Stupid pronunciation.

[changeling]

I 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.

Comments

[chardarkminion.livejournal.com]

Agnostic = Without Knowledge (presumably, without knowledge of God)

[delirieuse.livejournal.com]

I gathered that, once I got the correct etymology. :)

[erl-queen.livejournal.com]

Technically, in Greek there is no "h", there is only aspiration. You spell "hagnos" alpha-gamma-nu-omicron-sigma in Greek, but you pronounce the a with an aspiration, easiest expressed by "h" in English. So that might account for the alternate spelling you saw.

According to Liddell and Scott, "'agnos" means "full of religious awe, hallowed, holy, sacred, undefiled, chaste, pure, pure from blood, guiltless, upright." It does not say anything technically about "set apart". It does imply that it comes from "'agos" which it defines as "any matter of religious awe, that which requires expiation, a curse, pollution, guilt" etc., which seems almost the opposite, but deriving from the same source (religious awe).

So if it does come from agos, and somewhere along the line an extra "n" got added in, that might account for how it looks like "agnostic" but doesn't seem to mean the same thing. Agnostic is simply not-knowing (the prefix "a" in Greek often means not, as in athanatoi=not-dying).

You're right though that it's strange for us to pronounce the g in agnostic but not in gnostic. That's why I like Greek - the rules are more consistent at least, there are no silent letters like that.

[delirieuse.livejournal.com]

Technically, in Greek there is no "h", there is only aspiration. You spell "hagnos" alpha-gamma-nu-omicron-sigma in Greek, but you pronounce the a with an aspiration, easiest expressed by "h" in English. So that might account for the alternate spelling you saw.

Yep. That makes sense. "Hagnos" was the form used by Burkert, or at least his translator, in Greek Religion.

Usually in English the rules are there, it's just that they're difficult to discern unless you know which language the word is sourced from. Sometimes you also need to know when it was added to the language, what spellings were in vogue at the time, and what words it was confused with. ;)

[sannion.livejournal.com]

h/agnos is a tricky concept: properly it encompasses both that which is sacred, and that which is tabu. like thusia, it's one of those things we don't really possess in our modern spiritual vocabulary, which is why i prefer to leave such words in the original greek.

transliteration is also a tricky subject: i've seen both forms of the word used by equally knowledgeable folk.

[mawaridi.livejournal.com]

I don't know, I think it makes some sense that we would pronounce the g in 'agnostic' even though we don't in 'gnostic'. English has quite a lot of words with silent letters at the beginning, but fewer with silent letters in the middle. Gs tend only to be silent at the beginning of words or near the end (gnome, cough, etc.) It seems pretty inevitable to me that English speakers would forget the links and start pronouncing the 'g' in agnostic just because it seems a more likely pronouciation than 'a-nostic'. Even though 'a-nostic' would make the etymology a lot more obvious :)

[delirieuse.livejournal.com]

This is very true. [/deleting old comment notifications]

[watersusurrus.livejournal.com]

English comes from the same culture that produced Morris dancing.


Ergo, it doesn't have to make sense. You might as well just go and have a beer.

[delirieuse.livejournal.com]

*DIES*

I think I want that on an icon.