Last week I was reading Noah Cawley’s latest novel, Anthem, and ran across this etymological nugget:
In the original Greek, the term apocalypse is translated as an unveiling. It describes a moment in time when something long hidden is finally revealed.
I know the word apocalypse in the “great disaster” sense, with the Four Horsemen and so on. But I’d never wondered about where the word came from. Hawley is correct; the term comes from Greek apo (“off”) and kalyptein (“to conceal”).
What Hawley almost but not quite says, though, is that there is an equivalent English word: revelation. In the original Greek version of the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, the first word is apokalypsis.
This all got me wondering about ecclesiastical vocabulary in English. (Again, I suppose.) The Germanic tribes in Britain were converted to Christianity starting about 600 CE by missionaries who came from Rome and Ireland. The language of the church was Latin, so many terms pertaining to churchly things were taken into Old English (a.k.a. OE, the language of the Anglo-Saxons) from Latin, many of them ultimately from the Greek in which the New Testament had been written. Here’s a sampling:
- apostle (from Greek apo, “off,” and stellein “to send”)
- bishop (from Greek episkopos, “overseer”)
- deacon (from Greek diakonos, “servant”)
- disciple (from Latin disculpus, “pupil”)
- priest (from Greek presbyteros, “elder”)
These terms are borrowings: Old English took the terms as is, though with some Anglicization.
In some cases, though, OE used existing terms for new religious concepts, effectively translating the concepts into English. When you import an idea and instead of importing a word, you translate it, that’s known as a loan translation or calque. Here are some examples of religious terms that were loan-translated using native Anglo-Saxon words:
- doom. In OE, dom referred to a judgment, and domes dæge was used to refer to Judgement Day.
- ghostly. In OE, this was used to render the idea of the Latin spiritualis. The sense of ghostly to mean “spiritual” is archaic today in English.[1]
- God. OE used an existing word that was applied to pagan gods but changed it slightly—for example, made it masculine when referring to the Christian deity, while retaining the original neuter gender for other uses.
- gospel. In OE, this was godspel from god (“good”) and spel (“story”). This is a calque of the Greek term evangelion (eu “good” and angel “news, message”).
- hell. An old Germanic word that was used for the Latin inferna and Greek Hades.
- holy. This Germanic word was adapted to render the Latin word sanctus.
- Lord. OE had the word hlafweard, “loaf-ward” (i.e., head of the household), which became the word lord. This word was adapted to render the equivalent Latin terms dominus and Kyrie.[2]
I find it fascinating how the Anglo-Saxons calqued terms for these new religious concepts—as I’m sure happened everywhere. (And probably still does when new Bible translations are created.)
Update (22 Jul 23): My Old English instructor (Colin Gorrie) made this observation/correction about one of the terms in the preceding list: “In Old English, hlāford is typically used of temporal lords, whereas ‘The Lord’ (as in God) is typically referred to using another word, Dryhten. This also originates from a pre-Christian word, which can be reconstructed in Proto-Germanic as *druhtinaz, ultimately coming from *druhtiz, a band of troops.”
And what about apocalypse/revelation, is that also a calque? Yes, but not exactly in the same vein as the words I listed earlier. The word reveal (hence also revelation) is not a Germanic word from the time of the Anglo-Saxons. We got reveal from Old French in medieval times, which in turn got it from Latin revelare. The Vulgate Bible in Latin lists the last book as Apocalypsis Ioannis, but translations into French and later into English used the name Revelation. (The Book of Revelation was not translated into English until well past the Anglo-Saxon period, at least as far as I’ve been able to determine.)
So yes, the term revelation is a calque from Greek. But the calquing didn’t happen in Old English, and by the time we got the Book of Revelation as a title, it had already happened in Latin and French. But to return to the beginning, the next time you run across the word apocalypse, you will now have experienced the revelation, haha, of where we got that word.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
__________
[1] It still appears in the German word Geist, meaning “spirit”; in fact, we borrowed the word Zeitgeist from German (“time”+”spirit”=”spirit of the times”). More light-heartedly, at Google every year there’s an all-company survey known as Googlegeist, which aims to get a sense of the “spirit” of the employees, I guess you could say. [^]
[2] As a couple of people have pointed out, Kyrie is a Greek word. But it appears in the Latin liturgy, which is from where it was loan-translated into Lord. [^]