Bethel - the house of the canaanite god El (page 6)

Witness My Fury

Being STUPID was entirely my point... what part of sarcasm dont you understand?

Jeffro

mP

to say so or even disregard saying elders are not in anyway connexted wit el is strange. i dont appreciate how a man in a religious role is not in anyway related to the god he serves.

This is a basic equivocation fallacy.

Wow, so NOLAW is basically taking any combination of vowel (a, e, o) + /l/ in names as evidence of a Semitic loanword, apparently, 'el, distributed all over Europe. Never mind that they derive from different etymological roots from different languages and are only similar if you ignore the differences. And mP is still seriously claiming that it is not "far fetched" to claim Semitic 'el "god" as a common root and throws in the Romance definite article to boot. *eye roll*

The actual etymologies of most of these words are well known. And because of the possibility of coincidental phonetic resemblence, one must demonstrate the etymological connection through usual comparative linguistic principles, not simple assertion. And since we are talking about something so simple as a combination of any vowel and /l/ with almost any potential meaning, I would say the potential for coincidence is quite vast. I would guess almost every language in the world, at least any with the sound /l/, might have a word starting with al- or el- or il-, etc.

So here is the actual etymology of the English word "elder". It comes from the Mercian dialect form (eldra) of the Old English word ealdra "older", which is the comparative form of ald "old". Ealdest was the superlative form "eldest". This dialect reduced diphthongs into monophthongs (/ea/ → /e/) when they occurred before /l/, and the reason why the /ea/ diphthong occurred was because Old English had umlaut vowel harmony in the comparative. The cognate forms "older" and "oldest" come from the same words, but derive from a time after the loss of the umlaut in the language. So the similarity of the first vowel in elder being the same as the vowel in El depends on a particular phonological process in a particular dialect of Old English. Old English ald "old" in turn derives from West Germanic *alÞas "grown up, adult", from which we have the words Gothic alÞeis, Old Frisian ald, and modern German alt and Dutch oud. So the meaning of "old" is only restricted to Germanic, and mostly West Germanic in particular (hence, not found in North Germanic). The root *alÞas "grown up" in turn derives from the Proto-Indo-European suffixed form *al-to "grown up", from the root *al "to grow, nourish". Latin altus "high" is another word deriving from *al-to, as the sense of height < "grown tall". The root *al otherwise can be found in such words as Old Norse ala "to nourish", Gothic alan "to grow, grow up", Old Irish alim "I nourish", Latin alere "to feed, nourish, bring up, increase", and Greek althein "to get well" and aldaino "make grow". The similarity in meaning with "elder" being used as a religious ecclesiastical term is not early (going back to some loanword from Semitic thousands of years ago) but extremely late. It only acquired that meaning after the introduction of Christianity to Britain and the use of ealdra to translate the Greek word presbuteros "elder" in the Old English translation of the Bible. So yeah, your idea (elder < "servants of El") is extremely far fetched and disproven by the linguistic evidence.

Pistoff

mP vs Leolaia, teehee

NOLAW

Leolaia: Thanks for your little research. You actually proved that I am correct. Did you understand what you wrote? Once again thank you.

mP: You mixed the bits of information. Try again.

Servant: abd

God: Al

God's Servant: abd-al (Arabic: Abdoullah)

-

Gate: bab

God: Al, El

Gate of God: Bab-al, Bab-el. Greek/English: Babylon.

-

English: night

Greek: nix

Latin: nos

Goth.: nahts

Anc. Scandinavian: nott

Slavic: nosti

Sanscrit: nis

from Semetic verb: naha which means: reach the end, reach the limit.

Leolaia

NO LAW....I think you need to familiarize yourself with general principles in historical lingusitics, particularly the comparative method. You will find that your comparisons carry no weight because you are treating names that derive from very different roots as the same (as well as ignoring such things as onset consonants) and your criteria are so loose that any chance (or forced) similarity is good enough for you. Your last post also seems to imply that it doesn't matter what the vowels are because vowels in Indo-European cognates can vary all over the place. But this is not a willy-nilly variation; it is patterned and fully explicable from what we know about the PIE system of ablaut, paradigm simplication in conjugation and declension, phonological conditioning (such as the laryngeal coloring of vowels), and other factors involved in regular sound change. So in the case of *nók w ts "night", reflexes of the vowel followed the usual forms for the PIE o-grade: Indo-Iranian */a/ (cf. Sanskrit nák, náktam in the acc.sing.) = Baltic */a/ (cf. Lithuanian naktis) = Slavic */o/ (cf. Old Church Slavonic nošti) = Germanic */a/ (cf. Gothic nahts, Old High German naht, Old Norse natt; the /i/ in Old English niht is secondary) = Celtic */o/ (cf. Old Irish nocht, Breton noz) = Italic */o/ (cf. Latin nox, noctis in the gen.sing.). This is the same familiar o-grade pattern found in many other reflexes of PIE words, such as *porkos "pig" (cf. Sanskrit pasa, Lithuanian pãršas "castrated boar", Russian porosjata, Old High German farh, Old Irish orc, Latin porcus), *b h oso "naked" (cf. Lithuanian basas, Old Church Slavonic bosu, Russian bosoj, Gothic bazis), or *mono "neck" (cf. Sanskrit mánya, Old Church Slavonic monisto, German mana, Latin monile). There is no correspondence between *nók w ts and a supposed Semitic naha (cf. Arabic naha "reach, come to a place"), and *nók w ts is derived from the e-grade verb *nek w t "to become dark". BTW, the Greek form is not nix but νυξ/νυκτ- (from the zero-grade form *nk w t- attested elsewhere in Sanskrit akta, Gothic uht-, Old High German uhta, etc.).

mP

@jeffro

I never said it was definitive proof, i meant it was a reasonable start in investigating if there was connection. The other arguments about elks are just stupid, i hope you appreciate that, even if they were meant to be funny.

@nolaw

Sure, im confused how that makes my comments about "al" wrong. I nevever claimed it was universaly true, but many langs in Europe do share a common root in many important terms. WHile many might say some particular term in English originated in another neighbouring language if we go back far enough its obvious there is a common root. My last sentence refers to terms like mother and father which are the same with variations and substitutions in other languages wehre a consonant is transposed for another, think fv/th-d etc pairing.

mP

@leolaia

My comments about EL and LA being definitive articles in langs like sp is speculation. However it is very intriging that both terms are also names of the major heavenly bodies being the sun and moon.

While i cannot present definitive scholarly proof, we have an almost identical situation in Arabic and its many forms which cover large parts of Asia , Africa and North Africa. Ive included a small snippet about this discussion taken from wiki. It would seem that Arabs have adopted the sun and moon in an almost equally significant extent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_letters
In Arabic and Maltese , the consonants are divided into two groups, called the sun letters or solar letters ( Arabic : ???? ????? ‎ ?uruf šamsiyyah ) and moon letters or lunar letters ( ???? ????? ?uruf qamariyyah ), based on whether or not they assimilate the lam ( ? l ) [1] of a preceding definite article al- (???). These names come from the fact that the word for "the sun", aš-šams , assimilates the lam , while the word for "the moon", al-qamar , does not.

With the example of Arabic i just presented, we cannot exactly say that some god like EL, is not present. If it happened to arabic why not other european langs. After all Europe adopted many things from the levant.

mP

nolaw

your examples show a common root for night and dark. Is it a coincidence that our own word for no and negative also has a common N. The Bible itself uses light to symbolize goodness and dark as evil, thus is it not hard to reason that YES or JESUS share a common ancestry somewhere in much the same way the oppose night and no are similar in some way.

mP

@mac

unfortunately Jehovah is quite a poor approximation of Yahweh. The letter j in English is a poor replacement for Y. The vowels between JHVH are as well all know taken from ADONAI which supposedly means lord. However ADONAI is also closely related to another pagan god ADONIS for example. Considering that D and T are pairs we can also deduce that ADONAI is related to the Egyptian ATON.

Bethel - the house of the canaanite god El

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