World Religion Etymologies

A thought popped into my head today: why do we say a person is Jewish, but that their religion is Judaism? After all, whilst the jew and juda elements look similar, they are definitely not the same, and from a first glance you cannot immediately tell the origin of them like you can with Christian and Christianity.

And similarly, a muslim is a believer in Islam. Hold on, these words are completely different! How is that the case?

That is the topic I will write about today - names of religions. It is late in the day though, so I won't go too deep.

Judaism

Firstly let's go over Judaism. As it turns out the difference here is just a simple matter of being worn out over time, and the words ultimately derive from the same place, which is the name Judah. Quite simple.

Islam

The words muslim and Islam are quite a bit more interesting. In Semitic languages (e.g. Arabic), instead of all grammar being marked with affixes, instead roots of words are sequences of consonants (e.g. k-t-b) into which vowels are slotted to mark grammatical information (for instance, the word kitab means <q>book</q>, but the word kutubiyy is a <q>bookseller</q>; the verb kataba means to write, but if you conjugate it as 'aktuba, it means <q>I would write</q>. As can be seen from all these, the vowels are inserted into the words almost like a template: the -i-a- fits together with k-t-b to form kitab <q>book</q>. If you want even more examples with this k-t-b root, there is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to it, which you can find here.

Now, let's take the template for making a verbal noun, i--a- and slot it over the verb s-l-m, meaning to submit (as in to surrender oneself). We get the word islam. So Islam is the noun meaning <q>submission</q>.

As for muslim, this has the prefix m- but works in a similar way. It is actually the active particle of the verb 'aslama, again formed of the s-l-m root and meaning <q>to submit</q>, so the word muslim translates to one who is submitting.

Again there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to this particular root (s-l-m), which you can find here.

The exact origin of this kind of morphology, called nonconcatenative morphology is generally in a sort of extreme kind of umlaut, which is then reanalysed and regularised into something resembling the above kind of morphology. Umlaut itself generally occurs when strong sounds (generally vowels, such as /i/) affect the vowels around themselves. This is how in English we have many words where the plural is a difference in vowels, such as foot, feet or man, men. In these cases, the suffix to mark the plural in West Germanic was an i, so the plural of mann was manni. This i was so strong it affected the a, turning the plural into menni. From there, because the difference in vowels was enough to tell the difference between singular and plural, the final i got dropped, giving man and men. As said, the process to form morphology like in Arabic is generally an extreme form of this umlaut, which is then regularised to become the dominant paradigm.

Buddhism

Buddism is quite a simple one - the name comes from buddha , which is from the Sanskrit word buddha, meaning awakened or enlightened. Tracing the word further back, it comes from a PIE word meaning awake, aware, which made it into English in the form of the words bid (as in, to bid at an auction) and bode. Hence, a word like forboding comes from forebode, or being aware (bode) of something in advance (fore, as in before).

Another somewhat interesting thing about the word buddha is the word for Buddha in several East Asian languages. For instance, in Japanese, the word for Buddha is quite different: Hotoke, or Hotoke-sama with the honorific. This in turns comes from Old Japanese potoke, from Proto-Korean most likely Pwutukye. The pwutu comes from the same origin as Buddha, namely Sanskrit (albeit through Chinese, which is partly responsible for the odd form). The kye part is probably a similar honorific to Japanese sama, meaning something like <q>lord</q>, but it might also be from the Chinese word ke, or <q>spirit</q>, as in, the spirit of Buddha.

After this, the final two major religions, Hinduism and Sikhism, have fairly simple etymologies that you may expect. Sikhism naturally comes from Sikh comes from a word sikkha, which originally meant <q>teaching, instruction</q>, relating to a word meaning <q>student</q>. Hindu is ultimate from the same word where the word India came from, which is sindhu in Sanskrit. This originally meant <q>river</q>, and is relating to the Indus River. The s sound at the beginning became h due to a common sound change, s > h, and the word became hindhu. From here we get Hindu, and when the word was passed along to Greek, the h at the beginning was lost giving us Indos, or India.

Whilst this is only the etymology of the most common religions out there, there are obviously many more. As you may have imagined, names from religions tend to come from several sources, such as names of important people in the religion (Judas in Judaism, Christ in Christianity, Buddha in Buddhism), descriptions of what followers should be like or do or descriptions of their leader ('submit' for Islam, 'enlightened' as the description of Buddha) or the nationality or geography (Hindu for instance). There are many other smaller religions as well, each of which can have fairly interesting etymologies as well (Taoism comes from a word meaning 'the way', where this tao element is related to the to in Shintoism, which means 'the way of the gods') but I have kept it to the major religions for brevity.