Hebrew as YWN and all you need do is consult a decent Hebrew dictionary. But you flitter from one English representation to another with gay abandon, showing no knowledge of the languages you are pretending to deal with or their phonologies. Is it any wonder that I recommended that you consider Linguistics 101? You just haven't got a clue about what you are trying to do -- other than attempting to be provocative.


spin

Amedeo

===> means: Reply ahead
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Amedeo View Post
Hence "dion" means precisely "the santuary of Zeus" and, by not contracting sounds, it should be written as Diion. ("Zeus/Dios" denotes the huge daylight or luminous sky; its etym is found in the Latin dies, deus, diana, etc.) ----------------

Actually, diion isn't a "contracted" word, in the Greek sense, as Attic contracts, but is regular in construction.
===> I stated that the presently used word "dion" is really the result of "di+ion", which make clear what it means. It does not matter whether what happened should be called a contyraction or not, or what Greek dialects makes contractions. As you did not object to the meaning I explicitates, your remarks , whether correct or incorrect, were besides the point.

Quote:
Back on the range, Zion is a variation of the old English Sion, which is also the French and the Italian name, which goes back to the Latin Sion. "Sion" is the word used in translating Scriptures from Greek. The Greek word in question is Seion. (The difference between Seion and Sion is like the difference between Seilenos and Silenus.)--------

The Z in Zion comes from the different ways to transliterate the Hebrew צִיּוֹן which you failed to mention, oddly enough.

===> According to the information I have, the English word in present use, Zion, is based on the English word in former use, Sion. That information may be inaccurate and the truth may be that "zion" came into vogue because of a new transliteration of the Hebrews word, but it does not matter as far as my discourse is concerned, because the subject of the discourse was not "zion;"
I was in the process of stating that the O.E. Sion and other languages Sion go back to a greek word, which goes back to a hebrew word. The objective was to point out that Dion (or Diion) and Sion (in all of its variations -- English, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin) are really the same word or "meaning", namely "the abode of Zeus". You did not really offer any criticism, as by saying that Dion means x, and Sion [in Hebrew or other languages] means y, namely something different from x.
You keep on making MARGINAL REMARKS rather than central remarks about the discourse you were reading -- which is neither here nor there.

Quote:
A duplication of a vowel (as in the case of diion) is normally such that the two vowels are slightly different in sound, as one vowel is upwards in pitch and the other is downward, or vice-versa: they are not vowels of identical pitch. -------------

Diion is not a real word, and is only made up by you with faulty Greek knowledge.

===> Read this slowly: It is true that Diion is not a real word today, and it is true that I constructed it, but it isfalse that the construction was done with faulty Greek knowledge. You said what you said because you did not read some details of my discopuse, such as the fact that "hermaion" means the abode or sanctuary or temple of Hermers. In other words, I know perfectly well of Greek word formation and that one meaning of -ion is the place or abode and the like. Because of this perfect knowledge, I was able to infer that the presently used "dion" as a sanctuary of Zeus [in which a statur was found' is precicely di-ion, namely the sanctualy of Zeus. Even a simple-minded reader could see that I constructed "diion" on the basis of the way "dion" is used and on the knowledge of Greek word-formation.

Quote:
Now, we know that the vowels are actually a sound with different pitches, the scale being written by means of these letters, "U, O, A, E, I." (Other vowels fit into other positions of this scale.) So, it is quite possible that "seion" ("seio^n") in facts records a descending i and an ascending i: the descending sound is lower in pitch than an ascending sound, wherefore the writting is by the letter e and by the letter i. At any rate, the single i of Sion and of Dion involves a slurring or equalization of the different vowels of the sounds (which we call "contraction" of sounds). // There is also the fact that non all people of a given culture had or have an exactly similar pronunciation. So, a Roman historian recorded the saying of some people that their leader was a certain Chrestos, whereas Greeks always wrote Christos.)-------

This is utter garbage. The first is downright false, the second is ignorant of the evolution of the pronunciation of eta.
====> I see that you, too, have learned the art of higher criticism: when you read something which does not agree with your preconceptions, you call it garbage. If you learned the art of investigating or inspecting food in a food-store, or if you learned the art of analytic chemistry, or the art of biological dissection, you would have the analytical skills to disting one thing from another, what is useful and what is useless, what is wholesome and what is garbage, and so forth. So, return to my discourse when you have learned some real analytical art./ Your specific remark about knowing the evolution is IRRELEVANt to any explanation of the e of seion, because I did nopt claim that seion is derived from a previous Greek word. Careful reading will reveal that I was dealing with seion as a transcription of an hebrew word, wherefore there is a question as to why it is Seion rather than Siion: one possibility may be the way the Greeks heard the word or the way they transcribed a written word or, we may add, because of the fact that the WRITTEN Hebrew word is not an accurate representation of their own spoken word. When it comes to vowel sounds, where is the capacity of the Hebrew script to simply represent them? It is the Greek aphaber that produced letters for the vowels. (And the moment I suppose that the Greek Diion or Dion was transmitted to the Islaelites through the Jesubites of Jerusalem, I would not expect that "dion" preseved its sound perfectly.)

Quote:
"Dion", "zion" [zee`-on], and "sion" are variations of one word, which is a Greek word which means "temple or sanctuary of Zeus." Or: "seion," "siion," "diion," and "ziion" are variations of one Greek word, which is identical in meaning with any of the words with the single i spelling. -----------------

Quite possibly the most ignorant thing I've ever read. Where did you get zion from? It's certainly not connected from your earlier posts. Nor sion, since Zeus (genitive Dios) contains no initial S.
===> That passage of mine was a summary of what I had been discussing, excplaining, or explicitating. So, you must have missed more thgan one boat on what I said earlier.

Quote:
The Greek "seion" is a rendition of the Scriptural Hebrew word "siyyon," as I found out in a Jewish theological article.
No, not siyyon, but tziyyon, the s in ts being rather antiquated.
===> The way the Hebrew word is transliterated today is totally irrelevant to what I was discussing. The Greeks heard or interpreted the beginning of the Hebrews word as as S, otherwise they had a Z that they could have used. The fact of importance is that there is a word (amongst various peoples) that varies in its initial sound -- essentially: Dion or Diion, Sion, Seion, siyyon or tziyyon, or other, and it means "the abode of Zeus."

Quote:
The Kerux article does not give the meaning of the word, for the Jews do not know the meaning of many of their words such as Siyyon, Yahweh, and even El/Elohim which is a Semitic word but not originally their own.

What? The Jews do what?? Since when have you asked every single Jew the meaning of Elohim, eh? Where do you get off misrepresenting the opinions of every Jew? Moreover, no Semitic words are "Jewish" - they're Semitic for a reason!
===> What? Who is talkling about every single Jew (or, for that matter, about every single Israelite, that is every simple man who has the Israelitic nationality)? / Your question, which amounts to a judgment that I was speaking about every Jew, would not have been asked, if you had perfect knowledge of the English language usage. If I said, "These are Jewish lies," the meaning would be that these are lies the Jews tell, not that evey Jew tells lies (of these kinds of lies). If I said that I know all about fake etimologies Jews make, the meaning is that I know the kind of etymologies rabbis and other Jewish etymologists make about Scriptural words, not that every Jew make etimologies (or fake etymologies at that) etymologies.

Quote:
(I know all about the fake Semitic etymologies they have constructed.)
Apparently, you have your own fake etymologies.

Quote:
But they certainly knew the denotations of the words they used, otherwise they would not have used them. So, they used "siyyon" ["zion" in modern English] as the name of a mount or heights in Jerusalem. So, they and we say "Zion" or "Mount Zion" to name one and the same thing. Why is the mount called Zion rather than Bethel (the house or abode of El) or Olympus nobody knows, because nobody knows the meaning of the word "siyyon". But in fact, psamists (as in Psalm 48) talk about Zion precisely as the temple or abode of God [El] or the Lord [Yahweh].

Did you miss the fact that there's a real mountain called Zion near Jerusalem?
===> It is irrelevant that there was anouther mountain besides the citadel mount which was called Zion.

Quote:
We know from Eblaite sources that Yahweh existed in non-Israelitic Palestine, and I have shown that Yah was not a Semitic god, but rather a Caucasian god that became the central god of the Latins, the pristine Yah(weh) being identical with Ju(piter).
Jupiter actually comes from the slurring of Di to a /j/. Jupiter = Dies-pater, and the name is found throughout Indo-European languages.
==> Your orthodox etimology of Juppiter is wrong. (I made an extensive etymology elsewhere.) And the fact remains that there is no correct rabbinical etymology of Yahveh.

Quote:
Aside from later identifications, Jupiter and Zeus are different gods, and until now I had no evidence that there was a Zeus among the proto-Greek speaking people in the pre-semitic Levant.
Do you have any evidence for the assertions that the Levant was ever proto-Greek?
==> Plenty of evidence, which I stated elsewhere and I do not care to repeat.

Quote:
It was on different grounds that I stated that the proto-Greek speaking population (or southern Caucasians) extended, in the course of time, from the Euphrates River to the Tiber River.

This, like the rest of your post, is utter crap.
===> Your final judgment goes to show that all of your criticisms are utter crop.

Amaleq13

Amedeo,

Please use the format codes built-in to IIDB programming because what you have done is nearly unreadable. If you do not know how to use the codes, send a PM and I will explain.

Thanks in advance,


Doug aka Amaleq13, BC&H moderator