WORDLORE - God

God.

If there is such a thing as “the most important word” in the English language, then many would assuredly claim it to be this. What is today the English name of the Christian deity was, before, a word for any given divinity. This word, or rather, family of cognates is, however, distinctly Germanic - and differs markedly from other Indo-European words for “deity”.

The word deity is, as it happens, a good place to begin. One of many French loanwords of ultimately Latinate origin, deity reflects a far more frequent tendency among Indo-European languages than our Germanic words god, Gott, Gud etc. Deity is derived from the Latin deus, related to Sanskrit devá and Baltic dievas, among a host of others. These words all derive from the Proto Indo European word *deywós, meaning god. This comes from the PIE root*dyew, meaning “sky” and “heaven”, and also gives rise to the names of many specific gods. 

First among them is the Proto Indo European Sky-Father, *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr, who begat a host of sky-gods, closest to his own name is the Roman Iūpiter (Jupiter), and there is the Greek Zeus and the Proto-Germanic *Tīwaz, precursor to Týr and Tīw. But wait a minute, the Germanic theonyms are entirely unrelated to this etymology, right? Well, that was not always the case. The lengthy relationship and distinction between the *Tīwaz lineage and its cousins deserves its own discussion altogether, and can’t be covered at length here, but suffice it to say that this god received his name from a generic term for any divinity, derived from the same *deywós root. This process of semantic shift between the generic term for any given divinity into the name of a specific god seems, therefore, to be very common. It appears to tend in this same direction each time, also.

OE god → ME God

Latin deus → Italian Dio

PGmc *tīwaz → ON Týr 

(These are also attested as proper nouns in their original languages)

Where, then, do our modern Germanic words for “deity” come from? To find this out, we’ll have to climb all the way back up the linguistic family tree to Proto-Indo-European once more, and meet the root word, *ǵʰew. PIE was very fond of deriving words from verbal roots, and *ǵʰew exemplifies this. It means “to pour”. Now, some of you may be completely at a loss as to how on Earth a verb meaning “to pour” became the word for the supreme being and creator of the Universe, but those of you familiar with Indo European Religion may see where this is going. In the practice known as libation, pagans would pour liquid offerings to their gods as part of sacrificial rituals. 

The combination of *ǵʰew with the verbal-adjectival affix *-tós to make *ǵʰutós results in “libation made to an idol”, or, according to an alternative theory, “invoked”. From here, a semantic inference was made to “one to whom libations are made”, a shift which adjectives frequently make, invading the territory of nouns by a process of inference. By the time we reach Proto-Germanic, *gudą, the word has finally begun to reach its modern meaning of a god, or deity. It is not until the Christian era, however, that this humble upstart would replicate the trajectory of its *dyew derived counterparts, and become the name of God. One of the most weird and wonderful things about linguistics is the truly strange shifts in meaning that can take place between words - where a Greek word for a pot,* and the English word for the supreme being and divine creator can share an ultimate origin.

*

χύτρα