format_quote Originally Posted by
Lara
What's the origin of the word God?
Rather then going by memory I found a source I can quote from:
Word origin: God - Our word god goes back via Germanic to Indo-European, in which a corresponding ancestor form meant “invoked one.” The word’s only surviving non-Germanic relative is Sanskrit hu, invoke the gods, a form which appears in the Rig Veda, most ancient of Hindu scriptures: puru-hutas, “much invoked,” epithet of the rain-and-thunder god Indra. (From READER’S DIGEST, Family Word Finder, page 351) (Originally published by The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., Pleasantville New York, Montreal; Copyright (C) 1975)
Now if the sources noted above are accurate, then the word that we use for the Supreme Being, God, comes from a very pagan origin. Thus the word god is used generically by many different religions to refer to their deity or “invoked one.”
Some may laugh at the notion, the very idea that the word “God” has any origin or association with Hindu Sanskrit. To illustrate how this is possible, we again quote from ‘Family Word Finder’ on the historical development of our Modern English language:
Page 7, ‘Word Origins’ - “English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, which consists of about 100 related tongues, all descended from prehistoric language of a pastoral, bronze working, horse breeding people, the Aryans, who inhabited the steppes of Central Asia about 4500 B.C. Scholars refer to their language at this stage as proto-Indo-European, or simply Indo-European.
Source:
http://www.bibleanswerstand.org/God.htm
In addition How the early Germans used the word:
"Similarly, it is equally easy to gloss over the sordid history of many non-Arabic terms
Christians use for God. The English word “God”, for example, comes from the pagan
Germanic “Gott,” which was sued as a proper name for the chief Teutonic deity Odin,
who lives on top of the world-tree and created the first humans with his wife Freya, a
blonde, blue-eyed goddess of love, fertility and beauty. Should English speakers therefore
discontinue addressing the Most High as God? In spite of its pagan origin and its present
use for both false deities and the Most High, “God” (when capitalized) is generally
understood by English speakers as the God of the Bible, and therefore perfectly
acceptable to English-speaking Christians. Allah, by contrast, shares the same Semitic
roots as Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, is not presently used for false deities, and clearly
understood by all Arab Christians and Muslims as the God of the Bible. Allah is therefore
a perfectly acceptable term for Arabic-speaking Christians and Muslims."
Source:
http://camelmethod.com/downloads/Sho...anslations.pdf
Now for the big surprise before I get called anti-Christian. Both of those quotes are from Christian sites.