Tuesday, January 21, 2014

I mentioned God several times in a blog post I was writing the other day. Pretty soon that thing happened to me when a word starts to sound weird when you say it over and over.  God, God, God. When you over think it, the name sounds way too casual for who God is. For starters, it rhymes with Todd and Rod, which aren't exactly power handles. Also, it sounds a little bit too much like "Bob." I bet if you asked a few hundred people how many syllables should be in God's name, most of them would say, "at least three, out of respect."

I looked up the origin of the name God online and found this entry from the Oxford English Dictionary which really cleared things up for me:

"god (gρd). Also 3-4 godd. [Com. Teut.: OE. god (masc. in sing.; pl. godugodo neut., godas masc.) corresponds to OFris., OS., Du. god masc., OHG. gotcot (MHG. got, mod.Ger. gott) masc., ON. goðguð neut. and masc., pl.goðguð neut. (later Icel. pl. guðir masc.; Sw., Da. gud), Goth. guÞ (masc. in sing.; pl. guÞaguda neut.). The Goth. and ON. words always follow the neuter declension, though when used in the Christian sense they are syntactically masc. The OTeut. type is therefore *guđom neut., the adoption of the masculine concord being presumably due to the Christian use of the word. The neuter sb., in its original heathen use, would answer rather to L. numen than to L. deus. Another approximate equivalent of deus in OTeut. was *ansu-z (Goth. in latinized pl. form anses, ON. ρss, OE. Ós- in personal names, ésa genit. pl.); but this seems to have been applied only to the higher deities of the native pantheon, never to foreign gods; and it never came into Christian use.
 The ulterior etymology is disputed. Apart from the unlikely hypothesis of adoption from some foreign tongue, the OTeut. *gubom implies as its pre-Teut. type either *ghudho-m or *ghutó-m. The former does not appear to admit of explanation; but the latter would represent the neut. of the passive pple. of a root *gheu-.  There are two Aryan roots of the required form (both *glheu, with palatal aspirate): one meaning ‘to invoke’ (Skr. hū), the other ‘to pour, to offer sacrifice’ (Skr. hu, Gr. χέειν, OE. yéotan YETE v.). Hence *glhutó-m has been variously interpreted as ‘what is invoked’ (cf. Skr. puru-hūta ‘much-invoked’, an epithet of Indra) and as ‘what is worshipped by sacrifice’ (cf. Skr. hutá, which occurs in the sense ‘sacrificed to’ as well as in that of ‘offered in sacrifice’). Either of these conjectures is fairly plausible, as they both yield a sense practically coincident with the most obvious definition deducible from the actual use of the word, ‘an object of worship’.
Some scholars, accepting the derivation from the root *glheu- to pour, have supposed the etymological sense to be ‘molten image’ (= Gr. χυγόν), but the assumed development of meaning seems very unlikely. 

2 comments:

  1. I had some clients in Alabama who could get three syllables out of "Chris." But religious though they were, they couldn't more than two for "God."

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  2. That's why so many people refer to him as O My God - 3 syllables.

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