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Stupid pronunciation.
Oct. 19th, 2007 08:10 amI was reading an article about Graeco-Egyptian worship (as you do), and came across what seems to be an alternate spelling of hagnos, which I'd always assumed meant "holy". The spelling was agnos and what it literally meant was "set apart".
This made me wonder about the derivation of agnostic. The OED website (askoxford.com) didn't have the derivation, but gave an interesting definition of agnostic: "a person who believes that nothing can be known concerning the existence of God". Did this mean, I wondered, that agnostic derives from a concept that God/the gods are "set apart" from men, and so we cannot know them?
I surfed on to dictionary.com, which uses American spellings but has word derivations. The word agnostic derives from the Greek word to know; same basic root as gnosis, or gnostic. Ah. So agnostic shouldn't actually be connected with h/agnos at all. The pronunciation tripped me up. Surely agnostic should actually be pronounced "a-nostic", to bring it in to line with the pronunciation of gnostic (and other words beginning with a–, such as amoral)?
Sometimes I despair of English.
This made me wonder about the derivation of agnostic. The OED website (askoxford.com) didn't have the derivation, but gave an interesting definition of agnostic: "a person who believes that nothing can be known concerning the existence of God". Did this mean, I wondered, that agnostic derives from a concept that God/the gods are "set apart" from men, and so we cannot know them?
I surfed on to dictionary.com, which uses American spellings but has word derivations. The word agnostic derives from the Greek word to know; same basic root as gnosis, or gnostic. Ah. So agnostic shouldn't actually be connected with h/agnos at all. The pronunciation tripped me up. Surely agnostic should actually be pronounced "a-nostic", to bring it in to line with the pronunciation of gnostic (and other words beginning with a–, such as amoral)?
Sometimes I despair of English.
