(Piano music) Hello, and welcome to Your Greek Word On A Sunday, a weekly, bite-size podcast for anyone curious on language, etymology and connections. I am your host, Emmanuela Lia and wherever you are in the world, if you want to entertain your brain for a few minutes, this is the podcast for you. Let's Go!

Happy November everyone! Starting the month with a word that is usually mixed up with ‘freedom’, and you’d be both right and wrong to do so. Let me explain: Ancient Greece had a city-state system much like the US today. Athens would govern through all, set the laws for everyone and the city states paid taxes to it. If a city state wanted to follow its own laws, have its own elected politicians etc but still pay taxes to Athens and contribute troops in case of war, it wasn’t a free city state (because that could only happen in very few occasions and the city state would still be supervised). Εαυτός (eaftos/eautos) or αυτός (aftos/autos) means ‘the self’ and νόμος (nomos) means ‘Law’. The combined word that travelled from Greek to Latin to French and English, and kept its political meaning well into the 17th century, developed an individual meaning starting with the Stoics and reaching Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment. That’s when it started getting very close to the meaning of freedom. According to the stoics, a person who can follow their own rules, directed by their own morality (which better be virtuous) without denying the gods or fate was AYTONOMOΣ/AUTONOMUS

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(Piano music) Hello, and welcome to Your Greek Word On A Sunday, a weekly, bite-size podcast for anyone curious on language, etymology and connections. I am your host, Emmanuela Lia and wherever you are in the world, if you want to entertain your brain for a few minutes, this is the podcast for you. Let's Go!

Happy Halloween, let the spooky words in! Today’s word is not used very often in English and it’s more likely you’ll find it written than spoken, unless you want to be very dramatic in which case Halloween is the perfect time for it! In Ancient Greece If you wanted to enter the underworld, Hades , you had to cross 5 rivers. Αχερων (Acheron) the river of death , Κωκυτός (kokitos) the river of woe ,Πυριφλεγέθων (piriflegethon) also known as simply Φλεγέθων (flegethon) the river of fire , Lethe which I’ve spoken about in its own episode , the river of memory and forgetfulness, and Styx the river of hate. There is no particular order to enter Hades but Styx and Acheron are mentioned mostly as the first two. Styx was a titan, a goddess and a river that the gods swore in. It’s mentioned in the odyssey, the Iliad and has countless literary mentions from around the world. Styx ran from the underworld to a mountain side above the ground and that was an entry point to Hades. Her story as a goddess is for another episode but the adjective in English is used to describe anything dark and abominable. In modern Greek it means ‘ruthless’ ΣΤΥΓΕΡΟ/STYGIAN

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(Piano music) Hello, and welcome to Your Greek Word On A Sunday, a weekly, bite-size podcast for anyone curious on language, etymology and connections. I am your host, Emmanuela Lia and wherever you are in the world, if you want to entertain your brain for a few minutes, this is the podcast for you. Let's Go!

And it’s here! Happy Halloween, let the spooky words in!
Herodotus in the 5th century BC wrote about the Egyptian writing. He was fascinated by their use of two different systems, the sacred and the common and how they wrote from right to left. If you’re wondering why ancient writing is spooky, you haven’t watched any supernatural movies and now is the season to start ! One of the Egyptian writing systems was just symbols and they were mostly found in places of worship. Herodotus combined two Greek words to describe them . Ιερό (iero) meaning ‘sacred’ and the Ancient Greek infinitive γλυφειν (glyphin) meaning ‘to carve’. Of course the latinised spelling is a little different but the word remains ΙΕΡΟΓΛΥΦΙΚΑ/HIEROGLYPHS

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