Linguistic glob

The Symbolism of Ianuarius and Janus: A Semantic-Symbolic Perspective Introduction The Roman calendar, like many ancient temporal systems, encodes more than mere dates—it reflects concepts of time, thresholds, and initiation. The month Ianuarius (January) offers a fascinating case study. Named after Ianus , the deity of beginnings and transitions, it marks the threshold between the old year and the new, symbolically bridging past and future. This article explores Ianuarius from a semantic-symbolic perspective, highlighting cross-linguistic patterns that illuminate how early cultures conceptualized beginnings, orientation, and boundaries. Ianus : The Deity of Beginnings and Thresholds Janus is traditionally depicted with two faces, one looking backward and one forward, emphasizing his role as a guardian of transitions. He presides over gates, doorways, and temporal thresholds, embodying both initiation and reflection. In Roman thought, this duality encapsulates the cyclical and directi...

The Modern Greek word “ απόδειξη ” (“proof”) is usually presented as a simple inheritance from Ancient Greek ἀπόδειξις. That’s convenient—but misleading. Traditional etymology stops at Greek literary explanations and refuses to look at the Balkan linguistic reality. Here’s the truth: ἀπο - functions exactly like the Gheg Albanian “à bo ” (“it has been done”, b>p), marking a completed action. δείκνυμι (“to show”) matches the Albanian di (“know”), di, ditë (“day”), diell (“sun”)—preserving a concept of light → seeing → knowing. -σις / -ξη marks the result of an action, consistent with this semantic logic. In short : what is done in the light is seen; what is seen is known. This is the real idea of proof—not some abstract Greek invention. Ancient Greek formalism tries to hide this, forcing the word into rhetoric or logic. Modern Greek even stretches it to mean receipts or invoices—but that doesn’t explain its origin. By excluding Albanian and other Balkan substrate evidence, main...

 What I am doing in this article is root–semantic probing, not naïve word-matching. That distinction is crucial, and it is exactly the kind of analysis that curse tablets invite but mainstream linguistics avoids when Albanian is involved. Let’s take my findings one by one and situate them methodologically, not rhetorically. 1. nys / nis (“to start, set in motion”) Albanian nis / nys encodes initiation, activation, setting something into action. This semantic field is ritual-critical, because curse tablets are structured around: initiating binding setting a spell in motion activating divine or chthonic forces Greek curse language often uses opaque verbs whose semantics are inferred only contextually. Albanian preserves transparent motion/activation verbs, which are precisely what one expects in early ritual speech. Even if the form is not identical, the semantic architecture matches the function of the text. 2. di / ditë (“day; know”) This is one of the strongest Balkan survivals. I...

Against Greek-Centric Abstractionism Generation, Quantity, and the Misordering of Semantic History Greek-centric historical linguistics has long suffered from a systematic inversion of semantic chronology. By privileging abstract lexical forms preserved in Classical Greek—particularly adjectives of quantity such as πολλά (“many”)—it mistakes philological visibility for semantic primacy. This error is not incidental; it is structural. At the core of this paradigm lies an unexamined assumption: that the earliest attestable abstractions in Greek texts reflect the earliest stages of linguistic meaning itself. This assumption collapses immediately when confronted with cognitive, typological, and anthropological evidence. 1. The Greek fallacy: abstraction as origin Greek-centric models routinely treat abstract categories—number, measure, plurality—as primary semantic units, simply because they are lexicalized early in written Greek. This is a methodological fallacy. Writing preserves late c...

The Emergence of an “Engineering Language” from the Symbolic Root di The so-called “technical” or “engineering” forms of Indo-European languages—Latin vidēre, Greek oida, Sanskrit véda, and so on—are not arbitrary lexical innovations. They are the fossilized remnants of a fully articulated symbolic system, still alive and transparent in Albanian. At its core lies the root di / dia, encoding sun, light, visibility, and knowing, combined with spatial or perceptual operators such as ve / vi (“place, position, orientation”) or sy (“eye”). The fundamental equation is simple, elegant, and mechanical: LIGHT → VISIBILITY → SEEING → KNOWING Albanian preserves this semantic machine in its living grammar, while other Indo-European languages have reduced it to fragments—isolated words, abstract roots, and fossilized forms. The “seeing–knowing” root in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Germanic languages is not a reflection of independent invention but a derivative, opaque shadow of what Albanian still a...

Cham Albanian and the Root “di” In the Cham Albanian dialect, the expression “ u di ” (standard “ u gdhi ”) means “it dawned / it became day.” This is not a poetic metaphor but an ordinary, living usage: u di → impersonal, intransitive → literally: “it became known / it became visible” → semantically: light appeared; darkness ended u gdhi → from gdhihem / gdhi, “to dawn; to wake into daylight” → more concrete, but semantically equivalent The decisive point—systematically ignored in Greek-centric etymology—is that di here does not mean “to know” in a modern cognitive sense. It preserves an archaic semantic identity: di = to see = to become visible light → visibility → consciousness This is not speculative reconstruction; it is direct linguistic evidence, still functioning in a living Balkan language. Cham Albanian exposes the pre-abstract layer from which later philosophical meanings were derived—and subsequently obscured. The Root “di” and the Semantic Mechanics of αἰδώς The key to un...

Back to Beekes: αἰδώς and the Failure of the PIE Abstraction 1. The Data Greek Cannot Explain In the Cham Albanian dialect, the expression “ u di” (standard “ u gdhi ”) means “it dawned / it became day.” This is not a poetic metaphor but an ordinary, living usage. u di → impersonal, intransitive → literally: “it became known / it became visible” → semantically: light appeared; darkness ended u gdhi → from gdhihem / gdhi, “to dawn; to wake into daylight” → more concrete, but semantically equivalent The decisive point—systematically ignored in Greek-centric etymology—is that di here does not mean “to know” in a modern cognitive sense. It preserves an archaic semantic identity: di = to see = to become visible light → visibility → consciousness This is not speculative reconstruction; it is direct linguistic evidence, still functioning in a living Balkan language. Cham Albanian thus exposes the pre-abstract layer from which later philosophical meanings were derived—and subsequently obs...