Since Odin first contacted me back in February, he’s been hovering in the background of my life, making his presence felt, watching, and occasionally offering advice or insight. He has helped me become a better leader and a better father, and is working with me on a number of my personal struggles.

He also told me a story: his own story. I offer here a shortened version, in his own words. In it, he gives an answer to an ancient riddle; and you may judge for yourself the truth of it. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since I read Slade’s article a few weeks back about how to use numerology to find the meaning of your name using its letters, I’ve been extremely eager to explore the topic from the standpoint of sound. The exercise Slade describes is based entirely on spelling; but you can also imagine doing name divination directly from the sound of your name. The two are not the same — especially in languages like English and French, which have spelling systems that are simple and perfectly designed for the way the languages were spoken six hundred years ago.

I was delighted to stumble on the site of Margaret Magnus, which has a wealth of information on the correspondence between sound and meaning. Magnus clearly has a deep passion for the topic, and she’s obviously spent hundreds of hours doing research into it. And she’s generously posted reams of her material on the web! I tried to contact her, but she hasn’t replied as of this writing. Her web site is the basis for the divination technique I describe below, and the inspiration for a lot of the theoretical musings in this post, as well.

From one point of view, the sound of a word is much more basic and primal than its spelling. After all, everyone learns to talk — it’s practically part of the definition of humanity — but literacy, and especially alphabetic script, is a recent invention, and it’s not necessarily easy to master it. Humans are designed to talk. For example, we have a special kind of breathing that we can “turn on” when we’re talking — quick, sharp intakes of breath, followed by very long, slow, measured outbreaths while we’re actually saying words. If you try to breathe like that when you’re not talking, you’ll probably start gasping after five minutes. But someone standing in front of a classroom or making a speech can keep it up for hours. Speaking is literally written into our genetic inheritance. But there’s no such provision made for reading or writing.

Anyway: I’m going to resist the urge to open the post with a lot of theory and ruminating, and jump right into Magnus’s technique. Afterwards, stick around and we’ll muse and hypothesize… Read the rest of this entry »

First, let me reiterate exactly why it’s probable that the word “hand” used to mean something different.

1. As explained in the previous post, the word for hand in the various languages descended from Proto-Indo-European are a very mixed bag, and do not derive from a single common ancestral word. The word for hand in PIE was probably “men”, but it is “handaz” in Proto-Germanic, “manus” in Latin, “lamh” in Proto-Celtic, and “cheir(o)” in Greek. Among the Slavic languages, they stopped mentioning the hand at all — to this day, most Slavic languages have no specific term for hand; they say “arm” (or “lower arm”) instead.
2. Why wasn’t the PIE word “men” retained in its daughter languages (except Latin)? The hypothesis is that “men” was a taboo word, a word of power, and people avoided it by using euphemisms. (Specifically, it was taboo because of its association with the sun god, who was imagined to have long or heavy hands, like the rays of the sun.)
3. A euphemism is some meaningful word (or phrase) in the language which is brought in to replace a word that cannot be spoken lightly. For example, “pushing up the daisies” is a euphemism for “dead”. The euphemism already has its own meaning, but when used as a euphemism, it takes on the meaning of the taboo word. And, notably, the original meaning of the euphemism is intended to be somehow reminiscent of the taboo word. For example, “pushing up the daisies” indicates being buried underground (and hence dead).
4. Therefore, the words used for hand in the daughter languages — “handaz”, “lamh”, and “cheir(o)” — already existed in PIE and already had their own meanings before being adopted as euphemisms for PIE “men”.

So — what did “hand” (or more accurately, “handaz”) mean before it was adopted as a euphemism? Read the rest of this entry »