Monday, Monday

It's amazing, really, what unintended trouble one can get into when making a casual comment, online, on a Yahoo  list. I mentioned that "nionon" was the Irish Gaelic word for "heaven". Used in the email address and url for this blog. 

And this is a heavenly picture by Chris, of beautiful Red Rocks, CO, I assume.

I was just trying to help out a fellow lister by suggesting names for a project she had completed, and happened to mention the above. Well! Apparently there are Linguists who knit [it was a knitting list]. I was told I was wrong. And, darn it, she may well be right.

My slap down sent me to my books as well as haring off into the google-sphere. I spent eons of time reading and searching and trying to figure out the lineage of said "nionon". I knew where I'd found it, I just didn't know why it was wrong. I ended up having no choice but to assume that the Linguist who said it seems to be a new-age construction perhaps a downright fiction, was after all, correct. Don't ask me why I couldn't accept her word as an expert in language as easily as I'd accepted the word of an author? After all, who is likely to be correct?

Obviously I was attached to it and my perceived idea, as well romance of it all. I think most of us had to wrestle with AOL at one point in email history to find an email name that hadn't already been scooped up. Personally I hated having numbers stuck onto a perfectly pretty name which was the only other alternative if you couldn't find a pristine word [one that hadn't already been used for AOL]. I don't care for numbers, they always manage to ruin my otherwise perfect day.

But, does being a created word make it 'wrong', linguistically? Language changes all the time. New words come into and out of vogue and change meanings. There is already an Irish Gaelic word that mean heaven and it's "neamh". It's not nearly as romantically pretty. After said Lingust had enlightened me I found it, and some other goodies, online in McBain's Dictionary

heaven, Irish neamh, Old Irish nem, Welsh, Cornish nef, Middle Breton neff, now env: *nemos; Sanskrit námas, bowing, reverence; Latin nemus, grove; Greek @Gnémos, pasture: root nem, distribute, Greek @Gnémw (do.), German nehmen, take. Gaulish has @Gnemcton or @Gnemeton, Old Irish nemed, sacellum. Often, and lately (1895) by Prof. Rhys, referred to the root nebh, be cloudy, Greek @Gnéfos, cloud, Latin nebula (see neul); but the Gaelic nasalized èa is distinctly against this, as also is the Breton env (Stokes).

Of course that look up lead to reading a few other words and their meanings located on the same 'page' in McBain's...not sure why I find dictionaries such completely fascinating reading, but I do. 

I had a little giggle over the apparent similarity of "neamh [heaven]" to the following word. I'm sure the similarity is ephemeral as it's probably pronounced completely differently and would not resemble "neamh" when said in 'real' life, but I was amused:  

neimh: poison, Irish nimh, neimh, Old Irish nem, pl. neimi: *nemes-, "something given", root nem-, distribute (as in nèamh)?

nòin: noon, Irish nóin, g. nóna, evening, noon, Early Irish nóin, nóna, Welsh nawn; from the Latin nônahora, ninth hour of the day, or 3 o'clock.

I was told that "nion" was found as a rune, thought to indicate the "ash" tree [meaningful/sacred to the Celts] and that it is most likely a misspelling of "noin", not sure about that. I'd prefer to think of it as a misspelling of the following, although I am not at all sure of the information at the very end of this sentence:

neòinean, neònan:  the daisy, Irish nóinin: "noon-flower", from nòin, noon. Cf. the English daisy for force

So after all that, I'm not going to change my email name or blog url...and the project name Id suggested? It was accepted despite the small kerfuffle this stirred on the list. It was a lot of fun!