Jason is one of those rare, remarkable cases where two words are merged into one.

The first Jason comes ultimately from the Hebrew name Yehoshua, meaning “Yahweh saves”; it is the same name that gave rise to the names Joshua (Anglicized) and Jesus (Latinized). (Jesus’s actual name would have been pronounced Yeshua; Jesus is the Latin version.) A large number of Jews living in Greece were named Yehoshua, so that the name was eventually borrowed into Greek as Eason. Eason came into Latin as Jason, and thence into English.

The second Jason comes from native Greek Iason, possibly related to iasthai, “to heal” (of uncertain origin). This is the Jason of Argonaut fame.

Regardless of origin, Jason starts out with a troubled doorway or difficult decision (”j”) and then spreads out wide and flexibly (long “a”) and converges into targeted energy (”s”). The suggestion of a target is further strengthened by the final syllabic “n”, narrowing towards a goal.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 4:11 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.