Amedeo

Correction:
I meant to say "utter crap," as I intended to your precious evaluation terminology. I would not want to mispell it for anything in the world.

Amedeo

Like the other guy I replied to, you do not read carefully and then you adduce facts [whether they are really facts or vagaries] which are BESIDES THE POINT.
I did not transliterate -ion into Hebrew and I did not even state that -ion corresponds to a part of the Hebrew word.
What I did in effect assert is that there is a Hebrew word (which I quoted as it was transliterated in a Semitic Studies journal as SIYYON), which in denotation corresponds to "zion" (as in Mount Zion) and which the Greeks rendered -- correctly or not -- as SEION.

WHETHER ANYBODY DID ANY MIS-TRANSLITERATION DOES NOT MATTER. What is important for two words to be cognates (that is, essentially ONE WORD) is that (1) they have the same basic meaning or same denotation, (2) that they have a similarity of sound (so that linguists deal a lot with issues of phonological changes), and (3) some historical information that the word in one language was born with a dependency on another language.

So, many considerations led me to the conclusion that -- spellings aside -- Seion is derived from Siyyon [and both have the same denotation], and Siyyon is derived from an ancient Greek word (Dion) that meant "abode of Zeus."

Many etymologies that many etimologists put forth do not comply with the stringent criteria I stated for cognates, but you would not tell them to take Linguistics 101 BECAUSE it does matter to your whether their claims are true or false, as long as they do not deal with the Hebrew language.

An 18th century German linguist made the big blunder of dividing certain families of languages into SEMITIC and ARYAN (later called Indo-Germanic). Instead of investigating, he inferred from the Bible that what he called Semitic was the language of Shem, wherefore Hebrew is the mother-language of the other Semitic languages, and the language which by default (or divine confusing intervention) gave rise to the gentilistic languages.

On the one hand, Hebrew is not the primordial language of humans, anymore than Cain and Abel were the original farming and shepherding humans; on the other, it is demonstrable that the Levantine Semitic languages (Akkadian, Hebrew, etc.) are not simple languages; they are comminglings and hybrids of Arabic/Ethiopic and Caucasian (or Proto-Greek and Sumerian).[ What did really happen at the Tower of Babel? Who did the commingling?) // Since they do not teach this in Linguistics 101, a course like that does not prepare anyone to do linguistic work. What you learned there is not the real nature of languages.

There are many reasons to believe that the Hebrews (before they became Israelites under Abrahim) were Caucasians with a Caucasian language and god [Yah], and that by the Babel commingling, they acquired the Arabic language and deity (the Elohim who made man in THEIR own image, one male and one female -- by magic rather than by sculpting and breathing life, as Yah did......) You have studied Genesis-1 and Genesis-2, right?

There is a lot revealed by the Bible that the prophets never revealed and that the rabbis never understand.

Chris Weimer

Amadeo - you're dead wrong. They do not mean the same thing. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

spin

The LXX ubiquitously has siwn.

A cognate is a word in one language which is derived from the same source as a word in another language because each language inherited them from their common ancestor, eg panj in Sanskrit and fünf in German.

You are talking about something other than a cognate.

Why doesn't it look like the LXX siwn, which is certainly a transliteration of CYWN? Remember that a WAW is usually a transliteration of an omega and vice versa. They are both long vowels and phonologically significant. Also remember that the Hebrew TSADE has nothing to do with a Greek delta. By not remembering these things you are denying principal evidence.

I usually take anyone purveying folk etymologies or their equivalents here to task.

As you haven't done linguistics 101, you couldn't know.

Does this mean that the Phoenicians, Ugarits, Canaanites, Edomites, Ammonites and Palmyreans are also Caucasians with Caucasian languages because they share close linguistic ties to Hebrew??

If you mean the Genesis that one finds at the beginning of the Hebrew bible, yes, I have. What that has to do with the rest of your stuff though is not transparent.

But you do of course. Take my advice. Linguistics 101.


spin

Amedeo

You are telling me that when I speak of cognates [or use the word "cognate"], I am NOT talking about cognates but, rather, about something else! You are obviously not familiar with the way humans use words, words which were coined before their use, because, it is physically impossible for a person to use a word [that is, to point to what a word denotes, or to express what a word means] and to be doing the opposite, that is, denoting something different from one is denoting [by the very use of the word], or expressing a meaning which is different from a meaning which one is expressing [by the very use of the word].

What you should have said -- if you understood what you were saying -- is that I was not using a word [with a certain denotation or meaning] that some linguists have used; or that, for example, in my using the word "water" [by which I meant a liquid that quenches my thirst], I was not using the word "water" which chemists use [by which they mean particles individually composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom]. Any thinking person will realize that he who speaks of such and such a liquid is not talking about something which is OTHER THAN such-and-such molecules. // More specifically, a thinking person may realize that the primary or etymological meaning of "cognate" is "born together or jointly" , and cognate words are twins, as far as their meaning is concerned. But I do not call cognate words "synonyms" for the simple reason that two synonyms in a given language may consist of entirely different sounds, whereas what I call cognates have only minor sound differences. It is because they are essentially similar in sound [as in the case of their having identical consonants] that I call them cognates rather than synonyms.

Now, if one asks, How come that two words with the same meaning have an essential similar sound? or: How come that there are cognates and not just synonyms? The answer is -- on the basis of acquaintance with the life of languages -- that originally there was ONE word in some language, with had one sound and one meaning, but this word, either in its native land or in some other land, underwent some sonic change.
I have also written on the fact that , if we take what a word designate (such as a Rose, Man, Water, Boat), what is designated is usually a complex thingq, so that a native speaker might say "sail" to designate the whole boat [that's synecdoche], or a foreigner who acquires a word may say "boat" to denote simply a sail. So, it may happen that an acquired or borrowed word may vary slightly in sound from the original, and may differ entirely in meaningor denotation from the original. However, an external student of words in two languages, cannot call "Boat" and "Buat" [= sail] cognates, because, except in some circumstances, he has no way of telling that the English "boat" is a word which is also being used in Dreamland.

Now, a linguist, such as you refer to, may put the cart before the horse, and, having discovered that two words are cognates IN THE WAY I DEFINE "COGNATES", he will define Boat [= |boat|] and Buat [= |boat|] cognates because the latter was born from the former, or because Mundo and Mondo were born from Mundus, and he might even create this restriction: Only the two or more originated words are to be called cognates. No matter how he defines "cognates", the truth remains that he has to recognize the consanguineity of two (or more) words before he can say that there is a mother-word for the other(s). If you have no way of defining and finding the consanguineity of two children, you have no way of telling that they are children of one mother. So, don't tell me what reputable and shallow linguistists do and how they define their official words; I know all about the blunders of the Pokorneys of this world, as I have discovered them.

The only other remarks that I want to make is that you are thinking on your own tracks and make remarks or criticisms that are off the mark. You are not reading what I keep in saying, and you keep on harping on the CORRECT transliteration of an Hebrew letter into a Greek letter or vice-versa. (A) What you or others believe to be the correct transliterations is irrelevant to the transliterations that people made hundreds or years ago. (B) When a Hebrew word was written down by a Greek (or anybody else),
-- he may have been in the process of transliterating a written Hebrew word;
-- he may have been in the process of writing down in Greek a spoken Hebrew word;
-- he may have written down a H. word in the way he heard it said by one man (and not by another); or
-- he may have written down a spoken H. word in the peculiar way he heard it (not as some other Greek may have heard it).
[One's own signature is not alawys precisely the same. Maybe it is hardly ever the same. And I who have ears to hear don't find that my own spoken words are always the same. The fact of diversity is noticeable to most people when they have a fever or are in a state of fear or anxiety.]
Jesus was quoted as invoking his God, and what do we read? "Eloi, Eloi,..." or "Eli, Eli..." how could the hearers be so far apart? Well, the Greeks have the sound -oi as the plural of certain words, and it was certyainly preserved in their literature, but in the course of time, they (like the Latins) produced a single sound which is, or is similar to, the sound "i". So, they heard "el- something" which sounded like the contracted "i" or the traditional plain "i". The Greeks who wrote down oral reports or stories wrote either "oi" or "i". (This variation is writing is NOT due to some poor knowledge of correct transliteration).

You were not able to grasp these simple propositions: There is a Hebrew word F which denotes a mount and the abode of a god. There is a Greek word G that denotes the same mount and the abode of a god [I say the same because the Greek writer was merely translating a Hebrew work, not writing a story of his own]. There are words H'H"H'" which are employed in translating G. And there is an orginally Greek word K which denotes the abode of a god on a mountain top. //The words in question have two components: one means "god" or is the name of a god; and the other means "abode". They are slightly different in sound. So, I call them cognates; they are not precisely one and the same word. Furthermore -- and this is as important as meanings/denotation and sounds -- the words in question are not taken at random from the world of languages. What cannot be determined, at face-value, is whether F or K is the primary or matrix word.

I will go no further at this point, since it is unlikely that you could follow my story. I will only say that linguist Semerano would say that "Dion" (K) is a word of Semitic origin, because he endeavored to show, in two volumes, the Semitic origin of many Indo-European words, but without realizing that, unlike Arabic and Ethiopic, the Levantine Semitic
words are not pure Semitic. At least one Jewish scholar has compared Bible Hebrew and Iliad Greek, and found that Hebrew is largely Greek. Both linguists committed etymological errors, but the fact of error has a consequnce only on the NUMBER of Ggreek cognates; they decide nothing about priority.
Semerano assumed, like the 18th Century German linguist, that Semitic is older than Greek. There is no evidence whatsover for this. The assumption is based on the Biblical genealogy of humans, which really tells us that if Semitic was the language spoken by Cain and Abel, the first farmer and shepherd, Semitic appeared in the late neolithic age, or, as the Bible chronologists would say, sometimes around 3000 B.C. Indeed, I would say that the forms of Levantine Semitic appeared as the pro-Arabic spread in the Levant wherefore Akkad, Canaan, Israel, etc. were formed in various periods of time. The most important fact is that "Israel," the short-lived Hebrew Pasture Land, is neither the oldest Semitic land, nor one of the first human habitats of the earth. (The Biblical history of the nations is a pious fable, just like the Greek and other heroic fables of the founding of nations. They are not history.)

Amedeo

P.S. (too late for inclusion) --

I take this occasion to state the PRINCIPLE OF LINGUISTIC TOPOLOGY for future historians [reserachers]:

Before the age of writing, words [which are exant now in speech or in writing] existed in a place either because speakers of those words lived in that place, or because speakers of those words injected themselves in that place, or because speakers of those words brought the words there, or because livers in that place imported those words.

In the case of the first of the two alternatives, the words are indigeous; when a new language submerges an earlier one, the new one includes above all the names of foreign gods, heroes, and places. In the case of the second two alternatives, the words are imported in one way or other, are relatively few, and are not the most ordinary ones in a language.

Greek "original" words are exant in the speech of people over a large area of the Aegean, were exant in the speech of the Latins and other Italic peoples, exist as derivatives among many European peoples, existed as the original language of the Philistines [simultaneously with Canaanite, Hebrew/Aramaic, and others, and with non-Semitic Persian], and exist in an as yet undetermined number in the Levantine so-called Semitic languages. (Part of Sumer was overrun by Arab-speaking people and became Akkad, and so was part of Philistine-land which became Phoenicia.) So, with quite differerent intensities, there is the occurrence of Greek from the Euphates to the Tiber, and possibly to some extent beyond the Tigris. The substratum of Akkad was Sumer (and something more); the substratum of Canaan and Israel was... there is no single name for that land, probably because there was no single nation. // Pure Semitc is Arabic and Ethiopic BEFORE they were influenced from Akkad and, later on, from the Greek-speaking world. If a Phoenician, Hrebrew, or Akkadian word [which does not refer specifically to some cultural fact of their own] is not found in Arabic and Ethiopic, we can be fairly certain that its is not Semitic, and that it is either Greek or Sumerian. The spadework for separating Semitic ["arabesque"] and Caucasian is yet to be undertaken.

Both the language of Canaan (as at Ebla) and the language of Israel (in the oral traditions of the Pastureland which eventually were written down in the Books) preserves both Yahweh and the Elohim -- names which respectively belong to the Levantine or proto-Greek language and the Canaanite-Arab language. Of course, both may be called Semitic names, for they were uttered by the Semites, just as "mercato" and "bistecca" are said to be Italian because they were put forth by Italians, while "mercato" is of Oscan origin (south of Latium) and "bistecca" is of English origin. Most Italian words are of Latin origin, and there is no such a thing as a word of Italian origin, since there has never been an Italy with an indigenous and unique language of its own; the inhabitants of Italy have been the Latins, the Oscans, the Greeks, the Etruscans, the Venitians, and others, and the gods of the Italians have been as diverse as their languages. // El and Ya are not the gods of one language or one culture, nor are they different names of one reality, unless you cannot understand the difference between a magician and an artisan.
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For people you can read Italian: my etymological study of the language of a small town in what used to be called Magna Graecia [southern Italy]:

http://www.xanga.com/Longobardese