By Cameron Bunney
Etymology is the study of words and their origins (and the etymology of etymology is from the Greek “etymologia” which in turn is from “etymon” meaning “true sense” and -logia meaning “a study of/speaking of”).
Etymology can be a fun subject for anyone to look into as you find words having quite weird origins, such as “berserk” which is thought to mean “bear-shirted/bare-shirted” from two old words meaning “bear” and “shirt” (or “bare” and “shirt”), the second word is most likely shirt from “serkr” meaning a type of coat, however as in English, “bear” and “bare” are homophones, they also form a similar difficulty in Old Norse! So, either way it was a description of a people with whom the Norse people had contact who either had no shirt or wore shirts made of bears!
Should you just be interested in etymology because of possibly naked people or bear-coated people? Perhaps! But there’s so much beauty in words! It teaches you more about your language and how people see the world, for example in Japanese, a word for a type of horse meat eaten is called 桜肉 (さくらにく/sakura-niku) which literally means “cherry blossom meat” but it refers, in a poetic way, to how the colour of the meat is, taking us away from the image of murder and brutality of killing an animal, and focusing on the intended enjoyment of the meal! Now, I could write a whole series of articles on Japanese and Chinese words and their origins, but I shall, for now, stay on subject.
Beads, you see, are prayers. Now, this is not a metaphor, they are literally prayers. If you know some German (and learned it attending a Christian school), you may know that the verb “to pray” in German is “beten” with related nouns being “das Gebet” and “das Beten.” The verb form is related to the Old English “gebedian” and has a noun form of “bed” (which you can really see becoming the noun “bead” we see today!).
This is, however, only the first part of the story! There is already a religious meaning, so let us look at “Rosary beads”. These are a set of knots or (modern day usage) beads on a string and each one represents a prayer. It is from this that we get our modern day name of “bead” – because people were so accustomed to the beads of the Rosary that the noun “bead” took on the name to refer to the prayers on the Rosary, the round shapes on the string. These beads represented prayers, rather than being the prayers themselves. From this, the meaning of bead and prayer diverged so that a bead is no longer a prayer, just the spherical shape we see.
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