G
Gottle_of_Geer
Guest
Gottle of Geer:
Besides, having the name of a thing is not a proof of having the nature of that thing - “cat-gut” is nothing to do with cats, despite the name. A “bull market”, despite its name, has no connection with bulls.**All that is one paragraph in the original. For a book written in the 1850s, as this book was, it is an understandable mistake - but it is still a mistake, however understandable. If the name of the goddess Ishtar is the origin of the word Easter, one has to explain why the feast is called Easter only in English. The author does not explain how the name of the Assyrian-Babylonian goddess found its way into Old English. It’s not absolutely impossible, at least in principle - but it cannot be asserted as a fact without further ado; & there is no reason to believe it underlies either the word Easter, or the Church feast. **
Not to mention, any philologist would laugh out of his office anyone who thought the Indo-European “Eostre” could be derived from the unrelated Semitic name “Ashtoreth/Ashtarte.” As linguistic scholarship, that’s roughly on par with saying that a girl named Kellie is an avatar of the Hindu Kali.
It is only fair to point out that:
- The bad etymology is largely explicable by the state of linguistic scholarship in the languages of Mesopotamia, which was then in its early infancy.
- to make things worse, the author misidentified the language: he thought it was some kind of Aramaic.
- **To make things even worse, some of his sources were even then out of date. **
- he **was not alone in his fantastic etymologies **
- some authors had even wilder ideas
- **the identification of the language he calls “Chaldee” - meaning by this, Aramaic in a broader sense than usual - was debated for several years. **
**So there is s****ome ****excuse for these linguistic horrors. **That pseudo-etymology of yours from “Kali” is very amusing.