gstafleu

In my continuing quest for etiology I'm reading a book by Gabriella Kalapos: Fertility Goddesses, Groundhog Bellies and the Coca Cola Company (or via: amazon.co.uk). It is about the origins of our modern holidays. It is a bit of a babble book, but it does have some interesting ideas. One of them is the following:
A quick google seems to yield some support for at least "red earth," a forum search doesn't seem to yield much. So what do our historians think, is Adam indeed "bloody clay" or is that a tendentious translation.

Oh, and what does this have to do with modern holidays? Well, it has to do with groundhog day. If there is any interest, I'll explain how.

Gerard Stafleu

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Let me tell you a little story. There was a little word that could. This word referred to that large ugly pimply thing that raised its ugliness over a person's shoulders, that thing that had lots of strands of dead cells hanging off and funny bumps and other features on one side. This little word one day decided to spread out and get said in different ways, as though the one word was beginning to sire other words. It was a kind of tower of babel in which whole families of words divided like mitosis and went off to conquer new cultures. Our little word sent its descendants off with each and ever one of these families, descendants which looked like the little word that could, but as generations went by the descendants sometimes took on features that didn't come from the little word that could.

I never learnt the name of the little word that could, but I got to know a lot of his children. In the early Latin family his descendant was called caput and caput was a very strong little word indeed, or so one would think by his descendants, but we'll return to him in a moment. Caput's Germanic brother, well, he never left any direct traces but we know many of his descendents. There's head and huvud and haupt and a host of others, all strong and healthy little descedants of the little word that could.

As I said, caput was apparently a strong little word which grew stronger, conquering the Germans (who transmogrified it into a German word, Kopf, who also were forced to change the meaning of its descendant of the little word that could, which took on related meaning as caput would), and larger, taking on new significance, being not just that ugly thing on one's shoulders, but having metaphorical significance when one considered a society, or a section thereof, as a body politic, which in turn had a metaphorically ugly thing on its shoulders.

But caput succumbed to a strange illness, which robbed it of its original meaning, ceding it to another word, an insidious word which originally meant "pot" or "amphora". It was a battle of muscle, because Roman soldiers used slang to refer to that ugly thing as a "testa" rather than a "caput" and the soldiers were such a strong force in Romans society that poor little caput had to make space for testa, so caput lost its head, but kept its metaphorical significance of "principal, main".

Caput's descendents went off to Spain and France (along with the brute, testa, which came to be tete in France). The French caput went over to Britain twice, the first time being received as chief and the second as chef, so the Brits ended up with three descendants of the little word that could, each different, but each derived from it. Which one is the true heir of the little word that could? Do they still all bear the significance of that little ancestor? Do they even look anything like it? Linguistic genealogy is a fascinating subject, which poses many questions.


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As a follow-up the Hebrew word for blood was DM which is related to the Assyrian damu.


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aa5874

There is a reference to Adam as being made from 'red earth' in 'Antiquities of the Jews' book 1 ch1:2

Anat

adam = human
adom = red
adama = earth
dam = blood

Since Hebrew Bible names often relate to the story in which they appear through folk etymology rather than a more formal etymology any of those might be related, though the story as appears in Genesis uses human and earth explicitly.