On Palm Sunday, an
etymological reflection of just how important the Ancient Greek world was to the Church. Both of the leading terms still used today derive from Greek, not Latin or Germanic forms — nor Aramaic. So too “Basilica,” not as common but used widely for very important churches.
I would have told you that ‘kirk” was Germanic, being a Scots word related to “church” but derived from interaction with the Scandinavians (cf. Iceland). And it is, but based on an even older word derived from the Greek.
2 comments:
Because etymologies fascinate, I looked up "church" in my shorter OED and elsewhere. From Greek through Gothic is likely, as you note, but still not solid. Some authorities suggest that some form of the word was present in proto-Germanic and the Greek/Gothic word only reinforced it. Doesn't matter, really, but fun.
My Swedish immigrant family alerted me that something was up before I even started on etymologies, pronouncing the Swedish Kyrka painted over their church's doorway as "shursheh" to me, and telling me it was "church." The Scottish version I only encountered much later, but it helped me connect the various words and gave me a linguistics lesson about sound-change as well.
I wondered about that, too, since Celtic, Armenian, Albanian, Slavic, Italic, and Germanic all split off from the European trunk of the Indo-European group at around the same time, maybe 500 B.C.? (Boy, people must really have been on the move.) Did "kirk" have its roots that early, or was it a later borrowing? Wikipedia claims kirk "was borrowed into the Germanic languages in late antiquity, possibly in the course of the Gothic missions [4th century A.D.]. (Only a connection with the idiosyncrasies of Gothic explains how a Greek neuter noun became a Germanic feminine)." Considering the late development of the concept of "church," I guess my money would be on a borrowed word in late antiquity.
Post a Comment