Etymology of the name Jesus

[mojobadshah]

No, "the Greeks" didn't; if you have some single author in mind, obviously he was talking through his hat.

see Zarathushtra; The First Monotheist Prophet (CAIS)

That is not an argument that Gathic is more archaic than Sanskrit, unless you are claiming that Indo-Iranian had not yet broken up by the time of Gathic, which it clearly had. Rather, the greater resemblance of later Avestan to Sanskrit reflects regional diffusion of pronunciation and grammatical habits from India to the west.

I don't know. I'm just trying to interpret Benjamin Fortson's Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction the best I can. In the Iranian Morphology section (pg. 234) he states that "...Avestan, in particular Old Avestan, preserves some archaic features that are not found in Vedic. (Interestingly, most of these features are not found in Young Avestan either, making the latter in some sense closer to Vedic than to Old Avstan.)" Are you talking about the same thing here?

WHAT linguists? The Mittani spoke a West-Iranian tongue quite distinct from the Central-Iranian ("Persian") group, and worshipped a large pantheon in which Buriyash the North Wind was the chief of the weather gods and Shuriyash the Sun the chief of the planetary gods, etc. Zoroaster was a contemporary of Cyrus I, grandfather of Cyrus the Great; and the linguistic evidence for Avestan is considerably later than Zoroaster's time: as in the Qur'an we often find stories in the Zend which are alluded to but not told (taking it for granted that we already know the stories), indicating a previous stage of development; you are correct however that the Gatha hymns are more archaic in linguistic form.

Fortson does for one. West-Iranian, huh? That's a first for me. I don't think I've ever read anyone put it that way. Just that the language of the Mittani texts were at least Indo-Iranian, and probably Indic.

There's no contraction here. It is quite straightforward.

I know I'm killing it here, but if there's no contraction and YHWH or YW and Yireh are rooted in two separate forms. Attestations aside, isn't it possible that YHWH and YW were contractions of Yatha Ahu Vairya and the Yireh was combined to the form YHWH later?

Note however that even if Sumerian is closer to Indo-European and kin than to anything else, it is still not at all "close": the separation must have been tens of thousands of years. The pronouns, low numerals, kinship terms, and grammatical affixes, which are usually very stable elements and helpful for long-range classification, are alien and weird in Sumerian (as Miguel acknowledges). The comparisons to Indo-European roots require numerous systematic consonant-shifts (a word in Sumerian is never related to a word in Indo-European which looks the same, but rather to something that looks different in some particular way), and most of the Indo-European roots he cites to are very rare ones, for which he cannot give examples in generally familiar languages; this indicates a large-scale shift in usage of the vocabulary.

Understandable, but we're not saying that the entire Avestan language was derived from Sumerian. We're talking about one very important word and concept in specific, Asha. And I'm even considering the possibility that the word Asha in Sumerian was derived from an Iranian language. I'm fairly certain that there was a connection between Iranian and Sumerian culture. A few key figures in Sumerian appear to be connected to Iranian figures eg. Inanna and Anahita, and Gilgamesh and Jamsheed (Yima Kshaeta)

 

[bob x]

see Zarathushtra; The First Monotheist Prophet (CAIS)

There's really no polite way to put this: that author is a raving lunatic.

I don't know. I'm just trying to interpret Benjamin Fortson's Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction the best I can. In the Iranian Morphology section (pg. 234) he states that "...Avestan, in particular Old Avestan, preserves some archaic features that are not found in Vedic. (Interestingly, most of these features are not found in Young Avestan either, making the latter in some sense closer to Vedic than to Old Avstan.)" Are you talking about the same thing here?

Fortson is a respectable (non-lunatic, professional) source. I do not have any problems with what he is saying. All of the branches into which Indo-Iranian splintered (West, Central, and East in Iran; Dardic and Vedic in India) made certain shifts away from the Proto-Indo-Iranian, while retaining some other set of the original features. The three Iranian branches tended to share most of the same shifts, but both in East (as your author on the Afghans mentioned) and in West, some of the shifts characteristic of Central Iranian (the "Avestan" group) did not occur, so that in those respects they can be said to be "resembling Indic" (it would be better to say that they and Indic are in those respects resembling the original). And of course, the Vedic had its own shifts (it is not a "better" representative of the original Proto-Indo-Iranian than any of the Iranian branches), and where Avestan did not make those changes, in those respects we can say "Avestan is more archaic"; but in respect of other shifts, we can say "Vedic is more archaic".

This does not speak to the "age" of these languages. Let me take another example: the centum/s'atam shift of which I have spoken often. It is a common tendency in human languages for "k" sounds followed by "front" vowels (those like "i"/"e" articulated with the tongue forward) to shift toward the front of the mouth becoming affricate ("ch" etc.) or sibilant ("s" etc.) This happened early in Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic (the "satam" languages), but in Latin "centum" was still pronounced with a "k": so in that respect, Latin is "more archaic" than either Avestan or Vedic Sanskrit. That does not mean it is older than Avestan or Sanskrit (Latin is scarcely attested even from the early Roman Republic, only after Rome started to be a major Italian state), just that this one primitive feature was retained in it. And interestingly, the later Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish etc.) all shift the "k" to "s" so, in that respect, Avestan and Sanskrit "resemble the younger Romance languages more than the older".

Fortson does for one. West-Iranian, huh? That's a first for me. I don't think I've ever read anyone put it that way. Just that the language of the Mittani texts were at least Indo-Iranian, and probably Indic.

Fortson dates Zoroaster??? What are his arguments? Mitannian is certainly Indo-Iranian, and more like Iranian, but "resembles Indic" in that it lacks some of the shifts seen in the Central-Iranian; that is why I distinguish the West-Iranian group as I do.

I know I'm killing it here, but if there's no contraction and YHWH or YW and Yireh are rooted in two separate forms.

They have nothing to do with each other. Yireh is the word "sees". YHWH-Yireh is a sentence, "YHWH sees." I only gave the full sentence because you asked in exactly what context the name "YHWH" occurred in Genesis, and that is where it is.

Attestations aside, isn't it possible that YHWH and YW were contractions of Yatha Ahu Vairya

WHAT POSSIBLE REASON DO YOU HAVE FOR THINKING SO???

and the Yireh was combined to the form YHWH later?

Later than what??? The sentence "YHWH sees" occurs in a text which is older than any "Avestan" in which a form like ahu would exist.

Understandable, but we're not saying that the entire Avestan language was derived from Sumerian.

Not even slightly. Miguel is talking about an exceedingly distant relationship, going back to a common ancestor maybe 30,000 years ago; the two are scarcely even recognizable as distant cousins after all the shifts that separate them, but Miguel thinks that this relationship, distant as it is, is the nearest relation for Sumerian that can be found.

We're talking about one very important word and concept in specific, Asha.

Whenever the same word exists in Proto-Indo-European and Sumerian, according to Miguel's system of shifts, they don't look like each other. I keep telling you that you have to look for words which are different in some systematic way in order to find true relatives; coincidental resemblances in the present form are hardly ever relatives (English father and Latin frater look rather alike; but father is really related to Latin pater, Germanic "f" being a shift from "p"; while frater is really related to English brother, Latin "f" being a shift from "b").

And I'm even considering the possibility that the word Asha in Sumerian was derived from an Iranian language. I'm fairly certain that there was a connection between Iranian and Sumerian culture.

You are wrong. When Sumerians were in their heyday, Iranians had scarcely penetrated below the Caspian Sea, and are nowhere mentioned in Sumerian texts. Southern Iran was then the territory of the Elamites, whose language is distantly related to the Dravidian group (now confined to southern India and S'ri Lanka, but once spread all up the coast as far as the Gulf); northwest of these in the Zagros Mountains were the Gutians, who appear to be of the group containing the Khashd, Hattics, Urarteans and other mystery-languages that filtered down from the Caucasus.

A few key figures in Sumerian appear to be connected to Iranian figures eg. Inanna and Anahita, and Gilgamesh and Jamsheed (Yima Kshaeta)

I see no connections in either case. Anahita was a late (Parthian period) and peripheral addition to Iranian religion, borrowed from Syria where she was Anatha, a name that is considered akin to Greek Athena and Egyptian Neith; but she was always considered a quite different goddess from Astarte or Asherah, whose Babylonian form Ishtar was identified with Sumerian Inanna. Between Gilgamesh and Jamsheed what connection do you see except that they were both kings?

 

[mojobadshah]

There's really no polite way to put this: that author is a raving lunatic.

I hear you. I can't say I agree with everything he says, but his explanation behind how Zoroaster having lived 6000 years before Xerxes became 600 years before Xerxes according to the Greeks makes perfect sense.

Fortson is a respectable (non-lunatic, professional) source. I do not have any problems with what he is saying. All of the branches into which Indo-Iranian splintered (West, Central, and East in Iran; Dardic and Vedic in India) made certain shifts away from the Proto-Indo-Iranian, while retaining some other set of the original features. The three Iranian branches tended to share most of the same shifts, but both in East (as your author on the Afghans mentioned) and in West, some of the shifts characteristic of Central Iranian (the "Avestan" group) did not occur, so that in those respects they can be said to be "resembling Indic" (it would be better to say that they and Indic are in those respects resembling the original). And of course, the Vedic had its own shifts (it is not a "better" representative of the original Proto-Indo-Iranian than any of the Iranian branches), and where Avestan did not make those changes, in those respects we can say "Avestan is more archaic"; but in respect of other shifts, we can say "Vedic is more archaic".

This does not speak to the "age" of these languages. Let me take another example: the centum/s'atam shift of which I have spoken often. It is a common tendency in human languages for "k" sounds followed by "front" vowels (those like "i"/"e" articulated with the tongue forward) to shift toward the front of the mouth becoming affricate ("ch" etc.) or sibilant ("s" etc.) This happened early in Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic (the "satam" languages), but in Latin "centum" was still pronounced with a "k": so in that respect, Latin is "more archaic" than either Avestan or Vedic Sanskrit. That does not mean it is older than Avestan or Sanskrit (Latin is scarcely attested even from the early Roman Republic, only after Rome started to be a major Italian state), just that this one primitive feature was retained in it. And interestingly, the later Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish etc.) all shift the "k" to "s" so, in that respect, Avestan and Sanskrit "resemble the younger Romance languages more than the older".

Right. So Avestan is more archaic than Sanskrit in some regards, but Sanskrit is more archaic than Avestan in others. What about the actual context of the two traditions? I once recall reading an argument that the story of Yima in the Avesta, a figure who runs parallel to Yama of the Vedas, can be shown to be older than that of the Vedas because the Avestan account provides a fuller account of this figures life from rise to fall from grace whereas the Vedic account begins after his fall and portrays him as the psychopomp.

Fortson dates Zoroaster??? What are his arguments? Mitannian is certainly Indo-Iranian, and more like Iranian, but "resembles Indic" in that it lacks some of the shifts seen in the Central-Iranian; that is why I distinguish the West-Iranian group as I do.

Fortson says Old Avestan is usually assumed to be of about the same age of the Rig Veda perhaps the late second millenium B.C. He says Young Avestan is more archaic than our earliest Old Persian and probably several centuries older. He estimates 9th or 8th century B.C. I believe it was Mary Boyce who originally placed Avestan around 1700 B.C. and then 1500 B.C. I thought it had something to do with the fact that the language of the Mitanni being placed around 1500 B.C.

WHAT POSSIBLE REASON DO YOU HAVE FOR THINKING SO???

Because though I'm no specialist it would still appear possible that the [atha] or [tha] in Yatha could have eroded and combined with Ahu (or maybe it was initially Ahura) and the [yra] could have eroded in Vairya and Vai could have combined with the previous two forms to become Yahuvai (and I don't know if this would explain the v > w shift, but I'm aware that [v] and [w] are interchangeable in Farsi for one) so in the end Yahuvai could have developed into YHWH.

Later than what??? The sentence "YHWH sees" occurs in a text which is older than any "Avestan" in which a form like ahu would exist.

You said the Hebrew Bible was compiled after Fortson says Young Avestan was attested.

Not even slightly. Miguel is talking about an exceedingly distant relationship, going back to a common ancestor maybe 30,000 years ago; the two are scarcely even recognizable as distant cousins after all the shifts that separate them, but Miguel thinks that this relationship, distant as it is, is the nearest relation for Sumerian that can be found.

Whenever the same word exists in Proto-Indo-European and Sumerian, according to Miguel's system of shifts, they don't look like each other. I keep telling you that you have to look for words which are different in some systematic way in order to find true relatives; coincidental resemblances in the present form are hardly ever relatives (English father and Latin frater look rather alike; but father is really related to Latin pater, Germanic "f" being a shift from "p"; while frater is really related to English brother, Latin "f" being a shift from "b").

This is my source for the connection between Sumerian Asha and Avestan Asha - The language of the Harappans: from Akkadian to Sanskrit By Malati J. Shendge

You are wrong. When Sumerians were in their heyday, Iranians had scarcely penetrated below the Caspian Sea, and are nowhere mentioned in Sumerian texts. Southern Iran was then the territory of the Elamites, whose language is distantly related to the Dravidian group (now confined to southern India and S'ri Lanka, but once spread all up the coast as far as the Gulf); northwest of these in the Zagros Mountains were the Gutians, who appear to be of the group containing the Khashd, Hattics, Urarteans and other mystery-languages that filtered down from the Caucasus.

This is the source that made me question the possibility. Some Early Traces of the Aryan

I see no connections in either case. Anahita was a late (Parthian period) and peripheral addition to Iranian religion, borrowed from Syria where she was Anatha, a name that is considered akin to Greek Athena and Egyptian Neith; but she was always considered a quite different goddess from Astarte or Asherah, whose Babylonian form Ishtar was identified with Sumerian Inanna. Between Gilgamesh and Jamsheed what connection do you see except that they were both kings?

The inscription of Artaxerxes II (404 B.C.) at Susa reads: "By the will of Ahura Mazda, Anahita, and Mithra I built this palace. May Ahura Mazda, Anahita, and Mithra protect me from all evil" Moreover, isn't this Anahita the same Anahita as the Ardvi Sura Anahita of the Avesta?

As far as Gilgamesh and the connection to Yima Khshaeta and Jamsheed (who are the same) if you were to combine the Avestan account and Firwadousi's account you'd may be surprised how many connections can be made between the Sumerian and the Avestan.

 

[bob x]

I hear you. I can't say I agree with everything he says, but his explanation behind how Zoroaster having lived 6000 years before Xerxes became 600 years before Xerxes according to the Greeks makes perfect sense.

Only if you disregard the basic fact that 6000 years before Xerxes, no-one in the region even knew how to grow crops or herd animals, or how to work in metals or cloth or any material but wood and stone, or had any form of community beyond the nomadic hunting band. I call him a "lunatic" not just because of this particular detachment from reality, but from his general theme of taking as absolute givens things that he derives from the imagined contents of lost libraries, or from assuming that late epic poets are preserving literal facts with absolute fidelity, or from accusing everyone not of his ethnicity of being part of a plot against Iran.

And, as I said before, a single author is not "the Greeks": I don't know whether Diogenes Laertes originally said 6 "hundred" or "thousand" but would not rely on such an unconfirmed source anyway.

Right. So Avestan is more archaic than Sanskrit in some regards, but Sanskrit is more archaic than Avestan in others. What about the actual context of the two traditions? I once recall reading an argument that the story of Yima in the Avesta, a figure who runs parallel to Yama of the Vedas, can be shown to be older than that of the Vedas because the Avestan account provides a fuller account of this figures life from rise to fall from grace whereas the Vedic account begins after his fall and portrays him as the psychopomp.

The fuller account is the later, presumably. Why would you presume the reverse?

Fortson says Old Avestan is usually assumed to be of about the same age of the Rig Veda perhaps the late second millenium B.C.

"Late second millenium" means 1000-1200, not 1800-2000 (that is early second millenium). The assumption made by the authors who think the Gathas are almost as old as the Rig Veda (I don't know of an author who would put them at the same age, or say the Gathas are older) is that these hymns preserve material that pre-date Zoroaster.

He says Young Avestan is more archaic than our earliest Old Persian and probably several centuries older. He estimates 9th or 8th century B.C.

Interesting. I didn't think younger Avestan was considered to be much different from Old Persian.

I believe it was Mary Boyce who originally placed Avestan around 1700 B.C. and then 1500 B.C.

Do you have a source for Mary Boyce and her arguments? I find articles on how she studied among rural Zoroastrian communities to understand the structure of the religion and grasp the meanings of the texts, but I am not finding anything about what chronology she assumed for the composition of the texts, or why she thought so.

I thought it had something to do with the fact that the language of the Mitanni being placed around 1500 B.C.

Mitannian was, as far as we know it, distant from the mainstream of Iranian; their religion was exuberantly polytheistic and not the least bit like Zoroastrianism.

Because though I'm no specialist it would still appear possible that the [atha] or [tha] in Yatha could have eroded

That erosion of "t" to "th" to "h" or nothing did not take place in Persian until medieval times.

and combined with Ahu (or maybe it was initially Ahura)

Initially it would have been asu or asura. The shift of "s" to "h" characteristic of Avestan cannot have been until later than when West speeches like Mitannian and East languages like the ancestor of Pashtun had already split off from the Central group. If Fortson says "late 2nd millenium" then I'm sure he knows better than I do (I wouldn't have guessed that early), but "mid" or "early" 2nd millenium just doesn't seem possible.

I don't know if this would explain the v > w shift, but I'm aware that [v] and [w] are interchangeable in Farsi for one

The waw letter in Hebrew is not exactly the English "v" which is called a "labiodental" fricative (labio- "lip" rubbing against dent- "teeth") nor the English "w" which is called a semivowel (it is not a "fricative" which means a "rubbing; frictional" sound; the lips are kept a little apart); rather it is the "bilabial fricative" (two lips together and rubbing, but not touching the teeth). Shifts among "v" and "w" and a waw sound happen all the time.

You said the Hebrew Bible was compiled after Fortson says Young Avestan was attested.

"Attested" means "actually found" or "witnessed"; we don't find any actual manuscripts of the Avesta older than 900 AD, and none of the ancient authors that discuss Zoroastrianism say anything about them having sacred books. We assume, based on the antiquity of the language, that Avestan existed much much earlier than it is "attested"; but that is the same way that we assume that the portions of the Hebrew Bible which are written in far more antique dialects than the dialect spoken in Persian times go back to sources of quite early age.

This is my source for the connection between Sumerian Asha and Avestan Asha - The language of the Harappans: from Akkadian to Sanskrit By Malati J. Shendge

That link doesn't work. I am immediately suspicious, however, of anybody who claims to know anything about the language of the Harappans (the script is completely undeciphered).

This is the source that made me question the possibility. Some Early Traces of the Aryan

If X and Y look related, there are four possibilities:
1. It is pure coincidence
2. X caused Y
3. Y caused X
4. Some common Z caused both X and Y
This source constantly assumes that "Iranian caused the Mideastern forms" when most of the time the reverse direction of causation looks much more plausible. He proposes that s'atam forms are older than centum: it NEVER goes in that direction; we understand from the mechanics of human sound production why we often see "k" before front-vowel in an older language (Latin, say) becoming "ch"/"s"/etc. in younger languages (Italian or French) but never the opposite. In other cases too he proposes that the shift goes in the more complicating, rather than the simplifying, direction: diqna "fast; the river Tigris; tiger" as a source for tigra makes senses, but not the reverse. Where the relationships are genuine, therefore (a lot of them may be sheer coincidence), the Iranian looks like the late borrowing rather than the source; and if there was not a borrowing at all, it could be an inheritance from a common ancestor (as Miguel was proposing) with very different shifts in each case.

The source also grabs a lot of peoples whose languages are known not to be like Iranian at all, and proclaims them Iranians. The "Cassites" (I prefer "Khashd" preserving their weird self-name more accurately) and Guti were of the group with the Hattics, whose languages were seriously alien (I have seen them compared to the Avar and Chechen groups of the north Caucasus, but not to anything else); the Philistines/Peleset/Pelasgians were from the Aegean, and spoke the Eteo-Cretan of the Linear A tablets, perhaps akin to Etruscan but not to much else; the Tocharians/Teucroi/Trojans migrated along with Philistines to the east following the downfall of Troy c. 1200 BCE, and their language while Indo-European was originally of a western, not eastern ("centum" not "s'atam") branch, not terribly far from Greek, Albanian, or Armenian.

The inscription of Artaxerxes II (404 B.C.) at Susa reads: "By the will of Ahura Mazda, Anahita, and Mithra I built this palace. May Ahura Mazda, Anahita, and Mithra protect me from all evil" Moreover, isn't this Anahita the same Anahita as the Ardvi Sura Anahita of the Avesta?

OK, it appears Anahita was borrowed earlier than I thought. But the Zend is centuries later than Zoroaster: are you citing Ardvi Sura Anahita from Gathas, or from a Zend story?

As far as Gilgamesh and the connection to Yima Khshaeta and Jamsheed (who are the same) if you were to combine the Avestan account and Firwadousi's account you'd may be surprised how many connections can be made between the Sumerian and the Avestan.

I don't see them. Show me.

 

[mojobadshah]

Only if you disregard the basic fact that 6000 years before Xerxes, no-one in the region even knew how to grow crops or herd animals, or how to work in metals or cloth or any material but wood and stone, or had any form of community beyond the nomadic hunting band. I call him a "lunatic" not just because of this particular detachment from reality, but from his general theme of taking as absolute givens things that he derives from the imagined contents of lost libraries, or from assuming that late epic poets are preserving literal facts with absolute fidelity, or from accusing everyone not of his ethnicity of being part of a plot against Iran.

I don't know enough about the actual material culture that the Gathas or the Zend Avesta account, I just think its interesting that the 600 B.C. placement of Zoroaster may have come down to a copyiest error. However, I was always taught that the agricultural revolution began around 6000 B.C. exactly. The idea of lost libraries is also interesting to me. Isn't that how the story goes? Alexander came through and destroyed libraries and murdered Magi. Because to me, regardless of the contents of the libraries, that the Persians were not an illiterate culture as it is commonly regarded. And as far as his accusations of a conspiracy. It doesn't really surprise me, but I know what you mean. Also it's curious why he was compelled to do this if it really happened. Could it have been because Zoroastrianism which promoted an ethical system which was contrary to the Greek heritage was beginning to affect Greek thought?

And, as I said before, a single author is not "the Greeks": I don't know whether Diogenes Laertes originally said 6 "hundred" or "thousand" but would not rely on such an unconfirmed source anyway.

The fuller account is the later, presumably.

How so?

Why would you presume the reverse?

Isn't he already fallen in the Vedas. I don't recall any background on how he fell and became the psychopomp.

Do you have a source for Mary Boyce and her arguments? I find articles on how she studied among rural Zoroastrian communities to understand the structure of the religion and grasp the meanings of the texts, but I am not finding anything about what chronology she assumed for the composition of the texts, or why she thought so.

I think this was the source - Zoroastrians: their religious beliefs and practices By Mary Boyce

That erosion of "t" to "th" to "h" or nothing did not take place in Persian until medieval times.

Don't know enough to explain that. But this development [t] > [ ] is definitely possible, right? What I mean is it's not counter to linguistic rules.

Initially it would have been asu or asura. The shift of "s" to "h" characteristic of Avestan cannot have been until later than when West speeches like Mitannian and East languages like the ancestor of Pashtun had already split off from the Central group. If Fortson says "late 2nd millenium" then I'm sure he knows better than I do (I wouldn't have guessed that early), but "mid" or "early" 2nd millenium just doesn't seem possible.

You keep on mentioning that initially it would have been an instead of an [h] which I quite understand, but what I'm proposing is that shifted to [h] and then developed into its intermediary form resulting as part of the Hebrew YHWH.

The waw letter in Hebrew is not exactly the English "v" which is called a "labiodental" fricative (labio- "lip" rubbing against dent- "teeth") nor the English "w" which is called a semivowel (it is not a "fricative" which means a "rubbing; frictional" sound; the lips are kept a little apart); rather it is the "bilabial fricative" (two lips together and rubbing, but not touching the teeth). Shifts among "v" and "w" and a waw sound happen all the time.

So this wouldn't detract from my hypothesis.

"Attested" means "actually found" or "witnessed"; we don't find any actual manuscripts of the Avesta older than 900 AD, and none of the ancient authors that discuss Zoroastrianism say anything about them having sacred books. We assume, based on the antiquity of the language, that Avestan existed much much earlier than it is "attested"; but that is the same way that we assume that the portions of the Hebrew Bible which are written in far more antique dialects than the dialect spoken in Persian times go back to sources of quite early age.

Yeah, that was my point exactly and then you started to almost accuse me of being a creationist. All I'm saying is what if the assumptions are wrong or maybe not even but the form YHWH-Yireh and Yasha came from Zoroastrianism.

That link doesn't work. I am immediately suspicious, however, of anybody who claims to know anything about the language of the Harappans (the script is completely undeciphered).

The language of the Harappans: from Akkadian to Sanskrit By Malati J. Shendge

He appears to be claiming that Asha was a Sumerian loan to Avestan.

If X and Y look related, there are four possibilities:
1. It is pure coincidence
2. X caused Y
3. Y caused X
4. Some common Z caused both X and Y
This source constantly assumes that "Iranian caused the Mideastern forms" when most of the time the reverse direction of causation looks much more plausible. He proposes that s'atam forms are older than centum: it NEVER goes in that direction; we understand from the mechanics of human sound production why we often see "k" before front-vowel in an older language (Latin, say) becoming "ch"/"s"/etc. in younger languages (Italian or French) but never the opposite. In other cases too he proposes that the shift goes in the more complicating, rather than the simplifying, direction: diqna "fast; the river Tigris; tiger" as a source for tigra makes senses, but not the reverse. Where the relationships are genuine, therefore (a lot of them may be sheer coincidence), the Iranian looks like the late borrowing rather than the source; and if there was not a borrowing at all, it could be an inheritance from a common ancestor (as Miguel was proposing) with very different shifts in each case.

So would you say there was an Iranian connection to the Sumerians or not? What about some of the material evidence for a connection between the Sumerians and the Iranians, like the symbol of Ashur and Ahura Mazda or Farohar, the Ziggurats which point to a mountainous homeland, and lastly the paleontology.

IOK, it appears Anahita was borrowed earlier than I thought. But the Zend is centuries later than Zoroaster: are you citing Ardvi Sura Anahita from Gathas, or from a Zend story?

Both.

 

[bob x]

I was always taught that the agricultural revolution began around 6000 B.C. exactly.

Yeah, it was BEGINNING then, among people not related to Indo-Europeans; it did not spread to people like Iranians (who were out on the northern steppes hunting game with spear-throwers in 6000 BC) until thousands of years later. "600 BC" appears to be way too late for Zoroaster, but "6000 BC" is just absurd: that is sort of like the Hindu chauvinists who will say things like, the Vedas and the Gita are "50,000" years old or some other big number pulled out of the air-- OK, not quite that bad, but...

The idea of lost libraries is also interesting to me.

The Avesta as we have it appears to have been compiled after the Islamic conquest, representing only fragments of a once much more extensive literature.

Because to me, regardless of the contents of the libraries, that the Persians were not an illiterate culture as it is commonly regarded.

I don't know anyone who would call the Persians "illiterate"; if you have run into such, I am sorry.

Could it have been because Zoroastrianism which promoted an ethical system which was contrary to the Greek heritage was beginning to affect Greek thought?

Prior to Alexander, the Greeks seem to have known hardly anything about Persian thought. I don't see any indication of anybody in Greece, from Periclean period or before, who had even heard of the NAME Zoroaster, let alone any of the Zoroastrian teachings. This was my point about Herodotus: he has some information, not always accurate, about events in Persia, but no real clue how things worked there except, you know, that they were the enemy and presumably generally bad people; whatever you think of him as a source for the actual history, he is a solid source for how the Greeks were thinking about Persia at the time.

Bobx: presumably the fuller account is the later
How so?

I'm not really sure what you're not understanding. Stories grow, add more and more elaborations, as time goes by. The version with all the elaborations is the later version.

Isn't he already fallen in the Vedas. I don't recall any background on how he fell and became the psychopomp.

The whole business of "falling" is part of the elaborations. In the Vedas he is the first human, and therefore was the first to die, that's all; the whole story about how he was intended to be immortal, and had to go through some kind of "fall" in order to become mortal, hadn't been invented yet.

I think this was the source - Zoroastrians: their religious beliefs and practices By Mary Boyce

Thank you. It says "calculations based on the language and content of the 'Old Avestan' and 'Young Avestan' texts suggest a date of about 1200 BC for the former and not later than 800 BC for the latter" (in the foreword p. xiii). This is earlier than I would have guessed, but in line with Forston's "late second millennium" (and both Boyce and Fortson are better informed than I am).

But this development [t] > [ ] is definitely possible, right? What I mean is it's not counter to linguistic rules.

Of course it's "possible"-- since it actually happened. But the thing is, we know WHEN it happened, which was more the time of Muhammad than Moses.

You keep on mentioning that initially it would have been an instead of an [h] which I quite understand, but what I'm proposing is that shifted to [h] and then developed into its intermediary form resulting as part of the Hebrew YHWH.

You need some time-travelling backwards for that to work.

So this ["w"/"v" shifts] wouldn't detract from my hypothesis.

No, that kind of shift is very common.

Yeah, that was my point exactly

That the Hebrew Bible is many many centuries older than Ezra's standardization of it in the Persian period? No, you seemed to be making the opposite point, claiming that everything in the Hebrew Bible was being newly invented just then, which the linguistics really don't allow for. By analogy: the Avesta was put into standardized form in the Islamic period, and we don't get manuscripts until ~900 AD; but it would be ridiculous to think the material was newly composed then, when the linguistics indicates that the sources go back much much earlier.

and then you started to almost accuse me of being a creationist.

Saying that we can't ever know what the dates are does raise my hackles. Yes, there are always uncertainties, in this case uncertainties of hundreds of years, but not of thousands (that's what reminding me of creationists thinking we can't tell thousands of years from millions of years).

All I'm saying is what if the assumptions are wrong or maybe not even but the form YHWH-Yireh and Yasha came from Zoroastrianism.

Look, I understand your patriotic urge to emphasize the anciency, virtues, and importance of your native culture, but you are going beyond what is realistic. "YHWH" has a perfectly straightforward etymology within Semitic from the verb "to be" (just as "Ahura" is straightforward within Indo-European) without any need to grasp for straws at some major distortion of an Iranian phrase, a distortion which could not have happened until way too late. The reality is that Zoroastrianism had major influences on later Judaism of the form presumed in the New Testament, namely such concepts as afterlife rewards and punishments and spiritual beings of "angelic" and "demonic" kinds; but this is the kind of concept which is notably absent in the Hebrew Bible itself, and is obviously a later layer of addition.

The language of the Harappans: from Akkadian to Sanskrit By Malati J. Shendge

He appears to be claiming that Asha was a Sumerian loan to Avestan.

Yes, I found that (so that I do not lose it: he says Sumerian asha "right order" was rendered riddu in Akkadian; it was common for cuneiform scribes to use Sumerian and Akkadian synonyms interchangeably; Sanskrit r.ta corresponding to Avestan asha looks like India borrowed the Akkadian form while Iran borrowed the Sumerian). I am going to have to spend some more time reading this paper: so far I find a mixture of information that intrigues me, and assumptions that annoy me.

So would you say there was an Iranian connection to the Sumerians or not?

The Sumerians were gone before the Iranians were in the area. Some borrowing FROM Sumerian INTO Iranian happened indirectly through Akkadian (the Semitic language which replaced Sumerian in the 2nd millennium BC, although Sumerian words continued in usage). Miguel was speaking of a connection in the form of a far distant ancestor from which both Sumerian and Indo-European derive, but the attempts by your "Early Traces of Aryan" to claim that the Iranian forms are closest to the original, and that there were borrowings INTO Sumerian FROM Iranian, were very unpersuasive to me. For example, he compared Sumerian gal "high-ranking noble" with Indo-European root *kel "superior" as in German Held "hero", Helm "helmet" and the Celtic self-name ("Celt" is supposed to be pronounced "Kelt", not "Selt" as people in Boston mangle it! Gael is also from Kelt); and Miguel would probably like that match-- but the Iranian form s'ar "prince" with the typical centum/s'atam shift plus an "r"/"l" shift (liquids do shift back and forth, though this is not as common as the "w"/"v" which I called "no problem" above) is just obviously not the original.

What about some of the material evidence for a connection between the Sumerians and the Iranians, like the symbol of Ashur and Ahura Mazda

The divine name Asshur is not Sumerian-period, but is about as old as YHWH, somewhere in the 1800-1500 BC range. It is one of the best cases given for a borrowing FROM Iran INTO Mesopotamia: a derivation from asura looks easier than any internal-Semitic source. But this would be a West-Iranian like Mitanni, or an older form of Central-Iranian than any Avestan since it does not show the "s" to "h" shift yet: you see that it is not ahura!

the Ziggurats which point to a mountainous homeland

Ziggurats point to astronomers' desire to be up above the clutter as far as possible for best viewing. That has never changed: 20th century observatories are built up as high as possible, too.

and lastly the paleontology.

I don't know what you are referring to here: please elaborate.

Both [Gathas and Zend contain Anahita].

Interesting. I was seriously mistaken about "Anahita" being a late addition to the religion, then.

 

[mojobadshah]

Prior to Alexander, the Greeks seem to have known hardly anything about Persian thought. I don't see any indication of anybody in Greece, from Periclean period or before, who had even heard of the NAME Zoroaster, let alone any of the Zoroastrian teachings. This was my point about Herodotus: he has some information, not always accurate, about events in Persia, but no real clue how things worked there except, you know, that they were the enemy and presumably generally bad people; whatever you think of him as a source for the actual history, he is a solid source for how the Greeks were thinking about Persia at the time.

Xanthus of Lydia who lived around the same time Pericles lived was the first Greek to actually mention Zoroaster.

Thank you. It says "calculations based on the language and content of the 'Old Avestan' and 'Young Avestan' texts suggest a date of about 1200 BC for the former and not later than 800 BC for the latter" (in the foreword p. xiii). This is earlier than I would have guessed, but in line with Forston's "late second millennium" (and both Boyce and Fortson are better informed than I am).

I guess Boyce wasn't where I got the 1700 or 1500 BC. for the earliest placement of Zoroaster from. In any case this source discusses a 1700-600 B.C. date for Zoroaster. Zoroaster General Survey

Of course it's "possible"-- since it actually happened. But the thing is, we know WHEN it happened, which was more the time of Muhammad than Moses.

Did this [th] > [ ] shift take place any earlier in Canannite?

You need some time-travelling backwards for that to work.

I'm not really sure what you mean here.

That the Hebrew Bible is many many centuries older than Ezra's standardization of it in the Persian period? No, you seemed to be making the opposite point, claiming that everything in the Hebrew Bible was being newly invented just then, which the linguistics really don't allow for.

Na, I'm just talking about a two particular words which were significant in Zoroastrianism as well as in Hebrew.

Saying that we can't ever know what the dates are does raise my hackles. Yes, there are always uncertainties, in this case uncertainties of hundreds of years, but not of thousands (that's what reminding me of creationists thinking we can't tell thousands of years from millions of years).

Yeah, but can you be so sure that Cannanite appeared before Avestan if your saying Cannanite appeared 1800 B.C. and others are saying that Avestan appeared around 1500 B.C.?

The divine name Asshur is not Sumerian-period, but is about as old as YHWH, somewhere in the 1800-1500 BC range. It is one of the best cases given for a borrowing FROM Iran INTO Mesopotamia: a derivation from asura looks easier than any internal-Semitic source. But this would be a West-Iranian like Mitanni, or an older form of Central-Iranian than any Avestan since it does not show the "s" to "h" shift yet: you see that it is not ahura!

I did not know that. That is really interesting. Is Ashur where the place-names Assyria and Syria comes from too? But when I said symbols I actually meant the winged disc with the man in the middle. Does that not appear in Sumerian art?

I don't know what you are referring to here: please elaborate.

The Sumerians and the Iranians both bore "Afghanian" bone structure, if I'm interpreting this correctly. Other sources mention how Sumerian features can be found as far east as Baluchistan.

 

[bob x]

Xanthus of Lydia who lived around the same time Pericles lived was the first Greek to actually mention Zoroaster.

According to Pearson, the leading scholar on Xanthus and his contemporaries, as cited in the Wiki article, "It is believed that Xanthus had some knowledge of Persian traditions, and it is plausible that he, a Lydian, would write about Persian religion, but it seems unlikely due to the available evidence." As with many ancient authors, Xanthus got a lot of "pseudepigrapha" attributed to him (books claiming to be by some ancient authority, actually freshly composed). His genuine work, although composed in a peculiar dialect of Greek, was all about the Lydians (speakers of a language somewhat like Hittite, the branch of Indo-European most distant from all the others) and in the "chauvinist" style: that is, claiming that every great idea in the world originated in Lydia; I have mentioned the "Hindu chauvinists" who claim that India is the origin of all civilization; and you, my friend, are a prime example of "Iranian chauvinism." Examples of "Greek chauvinism" are the quote from Strabo you mentioned some pages back, where he says Persians call worship yasna because Jason and the Argonauts taught them how to worship (that is, those barbarous Persians wouldn't know anything about religion if Greeks hadn't shown them!) or the only passage in Plato I can find about Persians, where he says that Achaemenes (the dynastic founder) was the son of Perseus and Andromeda (how could he have been great if he didn't have a Greek father?)

We do not have any extract from Xanthus talking about Zoroaster, or Persia at all. What we have is that strange quote in Diogenes Laertius where he says Zoroaster was "6000" or "600" years before Xerxes, and claims Xanthus as his source: but Pearson thinks this would be a reference to some pseudepigraph that wasn't written by Xanthus at all; there is also some discussion of the Diogenes quote in your source here:

...this source discusses a 1700-600 B.C. date for Zoroaster. Zoroaster General Survey

which says it could go back to "Persian informants" (presumably through the intermediary of someone writing in Greek and pretending to be Xanthus of Lydia) like the chronologers who invent the artificial histories in "1000-year ages" which cannot taken seriously (the datings are not accurate even for well-known periods: your source points out that the Arsacid dynasty of the "Parthian" period is seriously compressed, since they were not well-remembered; they came from the far east, and never achieved much loyalty in the western empire, so that they did worse and worse against the Romans as time went on, until the Sassanians overthrew them and re-established Persia as a first-rank military power). But "6000 years ago" would have been back to the beginning of history, and the placement of Zoroaster then would have been just a garbling; the chronologies have this bit of data that Zoroaster was "258 years before Alexander" which has been taken much more seriously than the rest, because it is not a round number and is not the kind of thing that these chronologers would have wanted to invent out of nothing.

This would put Zoroaster ~600 BC in the reign of Cyrus the First (grandfather of Cyrus the Great), and a lot of scholars have taken that as solidly established: so did I, when we started this; but I am accepting the linguists' opinions you have cited that this is about six centuries too late for the dialect in which the Gathas are written (as for those, mentioned in your source, who think Zoroaster was completely legendary, or that the Gathas weren't written by him: that is the kind of arch-skeptic, like people who think Jesus of Nazareth never existed or the 19th-century disbelievers in the existence of any city of Troy, that I just find annoying; ancient sources do have their problems and distortions, but don't make up important people and places out of nothing). What is plausible is that this date represents the time when the Achaemenid kingdom adopted Zoroastrianism as the state religion; not long after, we find Vishtaspa ("Hytaspes" in Greek) father of Darius, named after the king Vishtaspa whom Zoroaster converted: I am also annoyed by those who think the father of Darius was the only "real" Vishtaspa and that the king in the Avesta was based on him (the father of Darius was not a king at all, and the king in the Avesta is depicted as far to the east), rather taking it for granted that he was named after the scriptural hero.

Your source does not really think that anywhere "from 1700 BC to 600 BC" is a plausible date for Zoroaster. Rather it is saying that the time when the Rig Veda was written (1700-1500?) is definitely too early (the Gathas are distinctively later than that) and the time when the Achaemenids converted (600?) is definitely too late (the religion must have been around for a while before then). About 1200 seems to be the emerging consensus.

Did this [th] > [ ] shift take place any earlier in Canannite?

It did not take place AT ALL in Canaanite. The shift of medial "t" ("medial" means in the middle of a word) to "th" and then to "h" and finally to nothing is something that happened in Persian, over lengthy periods, not reaching completion until medieval times. There were some similar shifts in Semitic: the feminine-singular-nominative ending shifted from -at to -ah early in the "Canaanit"e and "Aramaic" groups, later in the "Arabic" group, of Central Semitic (never in the "Akkadian" or East Semitic, or in the "Ethiopic" or South Semitic), but the feminine-plural -ot and feminine-singular-constructive -et were not affected, nor any other words with final "t"; between vowels or in final position, "t" did shift to "th" (Sephardic dialect) or "s" (Ashkenazic dialect) in early medieval Hebrew.

I'm not really sure what you mean here.

Na, I'm just talking about a two particular words which were significant in Zoroastrianism as well as in Hebrew.

Rather more than that. You are starting from the fact that the now-standard text of the Hebrew Torah was compiled in the Persian period ~450 BC to argue that major names (of the deity as well as ancestral heroes) and ideas were all made up out of nothing during the Persian period, denying that the linguistics indicates a very lengthy prior history. This is the same as arguing that, since the now-standard text of the Avesta was compiled in the Islamic period ~750 AD, its ideas and names can be derived from the Qur'an and Arabic, ignoring any indications that the Avestan literature had a long prior history.

Yeah, but can you be so sure that Cannanite appeared before Avestan if your saying Cannanite appeared 1800 B.C. and others are saying that Avestan appeared around 1500 B.C.?

NOBODY, as far as you have shown, thinks Avestan appeared around 1500 BC; your sources have rather indicated that such a date is clearly too early.

But I think your usage of the word "appeared" here is indicating some muddle-headedness about how languages develop. People in Canaan or Iran or anywhere else kept right on speaking, continuously, as they have been doing since they became "modern humans"; there are gradual shifts from one generation to the next all the time (teenagers now say "And he was, like, what are you talking about? and I go, like, I'm talking about what you did to me that night" where this usage of "like" to indicate a paraphrased quote did not exist in the English language when I grew up-- and I'm not all THAT ancient!) and no sharp "borders"; the people in England didn't say "We're going to stop speaking Anglo-Saxon now and start speaking Middle English" in some particular year (but the years after 1066 saw rapid changes due to the Norman French invasion, so we mark off "two different" languages around then).

Canaanite did not "appear" in 1800 BC in any sense except that we start to get abundant written attestations then, first from Ebla and then (around 1500) from Ugarit. Ebla used the Mesopotamian cuneiform, a difficult script of mixed syllabic/ideographic style: that is, the symbols either represent a full syllable, or else the idea of a word. For example, the "star" symbol is common for the syllable an. because Anu was the Sumerian god of heaven; but it was also used in Sumerian for the word "god" (which could also be spelled out in syllables as din.gir.) or as a prefix to any god-name (a "man" symbol was prefixed to any man's name, a "woman" symbol to any woman's name, a "mountain" picture to any place-name, and "wood" or "metal" to the name of any tool made of those materials), and then in Akkadian it might still be used to write "god" (although in Akkadian that word was pronounced, and might be spelled out, as i.lu.). The pronunciations are not always written very accurately because not every possible syllable had a mark: so when "Yaw" occurs from Ebla, we don't know whether an "h" sound or two also occurred in the pronunciation, because Sumerian had no "h" so there were no syllable-markers that included "h" sounds. Ugaritic script gives us a better picture because (like the Old Persian script invented in the reign of Darius) it was cuneiform in mechanics (still made by scratching wedges into clay bricks) but alphabetic in style, using 30 letters to indicate the consonants very precisely and the vowels vaguely.

What I mean by the "appearance" of Avestan as a distinct language is the shifting of "s" to "h" which distinguishes it from other old Indo-Iranian speeches. In 1500, we see no sign of that anywhere.

I did not know that. That is really interesting. Is Ashur where the place-names Assyria and Syria comes from too?

Correct. Before the Assyrian hegemony, "Syria" was known as Aram (as in "Aramaic").

But when I said symbols I actually meant the winged disc with the man in the middle. Does that not appear in Sumerian art?

No. Wings on the solar disc are an occasional motif in Egyptian art, however; it is thought this design may have become a symbol of royal power in Syria during the heyday of Pharaonic control. The man in the middle is not known before the Assyrians, however.

The Sumerians and the Iranians both bore "Afghanian" bone structure, if I'm interpreting this correctly. Other sources mention how Sumerian features can be found as far east as Baluchistan.

As I mentioned in the "Celtic/Saxon" thread, it is usually the case that language replacement really involved only a small conquering elite who imposed their political control and cultural ways on the common people, not thorough genocides and replacement of the whole population (although the old elite may well have been slaughtered). The Vedas speak of the upper castes (priestly Brahmans and kingly Kshatriyas) as the "lighter" castes and the lower (mercantile Vaisyas and peasant Sudras) as the "darker"; this is generally taken to mean that there was quite a distinction of skin-tone between the invading Indo-Aryans and the previous population (speaking Dravidian and Munda languages); but by this time you cannot really see much genetic difference among castes, indicating that religious prohibitions against intermarriage have not really been very successful over the long term; the population of the south is somewhat darker than in the north, but all over India it looks as if the population has only a small minority (somewhat more in the north somewhat less in the south) of "Indo-Aryan" genetic ancestry. Despite the language, therefore, the people of India are MOSTLY descended from the people who were in India before any Indo-Europeans showed up at all. The same is true in Iran: despite all speaking "Iranian" languages, you are not mostly descended from the people who brought those languages with them into Iran, but from the people (Elamites, Guti, Meluhhans etc.) who were there before.

 

[mojobadshah]

According to Pearson, the leading scholar on Xanthus and his contemporaries, as cited in the Wiki article, "It is believed that Xanthus had some knowledge of Persian traditions, and it is plausible that he, a Lydian, would write about Persian religion, but it seems unlikely due to the available evidence." As with many ancient authors, Xanthus got a lot of "pseudepigrapha" attributed to him (books claiming to be by some ancient authority, actually freshly composed). His genuine work, although composed in a peculiar dialect of Greek, was all about the Lydians (speakers of a language somewhat like Hittite, the branch of Indo-European most distant from all the others) and in the "chauvinist" style: that is, claiming that every great idea in the world originated in Lydia; I have mentioned the "Hindu chauvinists" who claim that India is the origin of all civilization; and you, my friend, are a prime example of "Iranian chauvinism." Examples of "Greek chauvinism" are the quote from Strabo you mentioned some pages back, where he says Persians call worship yasna because Jason and the Argonauts taught them how to worship (that is, those barbarous Persians wouldn't know anything about religion if Greeks hadn't shown them!) or the only passage in Plato I can find about Persians, where he says that Achaemenes (the dynastic founder) was the son of Perseus and Andromeda (how could he have been great if he didn't have a Greek father?)

You keep on accusing me of being all these things "patriot" "creationist" "Iranian chauvinist." I think you're a good guy Bob X, and I value you're wisdom, but you're starting to remind me of the Greek attitude towards the Iranians. I'm the American that is always hearing one side of the story and virtually never the other side of the story. I have the right to be critical, right?

We do not have any extract from Xanthus talking about Zoroaster, or Persia at all. What we have is that strange quote in Diogenes Laertius where he says Zoroaster was "6000" or "600" years before Xerxes, and claims Xanthus as his source: but Pearson thinks this would be a reference to some pseudepigraph that wasn't written by Xanthus at all; there is also some discussion of the Diogenes quote in your source here:

But if it wasn't a pseudepigraph that would mean that the Greeks were aware of Zoroaster during the Periclean Age right?

which says it could go back to "Persian informants" (presumably through the intermediary of someone writing in Greek and pretending to be Xanthus of Lydia) like the chronologers who invent the artificial histories in "1000-year ages" which cannot taken seriously (the datings are not accurate even for well-known periods: your source points out that the Arsacid dynasty of the "Parthian" period is seriously compressed, since they were not well-remembered; they came from the far east, and never achieved much loyalty in the western empire, so that they did worse and worse against the Romans as time went on, until the Sassanians overthrew them and re-established Persia as a first-rank military power). But "6000 years ago" would have been back to the beginning of history, and the placement of Zoroaster then would have been just a garbling; the chronologies have this bit of data that Zoroaster was "258 years before Alexander" which has been taken much more seriously than the rest, because it is not a round number and is not the kind of thing that these chronologers would have wanted to invent out of nothing.

This would put Zoroaster ~600 BC in the reign of Cyrus the First (grandfather of Cyrus the Great), and a lot of scholars have taken that as solidly established: so did I, when we started this; but I am accepting the linguists' opinions you have cited that this is about six centuries too late for the dialect in which the Gathas are written (as for those, mentioned in your source, who think Zoroaster was completely legendary, or that the Gathas weren't written by him: that is the kind of arch-skeptic, like people who think Jesus of Nazareth never existed or the 19th-century disbelievers in the existence of any city of Troy, that I just find annoying; ancient sources do have their problems and distortions, but don't make up important people and places out of nothing). What is plausible is that this date represents the time when the Achaemenid kingdom adopted Zoroastrianism as the state religion; not long after, we find Vishtaspa ("Hytaspes" in Greek) father of Darius, named after the king Vishtaspa whom Zoroaster converted: I am also annoyed by those who think the father of Darius was the only "real" Vishtaspa and that the king in the Avesta was based on him (the father of Darius was not a king at all, and the king in the Avesta is depicted as far to the east), rather taking it for granted that he was named after the scriptural hero.

Your source does not really think that anywhere "from 1700 BC to 600 BC" is a plausible date for Zoroaster. Rather it is saying that the time when the Rig Veda was written (1700-1500?) is definitely too early (the Gathas are distinctively later than that) and the time when the Achaemenids converted (600?) is definitely too late (the religion must have been around for a while before then). About 1200 seems to be the emerging consensus.

It's definitely my view that Zoroaster was not contemporary to Cyrus. Avestan is more archaic than Old Persian. The Avesta doesn't mention either the Persians or the Medes. I'm sure the 1500 B.C. date is all over the internet. I'm fairly certain it had something to do with the fact that there was an Iranian language attested by the Mittani. You pointed out that the language of the Mittani preserved the where Avestan shifted to an [h]. I understand that. What about the Iranian loans to Myceneaen? (see Janos Makkay, The Early Mycenaean Rulers and the Contemporary Early Iranians of the Northeast) Where those West Iranian loans as well?

It did not take place AT ALL in Canaanite. The shift of medial "t" ("medial" means in the middle of a word) to "th" and then to "h" and finally to nothing is something that happened in Persian, over lengthy periods, not reaching completion until medieval times. There were some similar shifts in Semitic: the feminine-singular-nominative ending shifted from -at to -ah early in the "Canaanit"e and "Aramaic" groups, later in the "Arabic" group, of Central Semitic (never in the "Akkadian" or East Semitic, or in the "Ethiopic" or South Semitic), but the feminine-plural -ot and feminine-singular-constructive -et were not affected, nor any other words with final "t"; between vowels or in final position, "t" did shift to "th" (Sephardic dialect) or "s" (Ashkenazic dialect) in early medieval Hebrew.

I guess I'm just not of the mind that the rules and laws of linguistics are absolute. Sometimes I like to look outside the box.

Rather more than that. You are starting from the fact that the now-standard text of the Hebrew Torah was compiled in the Persian period ~450 BC to argue that major names (of the deity as well as ancestral heroes) and ideas were all made up out of nothing during the Persian period, denying that the linguistics indicates a very lengthy prior history. This is the same as arguing that, since the now-standard text of the Avesta was compiled in the Islamic period ~750 AD, its ideas and names can be derived from the Qur'an and Arabic, ignoring any indications that the Avestan literature had a long prior history.

Well from what I understand there is no chemical means to determine the date of a text, which puts oral and written languages on the same page, and that leaves us with the extralinguistic and paleolinguistic methods of determining the dates. If you're going to be totally dependent on the linguistic estimates alone then I can see how there would be a problem with my hypothesis. It's just a hypothesis. The main detraction from my argument would appear to be the [th] > [ ] shift which according to the linguistic evidence is a much later development. But that doesn't seem so pivotal to me when you consider that Yatha Ahu Vairya and Asha and Yahuweh and Yasha, two very important concepts in both Zoroastrianism and Hebrew sharing semantics that indicates "the one that is" and "salvation" correspond to each other if the initial forms were to contract. Not to mention that Genesis was first compiled under the Persians, and there is no doubt that had been influenced by the Zoroastrian ideology during their time under the Persians.

I got two questions.

1.) You know how languages can change when foreigners adopt foreign languages. Could it have been possible that something like this occurred if the Jews had indeed adopted some key Zoroastrian concepts like the aforesaid ones?

2.) Couldn't the trails of the Jews up until their liberation from their Babylonian Captivity just have been "backwritten" to explain why they had gone through so much suffering? Like they found this monotheist God under the Persians and then created a genesis that would explain how they turned away and towards him at various times in their history until they finally accepted only him?

No. Wings on the solar disc are an occasional motif in Egyptian art, however; it is thought this design may have become a symbol of royal power in Syria during the heyday of Pharaonic control. The man in the middle is not known before the Assyrians, however.

So this one Sumerian Symbology is Assyrian and not Sumerian?

As I mentioned in the "Celtic/Saxon" thread, it is usually the case that language replacement really involved only a small conquering elite who imposed their political control and cultural ways on the common people, not thorough genocides and replacement of the whole population (although the old elite may well have been slaughtered). The Vedas speak of the upper castes (priestly Brahmans and kingly Kshatriyas) as the "lighter" castes and the lower (mercantile Vaisyas and peasant Sudras) as the "darker"; this is generally taken to mean that there was quite a distinction of skin-tone between the invading Indo-Aryans and the previous population (speaking Dravidian and Munda languages); but by this time you cannot really see much genetic difference among castes, indicating that religious prohibitions against intermarriage have not really been very successful over the long term; the population of the south is somewhat darker than in the north, but all over India it looks as if the population has only a small minority (somewhat more in the north somewhat less in the south) of "Indo-Aryan" genetic ancestry. Despite the language, therefore, the people of India are MOSTLY descended from the people who were in India before any Indo-Europeans showed up at all. The same is true in Iran: despite all speaking "Iranian" languages, you are not mostly descended from the people who brought those languages with them into Iran, but from the people (Elamites, Guti, Meluhhans etc.) who were there before.[/QUOTE]

So are you saying there were Iranians in Sumeria or not according to the paleontological evidence?

 

[bob x]

You keep on accusing me of being all these things "patriot" "creationist" "Iranian chauvinist." I think you're a good guy Bob X, and I value you're wisdom, but you're starting to remind me of the Greek attitude towards the Iranians. I'm the American that is always hearing one side of the story and virtually never the other side of the story. I have the right to be critical, right?

Certainly we have our own version of "chauvinism", what is often called (by its proponents as well as its detractors) "American exceptionalism", that the US is not just a new nation but a whole new concept of nation based on voluntary membership rather than ancestry, and that we are wholly responsible for the spread of the concepts of freedom and so on throughout the modern world, as well as the inventors of everything that contributes to modern prosperity... and let's skip over some of the darker aspects of our history, shall we?

If you understand that American chauvinism is vain and silly, surely you can understand that your attempt to make Iran the center of world history and the source of every good thing is going to sound equally so. Just because Zoroaster said we should do good and refrain from doing bad does not mean that everyone else who ever talked about good and evil must have gotten the idea from him.

But if it wasn't a pseudepigraph that would mean that the Greeks were aware of Zoroaster during the Periclean Age right?

It would mean that a LYDIAN, who knew a substandard variety of Greek as a second language, knew about Zoroaster (which is plausible, since Lydia was under the Persian empire); and that his readers in Greece would come to know about Zoroaster through him, if he was believed on this point.

But his known writings were all about Lydia, and how all of history started in Lydia, and so this passage about a Persian prophet living some ridiculous number of years ago is extraordinarily unlikely to be from his genuine writings.

It's definitely my view that Zoroaster was not contemporary to Cyrus. Avestan is more archaic than Old Persian. The Avesta doesn't mention either the Persians or the Medes.

And I am agreeing with you, on that. At first I was echoing the position found among several authors that the first Cyrus (grandfather of the well-known Cyrus) was the prophet's contemporary; but you have shown some good sources (among your other, dubious ones) who convince me that is about six centuries too late.

I'm sure the 1500 B.C. date is all over the internet.

Lots of rubbish is all over the Internet. You don't seem to have a good "BS detector" for sorting out people who are talking through their hats from people who have done sound investigation.

I'm fairly certain it had something to do with the fact that there was an Iranian language attested by the Mittani. You pointed out that the language of the Mittani preserved the where Avestan shifted to an [h]. I understand that.

What it means is that "Avestan", by which I mean a variety of Iranian speech showing that "h" (that is, a language like what Zoroaster spoke) JUST DID NOT EXIST in 1500.

What about the Iranian loans to Myceneaen? (see Janos Makkay, The Early Mycenaean Rulers and the Contemporary Early Iranians of the Northeast) Where those West Iranian loans as well?

I know nothing about this; again, you need to tell me what Makkay says, not just give a name I don't know (if an on-line of his book is not available-- and Google doesn't turn it up for me-- then give me some examples of "Iranian" words in Mycenaean). Yes, I would assume the Mycenaeans would only know western peoples like Scyths and Mitannians. Exact pronunciations of Mycenaean words is difficult to reconstruct because the Linear B script (an "open syllabary" in which only CV syllables, not CVC syllables, could be written, like the kana script for Japanese) was not designed for Greek or any other Indo-European language; it is a slight reworking of Linear A, which was used for the Eteo-Cretan language of the "Pelast" people (Greek Pelasgoi with a pun on pelagos "sea"; Egyptian Peleset; Hebrew Philistim; Latin Palestinian) which is possibly related to Etruscan but not much else.

I guess I'm just not of the mind that the rules and laws of linguistics are absolute.

Uh... we weren't talking about any "rules" or "laws"; we were talking about the observed FACTS. Did words which used to have a "t" in the middle eventually end up pronounced with nothing in place of the "t", in Persian? Yes-- by medieval times. Did that ever happen in Canaanite? No.

from what I understand there is no chemical means to determine the date of a text, which puts oral and written languages on the same page

Exactly. We can date the earliest MANUSCRIPT, but that is often distressingly later than when the text was actually composed (we have no manuscript of Caesar's Gallic Wars until after 1000 AD, for example).

The main detraction from my argument would appear to be the [th] > [ ] shift which according to the linguistic evidence is a much later development. But that doesn't seem so pivotal to me when you consider that Yatha Ahu Vairya and Asha and Yahuweh and Yasha, two very important concepts in both Zoroastrianism and Hebrew sharing semantics that indicates "the one that is" and "salvation" correspond to each other if the initial forms were to contract.

Asha means "order"; the Avestan reflex of the "salvation" root is Haurvaiti, as I have told you many times. And YHWH only has the meaning "the one that is" if you accept the perfectly ordinary derivation of it from the Semitic verb "to be".

Not to mention that Genesis was first compiled under the Persians

Just like the Avesta was first compiled under the Muslims.

and there is no doubt that had been influenced by the Zoroastrian ideology during their time under the Persians.

What do you mean, "no doubt"??? I have told you repeatedly that the Zoroastrian influences, such as "angels" and "demons" and the whole concept of afterlife rewards and punishments, are CONSPICUOUSLY ABSENT in the Hebrew Torah.

1.) You know how languages can change when foreigners adopt foreign languages. Could it have been possible that something like this occurred if the Jews had indeed adopted some key Zoroastrian concepts like the aforesaid ones?

In books composed during the Persian period, we do indeed find clear Zoroastrian borrowings with the linguistics somewhat altered. The demon in the book of "Tobiah" (once known only in Greek translation as "Tobias", but Aramaic texts were found at Qumran) is Ashmodewa where -dewa is obviously div (more like daeva in the older Avestan) and the first element is slightly distorted Iranian too (Google wouldn't bring it up for me right now but I remember reading an etymology once.

2.) Couldn't the trails of the Jews up until their liberation from their Babylonian Captivity just have been "backwritten" to explain why they had gone through so much suffering? Like they found this monotheist God under the Persians and then created a genesis that would explain how they turned away and towards him at various times in their history until they finally accepted only him?

If it had been written in the Persian period, it would be written in the LANGUAGE of the Persian period. The Hebrew of that period (as reflected in such late books as Song of Songs, Ruth, and Ecclesiastes) is as different from the Hebrew of the prophetic books (Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc.) as our English is from 19th century English; and the language of the Torah by contrast is like the language of Shakespeare, or in some places (like much of Genesis) as antique as the Anglo-Saxon of "Beowulf" is to us. Again, this is precisely analogous to the theory that the whole story about Zoroaster was invented in response to Islam.

So this one Sumerian Symbology is Assyrian and not Sumerian?

Note the criticism "CITES NO SOURCES OR REFERENCES"; the person who put that up on Wiki is obviously a member of Zachariah Sitchin's cult (a famous lunatic who invents a theory about aliens controlling early civilization out of some absurd translations of Sumerian texts). The phrase about "the tools used by the Annunaki..." is the giveaway here.
A

So are you saying there were Iranians in Sumeria or not according to the paleontological evidence?

The original "Iranians", speakers of a branch of the Indo-Iranian language family, were nowhere near the Middle East in Sumerian times; they were out on the steppes hunting game. The modern "Iranians" speak a language derived from the original "Iranians" but are mostly descended from the same people who had been there all along; the original Iranians were probably much fairer in complexion (given their more northerly habitat).

 

[mojobadshah]

I know nothing about this; again, you need to tell me what Makkay says, not just give a name I don't know (if an on-line of his book is not available-- and Google doesn't turn it up for me-- then give me some examples of "Iranian" words in Mycenaean). Yes, I would assume the Mycenaeans would only know western peoples like Scyths and Mitannians. Exact pronunciations of Mycenaean words is difficult to reconstruct because the Linear B script (an "open syllabary" in which only CV syllables, not CVC syllables, could be written, like the kana script for Japanese) was not designed for Greek or any other Indo-European language; it is a slight reworking of Linear A, which was used for the Eteo-Cretan language of the "Pelast" people (Greek Pelasgoi with a pun on pelagos "sea"; Egyptian Peleset; Hebrew Philistim; Latin Palestinian) which is possibly related to Etruscan but not much else.

I don't know what Makkay says, but M.L. West in his Indo-European Poetry and Mythology relates the name of the Dana(w)oi to the Avestan davanv- "river'. It was the Danaai who made Argos well-watered. Danae and her son Perseus recall the names of Iranian tribes, the Turanian Danavas (Yt. 5. 72-4, 13. 37 f.) and the Persians.

Asha means "order"; the Avestan reflex of the "salvation" root is Haurvaiti, as I have told you many times. And YHWH only has the meaning "the one that is" if you accept the perfectly ordinary derivation of it from the Semitic verb "to be".

No, would say that "order" is a good etymological translation of Asha, but really Asha is one of the hypostatises of Ahura Mazda that leads one to both Kshatra Vairya "Kindgdom of Heaven" as well as Ameritat "Immortality" or salvation.

What do you mean, "no doubt"??? I have told you repeatedly that the Zoroastrian influences, such as "angels" and "demons" and the whole concept of afterlife rewards and punishments, are CONSPICUOUSLY ABSENT in the Hebrew Torah.

Bob X!

 

[bob x]

I don't know what Makkay says, but M.L. West in his Indo-European Poetry and Mythology relates the name of the Dana(w)oi to the Avestan davanv- "river'. It was the Danaai who made Argos well-watered. Danae and her son Perseus recall the names of Iranian tribes, the Turanian Danavas (Yt. 5. 72-4, 13. 37 f.) and the Persians.

Maybe Makkay has something specifically Iranian, but this root is generic Indo-European: see Don/Dnieper/Dniester rivers from Balto-Slavic, Donau ("Danube") probably originally from Illyrian, Latin Diana (artificially identified with the unrelated Greek Artemis but originally a river-goddess, and tribe-names from this root include the Tuatha de Danaan in Celtic. "Perseus" was a simplification of older Pterseus from a root "to cut down; destroy"; there is no relationship to "Persian" (although Plato, as I mentioned, thought Achaemenes was the son of Perseus).

No, would say that "order" is a good etymological translation of Asha, but really Asha is one of the hypostatises of Ahura Mazda

And Haurvaiti is a DIFFERENT hypostasis: there is no reason for the Avesta to list seven hypostases (the plural replaces -is with -es, not stacking them both together) if you don't distinguish any of them from each other.

The suffix -ait in Avestan is third-person-singular ("he [verb]s") analogous to (but not related to) the prefix y- in Yshuwa'; the "h" is the shifted sibilant, related to the "sh"; the "au" vowel corresponds to the "u" vowel and the "v" to the "w"; the liquid which was probably originally "l" is irregularly represented by "r" in Avestan and glottal stop in Hebrew. Obviously neither of these is the source of the other; rather, they are end-points of two independent lines of development from a common source several thousand years prior to either.

that leads one to both Kshatra Vairya "Kindgdom of Heaven" as well as Ameritat "Immortality" or salvation.

The phrase "Kingdom of heaven" occurs numerous times in the NEW Testament (Christian Bible, written 1st-2nd centuries AD), but never (not even once; not at all; zero times) in the "Old" Testament (Hebrew scriptures). Neither does any concept of "immortality": there are no angels or devils in the Hebrew, and no afterlife in either a heavenly or hellish realm; your reward for good deeds is to have your family prosper and multiply, your punishment for evil to have your family extincted, and that is all. The verb sh-w-' "to save" is always used in the sense of rescue from a peril in this world (in the sense: if a lion is chasing you and I shoot the lion, I "saved" you), never (not even once; not at all; zero times) in the sense of being "saved from eternal damnation", a concept which is just unheard-of in the Hebrew scriptures.

I don't know how often I have to explain this to you: Zoroastrianism most certainly DID influence the post-Persian form of Judaism which is the background for Christianity; but all of those elements (angels, demons, heaven, hell etc.) are a late layer of addition, alien to the Hebrew tradition which had a long history of independent development long before they had ever heard of Persians. Most present-day forms of Judaism have shed all of that Zoroastrian baggage.

 

[mojobadshah]

And Haurvaiti is a DIFFERENT hypostasis: there is no reason for the Avesta to list seven hypostases (the plural replaces -is with -es, not stacking them both together) if you don't distinguish any of them from each other.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Listing all seven of them didn't seem necessary to the point. Asha is one of the hypostases that leads to salvation.

The phrase "Kingdom of heaven" occurs numerous times in the NEW Testament (Christian Bible, written 1st-2nd centuries AD), but never (not even once; not at all; zero times) in the "Old" Testament (Hebrew scriptures). Neither does any concept of "immortality": there are no angels or devils in the Hebrew, and no afterlife in either a heavenly or hellish realm; your reward for good deeds is to have your family prosper and multiply, your punishment for evil to have your family extincted, and that is all. The verb sh-w-' "to save" is always used in the sense of rescue from a peril in this world (in the sense: if a lion is chasing you and I shoot the lion, I "saved" you), never (not even once; not at all; zero times) in the sense of being "saved from eternal damnation", a concept which is just unheard-of in the Hebrew scriptures.

I don't know how often I have to explain this to you: Zoroastrianism most certainly DID influence the post-Persian form of Judaism which is the background for Christianity; but all of those elements (angels, demons, heaven, hell etc.) are a late layer of addition, alien to the Hebrew tradition which had a long history of independent development long before they had ever heard of Persians. Most present-day forms of Judaism have shed all of that Zoroastrian baggage.

You really don't. I think I have a good grasp of how Judaism was and wasn't influenced by Zoroastrianism. Everything but judgment and resurrection. Were these concepts initially Zoroastrian?

But also my point wasn't that "Kingdom of Heaven" was an OT concept, but that Yasha "salvation" was (from this root we have names like Oshea, Yehoshua, and others) and I can't see how it wouldn't be related etymologically to Av. Asha "the best good that leads one to salvation," apart from you're linguistic analysis.

 

[bob x]

I'm not sure what you mean here. Listing all seven of them didn't seem necessary to the point. Asha is one of the hypostases that leads to salvation.

And Haurvaiti is the one that IS "salvation".
Why does the Avesta distinguish seven at all-- if they're all the same? What's the point?

You really don't. I think I have a good grasp of how Judaism was and wasn't influenced by Zoroastrianism. Everything but judgment and resurrection. Were these concepts initially Zoroastrian?

And demonic enemies of God, and so on. The Hebrew scriptures just don't have any of that.

But also my point wasn't that "Kingdom of Heaven" was an OT concept, but that Yasha "salvation" was (from this root we have names like Oshea, Yehoshua, and others)

No, the root is not "Yasha". The ROOT of any verb in Semitic is three consonants, all of which are vital: shin AND waw AND 'ayin are found in all forms of "to save" (which really means "to rescue" from a worldly danger, and has no sense of "salvation" from afterlife perils, not anywhere in the Hebrew scriptures or in any earlier Semitic usages of that verb) while the y- prefix is the third-person-singular grammatical prefix "he [verb]s" and not part of the root at all. "Yasha" would not even be a POSSIBLE form of that root in Hebrew.

and I can't see how it wouldn't be related etymologically to Av. Asha

You can't see how two words that only share one single consonant could be unrelated? "Avesta" must be derived from English "ever" (which is the root for "forever" referring to eternity, and to "every" referring to all-inclusiveness) since they share the letter V?

 

[mojobadshah]

And Haurvaiti is the one that IS "salvation".
Why does the Avesta distinguish seven at all-- if they're all the same? What's the point?

Yes, Av. Haurvaiti is the form you said is akin to the Eng. save, but I don't think it means "save" as a hypostasis. I think it means something more along the lines of "whole" as a hypostasis. This is my rundown of how the hypostasis play into the overall scheme of the Zoroastrian philosophy:

Spenta Mainyu “Holy Mind,” Vohu Manah “Good Mind,” and Spenta Armaiti “Love” lead to Asha Vahishta “Best Order” which leads to Khshathra Vairya “The Kingdom of Heaven,” Haurvatat “Wholeness,” and Ameritat “Immortality.”

So Asha in this case is what leads to one's rescue or "safety or wholeness." Do you not see the semantic resemblance between Asha and Yasha that I'm seeing?

No, the root is not "Yasha". The ROOT of any verb in Semitic is three consonants, all of which are vital: shin AND waw AND 'ayin are found in all forms of "to save" (which really means "to rescue" from a worldly danger, and has no sense of "salvation" from afterlife perils, not anywhere in the Hebrew scriptures or in any earlier Semitic usages of that verb) while the y- prefix is the third-person-singular grammatical prefix "he [verb]s" and not part of the root at all. "Yasha" would not even be a POSSIBLE form of that root in Hebrew.

You can't see how two words that only share one single consonant could be unrelated? "Avesta" must be derived from English "ever" (which is the root for "forever" referring to eternity, and to "every" referring to all-inclusiveness) since they share the letter V?

But isn't Yasha "to rescue" an intermediary form between the root you're talking about and names like Oshea?

 

[bob x]

THERE IS NO SUCH WORD AS "YASHA"! Not in any language. Google only turns it up as a mis-spelling of Hindi "Yaksha" (evil female demon) used in the title of a play. I suppose it would be possible in Russian as a term of endearment for "Yuri" (the suffix -asha is often used in this way, as "Natasha" for "Natalya") but I don't know of any instance. You invented "yasha" because you wanted something that looks more like "asha" than any of the actual Hebrew words do.

And no, I don't buy your "semantic" connection. If a lion is chasing you, and I shoot the lion, it is not natural to say "I ordered you" (borrowing the word for "order" to mean "rescue" because "order" leads to "salvation" which is metaphorically a kind of "rescue"?)

 

[mojobadshah]

THERE IS NO SUCH WORD AS "YASHA"! Not in any language. Google only turns it up as a mis-spelling of Hindi "Yaksha" (evil female demon) used in the title of a play. I suppose it would be possible in Russian as a term of endearment for "Yuri" (the suffix -asha is often used in this way, as "Natasha" for "Natalya") but I don't know of any instance. You invented "yasha" because you wanted something that looks more like "asha" than any of the actual Hebrew words do.

Then why are there sites all over the internet that suggest that Oshea is derived from a Hebrew root verb yasha "help" (OT:3467)?

And no, I don't buy your "semantic" connection. If a lion is chasing you, and I shoot the lion, it is not natural to say "I ordered you" (borrowing the word for "order" to mean "rescue" because "order" leads to "salvation" which is metaphorically a kind of "rescue"?)

That's because you're interpreting "order" wrongly. I wasn't using it in the command sense "I ordered you." I was using it as an antonym to the word "chaos."

 

[bob x]

Then why are there sites all over the internet that suggest that Oshea is derived from a Hebrew root verb yasha "help" (OT:3467)?

There is all kinds of rubbish on the Internet. Whoever told you this doesn't have any clue how the Hebrew language even functions: it isn't just that that isn't a "root", it isn't even what a "root" looks like in Hebrew.

A "root" in Hebrew consists of three consonants, from which there are multiple "derivations" by inserting vowels in certain patterns and sometimes adding prefix or suffix consonants. From l-m-d derivations are elmed "I guide", tilmed "you guide", yilmed "he guides" with the subject pronouns indicated by prefixes, and object pronouns by suffixes, elmedakh "I guide you (singular)", elmedkem "I guide you (plural)", tilmedow "you guide him", yilmediy "he guides me" etc. and nouns like lamedh "walking stick; letter L", mulamud "guide; teacher", talmud "guidance; instruction", talmid "student". From m-l-k, simple concrete noun melekh "king", with suffixed pronoun in malkiy "my king", prefixed abstract noun memlakhah "kingship" (the m- is not a reduplication of the root-consonant but a prefix as in mulamud or muhammad "one who gives praise" from root h-m-d exactly the same as Arabic; the -ah suffix is feminine gender, customary on abstract nouns), verbal forms like yimlok "he reigns" or the causative verb himlik "he causes [someone else] to reign".

The "root" we are discussing is sh-w-' (that is, shin-waw-'ayin) and the derivation with y- prefix is y-shuwa' "he rescues"; there is also a causative form (like that himlik) with the h- prefix, and that is howshea' "he causes [something] to rescue" which is the name of the prophet "Hosea" ("Osee" in the Vulgate; this only happened because Greek has no "h" letter, just writing an apostrophe that often gets lost) and a variant name for "Joshua". It is an irregularity that the waw slips in ahead of the shin in that form, but "weak" consonants do some funny things.

What could be made of "yasha" in this context? Sometimes one of the "consonants" is the silent letter aleph (that is, not all three consonants are present; but a letter is written to mark the missing place), so "yasha" could be a poor way to write the root yod-shin-aleph, if there existed such a root, but that is not one of the combinations that actually occurs. There are some Hebrew words which are not from any three-consonant root, typically nouns with two consonants separated by a vowel: yom "day", dam "blood", 'am "nation", goy "foreigner" etc. and the set ben "son", bath "daughter", beth "house; family" which seem to be inter-related; some are "particles" (grammatical connectives that are neither nouns nor verbs) like pen "lest; for fear that..." or yesh "there is..."; the first "consonant" is often aleph (nothing), like ash "fire", etz "wood", ab "father", em "mother", ach "brother". The feminine ending -ah can be added to some (achah "sister") and that final "h" falls silent, but otherwise words seldom end in vowels; "yasha" could be *yashah "a female yash" if there were any word yash, but there isn't. It's just not a word; not a "root" and not any derivation from any root; it doesn't seem to be a word in any other language either (maybe it means something in Zulu or whatever).

That's because you're interpreting "order" wrongly. I wasn't using it in the command sense "I ordered you." I was using it as an antonym to the word "chaos."

So, you would think it natural to say "I organized you from the lion"? Because "organization" defeats chaos, and leads to salvation, which is a metaphorical kind of "rescue"?

 

[mojobadshah]

The "root" we are discussing is sh-w-' (that is, shin-waw-'ayin) and the derivation with y- prefix is y-shuwa' "he rescues"; there is also a causative form (like that himlik) with the h- prefix, and that is howshea' "he causes [something] to rescue" which is the name of the prophet "Hosea" ("Osee" in the Vulgate; this only happened because Greek has no "h" letter, just writing an apostrophe that often gets lost) and a variant name for "Joshua". It is an irregularity that the waw slips in ahead of the shin in that form, but "weak" consonants do some funny things.

So the name Yehowshua is not a contraction of the words Yahweh and Oshea?

So, you would think it natural to say "I organized you from the lion"? Because "organization" defeats chaos, and leads to salvation, which is a metaphorical kind of "rescue"?

I meant what I meant which is that the there is a semantic relationship between Asha and y-shuwa' in that "order" is "salvation." Order means safety, Chaos means hostility.

 

[bob x]

Y-howshuwa' "Joshua" is a contraction of YHWH y-shuwa' "YHWH rescues"; all personal names using "YHWH" as an element contract it in some manner, for the same reason as the "taboo deformations" I discussed in connection with "wolf/bear" deities (to speak the right name of a deity has the effect of summoning: don't do it unless you mean it).

I think I finally know where your "yasha" comes from. I noted that the waw which is supposed to be second-consonant slips in front of the shin which is supposed to be first, in such forms as Howshea', and this also happened in the simple noun, which pattern is usually [1st]e[2nd]e[3rd] like melekh "king" from m-l-k "to rule", or [1st]a[2nd]e[3rd] like lamed "cane" from l-m-d "to guide" so we might expect *shewe'/shawe' "[an act of] rescue" if not for the "weak" consonants ('ayin only likes "a" before it; waw prefers "o" or "u"); instead the word was apparently w-sha' but Hebrew early shifted initial "w" to "y" systematically: Canaanite wayin, the source through Phoenician of Greek oenus, Latin vinus, English wine, gives Hebrew yayin; the city of Weru-Shaliym with first element like Sumerian ur "city", became Yerushalayim "Jerusalem"; the w-l-d root "to be born" retains its "w" after prefixes, like yowled "he is born" or howlid "he caused to be born; fathered the child" rendered "begat" in King James, but the simple noun "child" is yeled, contrast Arabic walid.

So we find Y-sha'yah(uw) "rescue [is] YHWH" as the name of the prophet "Isaiah" (as rendered in English) and Yish-'ay "my rescue" as the name of David's father "Jesse". I am using a dash "-" for the sh-wa vowel (literally, a "nothing"; the absolutely least possible vowel, as in the first syllables of English about or alone). So a derivation did become like y-sha', tolerably like your "yasha" and probably the source of whatever website you got it from.