board77

ARGH. b77 won't let me post, every time I hit Submit it says 'oh there are new posts would you like to review yours?' I don't know why I'm even getting into discussions here when there is mistletoe to be hung and pierogies to make.

Anyway.

I think I was rude earlier. My apologies, Maria. Now I remember that test...I think I tried to take it once and got bored. Now I tried to take it again and came upon a question that I could not choose either answer to, so I gave up. Don't know what that says about me.

I'm not sure Alatar's point is so much about the importance of Santa as about the implication that it is not right to let a child believe in anything that is not fact. There's a huge difference, imho, between letting kids believe in fantasy things, and lying to them. My parents didn't rush to tell me Santa didn't exist, and I don't consider it that they lied to me. They just let me believe in something that it is valuable for a child to believe in, until I was ready to figure out that it wasn't true.

Jewel, you never told them he was real, but don't kids take everything for granted in their earliest years? We gradually learn to distinguish truth from fantasy and sometimes closure comes through a question...sometimes the belief just fades away naturally. So...well, you didn't tell them outright he was real, but did you tell them outright that he wasn't?

I understand that every parent and child relationship is different and usually parents know best what their child needs. Can't argue with that. But this sounds dangerously like parents are making sure their kids don't get an opportunity to believe in fairytales, because they would consider this lying.

I don't know.

Lord_Morningstar wrote:

It’s interesting, though, that Jove gets Thursday when Odin/Woden gets Wednesday, suggesting the copying wasn’t exact.

I was a bit surprised by that too, thinking Jove would translate to Odin since both were the chief gods in their respective pantheons. The supposed reasoning is that Thor was identified with Jove/Jupiter/Zeus since both were gods of Thunder, and Mercury got translated into Odin since both were connected to the dead. It's also possible that the names were assigned during the time when Thunor was supplanting Woden as the chief AS deity (or that a Thunor devotee got to make the call).

But it is interesting that both the Norse and the English seem to have translated the gods the same way.

Quote:

Looking at that list, I also have to wonder if there wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon deity named Saeter. However, if the Anglo-Saxons did have a ‘washing day’ type name for Saturday then I wouldn’t be surprised if they took a Roman God for it.

Not that I've ever heard of. In fact, it looks like they didn't even have an equivalent of Loki, so that "memory" of mine may have been a short circuit (there is a modern movement to rename Saturday Lokisday, though).

Edit: Wikipedia tells me it is actually the Romans who named the days of the week in the areas they controlled based on their own ideas about which local gods corresponded to theirs.

Dave_LF wrote:

In fact, it looks like they didn't even have an equivalent of Loki, so that "memory" of mine may have been a short circuit (there is a modern movement to rename Saturday Lokisday, though).

Makes one think of re-working the old Bay City Rollers' hit:

"Ell! Oh!
Kay Eye Ess! Dee Ay Why!
Night!

Ell! Oh!
Kay Eye Ess! Dee Ay Why!
Night!"

Incidentally, I remember an Edinburgh billboard from the late 'nineties, advertising Skol lager - it had one of the Bay City Rollers, all grown up now, with the caption "Buy one and we'll cancel our comeback!"


This post was sponsored by the Embassy of Osgiliath. Do carry on.

Dave_LF wrote:

Lord_Morningstar wrote:

It’s interesting, though, that Jove gets Thursday when Odin/Woden gets Wednesday, suggesting the copying wasn’t exact.

I was a bit surprised by that too, thinking Jove would translate to Odin since both were the chief gods in their respective pantheons. The supposed reasoning is that Thor was identified with Jove/Jupiter/Zeus since both were gods of Thunder, and Mercury got translated into Odin since both were connected to the dead. It's also possible that the names were assigned during the time when Thunor was supplanting Woden as the chief AS deity (or that a Thunor devotee got to make the call).

That makes sense.

Dave_LF wrote:

But it is interesting that both the Norse and the English seem to have translated the gods the same way.

It seems to have been done quite early, before the languages split. All the Germanic languages use the same system, except apparently for Icelandic where the pagan week has been replaced by an Ecclesiastical Latin-influenced one.

Dave_LF wrote:

Quote:

Looking at that list, I also have to wonder if there wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon deity named Saeter. However, if the Anglo-Saxons did have a ‘washing day’ type name for Saturday then I wouldn’t be surprised if they took a Roman God for it.

Not that I've ever heard of. In fact, it looks like they didn't even have an equivalent of Loki, so that "memory" of mine may have been a short circuit (there is a modern movement to rename Saturday Lokisday, though).

Edit: Wikipedia tells me it is actually the Romans who named the days of the week in the areas they controlled based on their own ideas about which local gods corresponded to theirs.

That could be true, but it shouldn’t explain the English or Norwegian weekdays. The Romans never ruled the Anglo-Saxons, nor the Norse or any other Scandinavian people. This Wikipedia article suggests that the Germanic peoples did the identifying themselves. It leads me to wonder – did they not have a concept of a week prior to contact with the Romans?

Hang on, the Romans ruled Britain for a while. Did the Anglo-Saxons invade after the Romans left?

Jude wrote:

Hang on, the Romans ruled Britain for a while. Did the Anglo-Saxons invade after the Romans left?

Yes, the legions withdrew in 410 and the Anglo-Saxons completed the conquest of England (sans Cornwall) in 591. The Romans never conquered the Saxon homelands, either. They were added to the Holy Roman Empire by Charlemange in the late 700s.

It just means that Odin is way awesomer.

No, I think some are missing the idea of cognate deities. Jupiter and Thor/Thunor were weather/sky gods. That was the important bit rather than whether one was the chief god of the pantheon. I remember one Roman (Tacitus?) saying that the chief god in the north was Mercury. A god was recognised by its attributes and powers. The ancients knew that deities with similar functions had different names in different places.
Odin/Wotan/Woden was the traveller god, a god of merchants and thieves. I'd have to do some checking to discover the other similarities with Hermes/Mercury.

I love the way this thread has osgiliated It's actually a really interesting topic, the naming of days of the week. I wonder what other commonly used words we have come from Norse, rather than Roman/Anglo-Saxon/Norman roots.

Maybe we should just have a seperate thread on what is, basically, anthropological linguistics?

I never believed in Santa (in Germany, he is not important, there is the "Christkind", but then I never really thought someone other than my parents broght me presents). Yet, I love christmas, the mood, the songs, the candles, the smells. I really love celebrating christmas and spend entire days preparing things and I do believe in magic or in phantasy and the power of it - it is not one thing in life which determinates this.

Estel wrote:

I love the way this thread has osgiliated It's actually a really interesting topic, the naming of days of the week. I wonder what other commonly used words we have come from Norse, rather than Roman/Anglo-Saxon/Norman roots.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_En ... rse_origin

Hm. There was plenty of contact between the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse; I guess one or the other must have adopted the day names in imitation of the civilized Romans and the other borrowed the idea from them. I don't know whether they had anything like a seven day week before that; the practice seems to have originated in ancient Babylon, so it's possible they didn't.

Dave_LF wrote:

Hm. There was plenty of contact between the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse; I guess one or the other must have adopted the day names in imitation of the civilized Romans and the other borrowed the idea from them. I don't know whether they had anything like a seven day week before that; the practice seems to have originated in ancient Babylon, so it's possible they didn't.

One of the wiki articles I linked to suggested that the Germanic peoples adopted the Roman week as early as the 1st century AD. As such, it would have been before the Anglo-Saxons, Norse, Lombards, Goths and all were really distinct peoples.

Quote:

Archeological evidence suggests a relatively uniform Germanic people were located at about 750 BCE from the Netherlands to the Vistula and in Southern Scandinavia. In the west the coastal floodplains were populated for the first time, since in adjacent higher grounds the population had increased and the soil became exhausted. At about 250 BCE, some expansion to the south had occurred and five general groups can be distinguished: North Germanic in southern Scandinavia, excluding Jutland; North Sea Germanic, along the North Sea and in Jutland; Rhine-Weser Germanic, along the middle Rhine and Weser; Elbe Germanic, along the middle Elbe; and East Germanic, between the middle Oder and the Vistula. This concurs with linguistic evidence pointing at the development of five linguistic groups, mutually linked into sets of two to four groups that shared linguistic innovations.

Quote:

The early Germanic tribes are assumed to have spoken mutually intelligible dialects, in the sense that Germanic languages derive from a single earlier parent language. No written records of such a parent language exists. From what we know of scanty early written material, by the fifth century CE the Germanic languages were already "sufficiently different to render communication between the various peoples impossible". Some evidence point to a common pantheon made up of several different chronological layers. However, as for mythology only the Scandinavian one (see Germanic mythology) is sufficiently known. Some traces of common traditions between various tribes are indicated by Beowulf and the Volsunga saga. One indication of their shared identity is their common Germanic name for non-Germanic peoples, *walhaz (plural of *walhoz), from which the local names Welsh, Wallis, Walloon and others were derived. An indication of an ethnic unity is the fact that the Romans knew them as one and gave them a common name, Germani (this is the source of our German and Germanic, see Etymology above), although it was well known for the Romans to give geographical rather than cultural names to peoples. The very extensive practice of cremation deprives us of anthropological comparative material for the earliest periods to support claims of a longstanding ethnic isolation of a common (Nordic) strain.

A Swedish woman I know told me that Bronze Age wall paintings there have a figure with one hand. The implication is that it might be Tiwaz/Tyr/Tew (Tuesday) the Northern war god who lost his hand to Fenris wolf. The other implication that follows from this idea is that the Northern pantheon is pretty ancient.

I don't think you were rude, Rodia. I just get so used to talking in personality type shorthand that I forget not everyone is into that. The types help with understanding the motivations of people who are very different from you- but they are just a basic template and real people are, of course, much more complicated. When you have trouble understanding why someone does what she does, knowing the general tendancies of their type can help bridge the gap. Personality type theory was a life saver in raising my youngest daughter, for instance. Her type is very foreign to me, but once I understood what she needed out of life, it was easier to relate to her.

Zeus is god of weather (lightning) usually equated with Jupiter (and Thor by virtue of the lightning), but Zeus and Odin are both the gods of suppliants (travelers). Interesting.

Jeez, I wish I'd been in here before . . .

I never told my kids that Santa was "real". They always knew it was a wonderful Christmas story, and they always seemed to have a great time at Christmas. I believed totally in Santa until I found out otherwise and it hurt a lot to find out that the grownups I trusted had gone to a lot of trouble to make me believe. It wasn't fair, I remember thinking that. I thought I had been lied to.

Now, before the Santa-lovers get all bent out of shape, I don't think it hurts kids to believe in Santa. What hurt me, and what I think is hurtful, is that there was an effort on the part of my grownups to KEEP me believing after I started to have doubts. That's what upset me. The moment had obviously come to tell me the truth - and they blew it. Not my Mum and Dad, but my grandparents. I never said a word about it to Mum and Dad, I figured it would upset them, too. Kids are very weird at times.

So I never made a big point of saying "Yes, he's real" to my kids. They still loved Santa, though. And my grandsons, too.

eta: hey, tinwe. Why don't you tell us what you really think?

One could argue that a role reversal of Santa and Jesus is equally valid, of course.

Having said that though, on this particular day of all days, I wonder if I might crave your momentary indulgence in order to discharge a by no means disagreeable obligation which has, over the years, become more or less established practice as we approach the terminal period of the year - calendar, of course, not financial - in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, Week Fifty-One - and submit to you, with all appropriate deference, for your consideration at a convenient juncture, a sincere and sanguine expectation - indeed confidence - indeed one might go so far as to say hope — that the aforementioned period may be, at the end of the day, when all relevant factors have been taken into consideration, susceptible to being deemed to be such as to merit a final verdict of having been by no means unsatisfactory in its overall outcome and, in the final analysis, to give grounds for being judged, on mature reflection, to have been conducive to generating a degree of gratification which will be seen in retrospect to have been significantly higher than the general average.

...even though the bible shows that Jesus was born in Spring - shepherds only watch their flocks at night during the lambing season. Christianity had a habit of taking over existing holidays (holy days, for the philologists in this thread) as their own.

BTW - did you know there are 360 degrees in a circle because the Babylonians thought there were 360 days in a year?

Lidless, you silly. Jesus is born in our hearts every day, regardless of the season.

...and there I was taking antacid tablets every day because I thought it was indigestion.