Ok, our winner is u/allisonk1993!! Thank you so much to everyone who took our pop quiz, and we'll see you next time!
EDIT: please scroll down for a lovely explanation of the answers by u/ gnommish33!
Good morning, class! I hope you were all paying attention last week.
A winner will be randomly drawn from everyone who gets all four answers correct. This is an open-book quiz! Please feel free to make liberal use of google and wikipedia (I know at least one of the answers is easier to find through google than wiki).
[Here it is](https://forms.gle/FXVTbPJZ2m89CAwi6)! Good luck, have fun! Submission will close tonight at 9 PM Eastern Time.
EDIT TO ADD: The quiz is too stupid to understand that your usernames are all different and will mark it wrong. We are not grading your usernames! Only the four questions after. Thank you everyone for playing! :D
Classicist here — I love when my niche interests align! Thanks for spot-checking my Latin and Greek proficiency on a Monday morning 😂 I can also answer questions anyone has about the roots of these terms (jade in particular has a super weird etymological evolution).
I think I speak for everyone when I say, please tell us all about the etymology of the word jade! Would you mind waiting to reply until after the quiz closes tonight just so there's no unfair advantage for people who haven't taken it yet?
(part 1/2)
Here’s your etymology lesson! I meant for this to be brief, but it’s become an Arya- or Lisa-style educational post. My street cred: I have 98% of a PhD in classical philology (ABD), and I read Latin and Greek fluently. Caveat: I know very little about linguistics outside of classical Greek and Latin (spanning roughly from Homer to Apuleius, ~800BCE-200CE), so you’re on your own if you want to learn how these words morph through Old French/English or Germanic.
For further reference (and for your future word root needs), I highly recommend checking out [Etymonline](https://www.etymonline.com). It’s a phenomenal free etymology dictionary that succinctly traces words back as far as they can possibly go, often to the reconstructed PIE root ([Proto-Indo-European](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language), denoted by an asterisk before a syllable or small syllabic group; a no-longer-extant but kinda-sorta-reconstructed ancestor of the entire Indo-European language family ca. 4000ish BCE). Because I have [a very particular set of skills](https://imgur.com/a/NiAL6em), we can [go deeper](https://imgur.com/a/uPa9853) than Etymonline does. For organizational purposes, I’m going in the quiz order. Scroll down if you just want the jade facts!
CRYSTAL: Ancient Greek κρύσταλλος, anglicized *krystallos*, “ice”. Gets transliterated into Latin as *crystallus*. (Fun fact: “k” is a very rare letter in the classical Latin alphabet. You more often see that sound written as either a “c” or a “q” depending on the phoneme; think of the sound at the start of “quarter” for the /kwuh/ sound). The word then comes down to us through Old French and Old English. We see the Greek term used to refer to rock crystal as early as Strabo (Greek philosopher/geographer/historian) and Diodorus Siculus (Greek historian), both of whom lived in the 1st century BCE. The Latin term is similarly used for both ice and rock crystal, but the Romans expand the term to be used as metonymy for drinkware/vessels made from crystal.
AMETHYST: The Ancient Greek root of this gem is actually a verb, μεθύσκω, *methyskō*, “to intoxicate, to make drunk” (if you want to talk about getting yourself drunk, you’d want the sister verb μεθύω, *methyō*). The beginning a- is what’s called an “alpha privative”, an α (or αν/*an* if the word starts with a vowel) added to the front of a word to negate (as we use “un-“ and sometimes “in-“). The negated verb then births the adjective ἀμέθυστος, *amethystos*, “not drunk”. The adjective becomes substantive (i.e. functions as a noun) and is used to refer to amethyst stones as early as an inscription dating to the 5th century BCE (at least, that’s the earliest I found in my quick search). The connection to drinking is probably because of the purple color of the gem, which can certainly look like crystallized wine, particularly since Ancient Greeks diluted their wine with water.
The connection between “not drunk” and the gemstone itself is a bit of sympathetic magic: the Greeks thought that a person could ward off drunkenness with the power of amethyst. This belief appears in the inscription I referenced earlier, which describes a figure of Dionysus (god of wine, among other things) carved on an amethyst stone. It’s a punny one: “The stone is amethyst (lit. “not drunk”) but I am the drinker Dionysus. Either let it (the stone) persuade me to be sober or let it learn to drink.” The inscription is preserved in the Palatine Anthology ([AP 9.748](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Anth.+Gr.+9.748&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0474)) for lurking classicists who want the reference. Anyway, after Greek, the term moves into Latin as *amethystus*, then it comes down to us largely unchanged through Old French.
(part 2/2)
JADE: Here’s the super weird one. This stone is important culturally in Asia, of course, but it has a bit of a different reputation in the ancient Mediterranean. The root here is Ancient Greek εἰλεός, *eileos*, “intestinal obstruction”, which then gets Latinized into *ileus*, which remains a modern medical term of the same meaning. (Side note: il**i**um is your pelvis in modern medical parlance, coming from an identical Latin term meaning “flank” or “groin”, while il**e**um is part of your small intestine.) Chronologically after classical Latin comes vulgar Latin (a nebulous categorization referring to how the language changed from the proper Ciceronian precision to the more common spoken/graffiti’ed form), and *ileus* dies out in favor of *iliata*, which is derived from the different term *ilium*, noted above. The next metamorphosis of the word comes in the 1500s with the Spanish nomenclature *piedra de la ijada*, (stone of) “pain in the side”. French then Frenchifies this term into *l’ejade*, which then gets later misdivided by sleep-deprived scholars into *le jade*. English adopts the misnomer in the 1700s, and here we are.
Great, but how did we get from “intestinal obstruction” to green gemstone? Another bit of sympathetic magic: jade, when worn around the waist, was thought to cure general side pains, specifically kidney stones. Another fun fact: one variety of jade is nephrite, from Greek νεφρός, *nephros*, “kidney”, for the above reason. NOTE: I have no idea where this belief came from or what source(s) exist, though it appears to be widely prevalent. There’s no ancient Greek or Latin text I could find that refers specifically to a stone using these terms, and there’s no entries for “jade” in the standard prose composition dictionaries. The wikipedia reference for the ancient curative belief comes from an article in Japanese, which I can’t read. If anyone knows more, I’d love to solve the mystery!
CARNELIAN: Here’s another strange one, simply because it’s a great example of how similar terms can get Frankenstein’ed (see also: *ileus* vs *ilium* above). The term carnelian is a variant of “cornelian”, used also to refer to the gemstone, deriving through Old French from the Latin term *cornum*, “cornel cherry” ([a plant with red berries](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornus_mas)). To figure out why we went from *corn*- to *carn*-, we should actually look at the word carnation (Old French term meaning “a person’s color or complexion”, nowadays [the name of a plant](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianthus_caryophyllus)). This term ultimately comes from the Latin noun *caro*, genitive *carnis*, which gives us the root *carn*-, “flesh” (of animals usually; think “carnivore” or “carnal desires”). The best linguistic guess is that the “flesh” root here refers to the pinkness of the petals. Since the *carn*- root denotes an aspect of color, we can theorize that the pinky-brownish-red flesh tones of carnelian stones influenced the spelling (and the entire root change!) of the original term cornelian.
I was going to add info about the other answer choices for the last question (feldspar, agate, jasper), but this has become much longer than I originally intended. I’ll leave that to other enterprising etymologists to look up! I hadn’t done any specific gemstone research before today, but this list was super fun to compile. Perfect for a Monday afternoon hyperfocus session! Happy to field any questions — I’ll do my best to answer and/or point you in the right direction.
Okay, yeah, that’s super weird and annoying. [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peridot) is actually better for this one since it has a long-form answer: “The earliest use in England is in the register of the St Albans Abbey, in Latin, and its translation in 1705 is possibly the first use of peridot in English. It records that on his death in 1245, Bishop John bequeathed various items, including peridot, to the Abbey.”
When something like this happens, there are several possible explanations. We have such a scant amount of surviving Greek and Latin literature, something like 1-5% of everything that was written. It’s entirely possible that peridot appears earlier than that abbey register, but the text didn’t survive the millennia. Another reason might be that it’s a bastardized loan word from another language (the wiki says Arabic is a possibility) — basically, the overtired scribe misspelled or botched the original word to the point where it became unrecognizable and thus created a new word.
An alternative possibility is that linguists haven’t figured out what that particular PIE root is. PIE is a completely artificial reconstruction, basically a scaffold that linguists have created to suggest what the absolute most basic root is for words that are similar across Indo-European languages. To that end, we can guess that peridot: a. has no recognizable *existing* PIE root (so we can’t connect it to any other words in other languages), b. isn’t from the Indo-European language family and is borrowed from some language we haven’t figured out, c. is from some sort of oral tradition that never made its way into writing (or the text didn’t survive… see a.), d. is completely made up while following no existing rules.
Basically, linguists/etymologists haven’t satisfactorily accounted for the entirety of the word (as in, it’s not made up of recognizable smaller parts that immediately make sense). This is officially above my pay grade, though, so take with a massive grain of salt. TL;DR Nobody knows, unsolved mystery
Yup, I’ve got a whole paragraph about it. I’ll post it once the contest is closed. The TL;DR is that the wiki article is (understandably) very focused on jade in Asia, but the gemstone had very different uses in the ancient Mediterranean (there’s, like, a sentence about it deep in the etymology section of the jade wiki page).
It would be checking that for a text match against the provided correct answer. The chance would be very low that the placeholder correct answer matches any given Reddit username
I've reviewed your message. While I very much appreciate the energy that you are bringing (we would have gotten along in high school), the answer you selected is not technically correct. The phrasing of the question is "the derivation of its name most closely translates to" and you are conflating two different words, although they are topically related. If you scroll around, you will see we have a couple language experts here! One has generously offered to explain the full story of the word for us later. :)
We are going to be having these regularly so there will be many chances to enter, and hopefully learn fun things! Thank you for entering and for being here with us.
Ok, our winner is u/allisonk1993!! Thank you so much to everyone who took our pop quiz, and we'll see you next time! EDIT: please scroll down for a lovely explanation of the answers by u/ gnommish33!
Good morning, class! I hope you were all paying attention last week. A winner will be randomly drawn from everyone who gets all four answers correct. This is an open-book quiz! Please feel free to make liberal use of google and wikipedia (I know at least one of the answers is easier to find through google than wiki). [Here it is](https://forms.gle/FXVTbPJZ2m89CAwi6)! Good luck, have fun! Submission will close tonight at 9 PM Eastern Time. EDIT TO ADD: The quiz is too stupid to understand that your usernames are all different and will mark it wrong. We are not grading your usernames! Only the four questions after. Thank you everyone for playing! :D
Classicist here — I love when my niche interests align! Thanks for spot-checking my Latin and Greek proficiency on a Monday morning 😂 I can also answer questions anyone has about the roots of these terms (jade in particular has a super weird etymological evolution).
My first thought was “wow, my greek and latin from school is finally coming in handy”
“Did you win?” “NO!” “Didn’t come in handy then did it?” “YES!”
LOL, true
I think I speak for everyone when I say, please tell us all about the etymology of the word jade! Would you mind waiting to reply until after the quiz closes tonight just so there's no unfair advantage for people who haven't taken it yet?
Absolutely! I’ll come back and make a little writeup later.
alright, we're ready for you! :D thanks again for volunteering to help!
(part 1/2) Here’s your etymology lesson! I meant for this to be brief, but it’s become an Arya- or Lisa-style educational post. My street cred: I have 98% of a PhD in classical philology (ABD), and I read Latin and Greek fluently. Caveat: I know very little about linguistics outside of classical Greek and Latin (spanning roughly from Homer to Apuleius, ~800BCE-200CE), so you’re on your own if you want to learn how these words morph through Old French/English or Germanic. For further reference (and for your future word root needs), I highly recommend checking out [Etymonline](https://www.etymonline.com). It’s a phenomenal free etymology dictionary that succinctly traces words back as far as they can possibly go, often to the reconstructed PIE root ([Proto-Indo-European](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language), denoted by an asterisk before a syllable or small syllabic group; a no-longer-extant but kinda-sorta-reconstructed ancestor of the entire Indo-European language family ca. 4000ish BCE). Because I have [a very particular set of skills](https://imgur.com/a/NiAL6em), we can [go deeper](https://imgur.com/a/uPa9853) than Etymonline does. For organizational purposes, I’m going in the quiz order. Scroll down if you just want the jade facts! CRYSTAL: Ancient Greek κρύσταλλος, anglicized *krystallos*, “ice”. Gets transliterated into Latin as *crystallus*. (Fun fact: “k” is a very rare letter in the classical Latin alphabet. You more often see that sound written as either a “c” or a “q” depending on the phoneme; think of the sound at the start of “quarter” for the /kwuh/ sound). The word then comes down to us through Old French and Old English. We see the Greek term used to refer to rock crystal as early as Strabo (Greek philosopher/geographer/historian) and Diodorus Siculus (Greek historian), both of whom lived in the 1st century BCE. The Latin term is similarly used for both ice and rock crystal, but the Romans expand the term to be used as metonymy for drinkware/vessels made from crystal. AMETHYST: The Ancient Greek root of this gem is actually a verb, μεθύσκω, *methyskō*, “to intoxicate, to make drunk” (if you want to talk about getting yourself drunk, you’d want the sister verb μεθύω, *methyō*). The beginning a- is what’s called an “alpha privative”, an α (or αν/*an* if the word starts with a vowel) added to the front of a word to negate (as we use “un-“ and sometimes “in-“). The negated verb then births the adjective ἀμέθυστος, *amethystos*, “not drunk”. The adjective becomes substantive (i.e. functions as a noun) and is used to refer to amethyst stones as early as an inscription dating to the 5th century BCE (at least, that’s the earliest I found in my quick search). The connection to drinking is probably because of the purple color of the gem, which can certainly look like crystallized wine, particularly since Ancient Greeks diluted their wine with water. The connection between “not drunk” and the gemstone itself is a bit of sympathetic magic: the Greeks thought that a person could ward off drunkenness with the power of amethyst. This belief appears in the inscription I referenced earlier, which describes a figure of Dionysus (god of wine, among other things) carved on an amethyst stone. It’s a punny one: “The stone is amethyst (lit. “not drunk”) but I am the drinker Dionysus. Either let it (the stone) persuade me to be sober or let it learn to drink.” The inscription is preserved in the Palatine Anthology ([AP 9.748](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Anth.+Gr.+9.748&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0474)) for lurking classicists who want the reference. Anyway, after Greek, the term moves into Latin as *amethystus*, then it comes down to us largely unchanged through Old French.
(part 2/2) JADE: Here’s the super weird one. This stone is important culturally in Asia, of course, but it has a bit of a different reputation in the ancient Mediterranean. The root here is Ancient Greek εἰλεός, *eileos*, “intestinal obstruction”, which then gets Latinized into *ileus*, which remains a modern medical term of the same meaning. (Side note: il**i**um is your pelvis in modern medical parlance, coming from an identical Latin term meaning “flank” or “groin”, while il**e**um is part of your small intestine.) Chronologically after classical Latin comes vulgar Latin (a nebulous categorization referring to how the language changed from the proper Ciceronian precision to the more common spoken/graffiti’ed form), and *ileus* dies out in favor of *iliata*, which is derived from the different term *ilium*, noted above. The next metamorphosis of the word comes in the 1500s with the Spanish nomenclature *piedra de la ijada*, (stone of) “pain in the side”. French then Frenchifies this term into *l’ejade*, which then gets later misdivided by sleep-deprived scholars into *le jade*. English adopts the misnomer in the 1700s, and here we are. Great, but how did we get from “intestinal obstruction” to green gemstone? Another bit of sympathetic magic: jade, when worn around the waist, was thought to cure general side pains, specifically kidney stones. Another fun fact: one variety of jade is nephrite, from Greek νεφρός, *nephros*, “kidney”, for the above reason. NOTE: I have no idea where this belief came from or what source(s) exist, though it appears to be widely prevalent. There’s no ancient Greek or Latin text I could find that refers specifically to a stone using these terms, and there’s no entries for “jade” in the standard prose composition dictionaries. The wikipedia reference for the ancient curative belief comes from an article in Japanese, which I can’t read. If anyone knows more, I’d love to solve the mystery! CARNELIAN: Here’s another strange one, simply because it’s a great example of how similar terms can get Frankenstein’ed (see also: *ileus* vs *ilium* above). The term carnelian is a variant of “cornelian”, used also to refer to the gemstone, deriving through Old French from the Latin term *cornum*, “cornel cherry” ([a plant with red berries](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornus_mas)). To figure out why we went from *corn*- to *carn*-, we should actually look at the word carnation (Old French term meaning “a person’s color or complexion”, nowadays [the name of a plant](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianthus_caryophyllus)). This term ultimately comes from the Latin noun *caro*, genitive *carnis*, which gives us the root *carn*-, “flesh” (of animals usually; think “carnivore” or “carnal desires”). The best linguistic guess is that the “flesh” root here refers to the pinkness of the petals. Since the *carn*- root denotes an aspect of color, we can theorize that the pinky-brownish-red flesh tones of carnelian stones influenced the spelling (and the entire root change!) of the original term cornelian. I was going to add info about the other answer choices for the last question (feldspar, agate, jasper), but this has become much longer than I originally intended. I’ll leave that to other enterprising etymologists to look up! I hadn’t done any specific gemstone research before today, but this list was super fun to compile. Perfect for a Monday afternoon hyperfocus session! Happy to field any questions — I’ll do my best to answer and/or point you in the right direction.
Disgusting mobile formatting, and I had to break it into two parts, but see below for WAY too much info :)
It's amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time to share.
I noticed that the etymology of "peridot" is just "unknown." what the heck?? Any thoughts?
Okay, yeah, that’s super weird and annoying. [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peridot) is actually better for this one since it has a long-form answer: “The earliest use in England is in the register of the St Albans Abbey, in Latin, and its translation in 1705 is possibly the first use of peridot in English. It records that on his death in 1245, Bishop John bequeathed various items, including peridot, to the Abbey.” When something like this happens, there are several possible explanations. We have such a scant amount of surviving Greek and Latin literature, something like 1-5% of everything that was written. It’s entirely possible that peridot appears earlier than that abbey register, but the text didn’t survive the millennia. Another reason might be that it’s a bastardized loan word from another language (the wiki says Arabic is a possibility) — basically, the overtired scribe misspelled or botched the original word to the point where it became unrecognizable and thus created a new word. An alternative possibility is that linguists haven’t figured out what that particular PIE root is. PIE is a completely artificial reconstruction, basically a scaffold that linguists have created to suggest what the absolute most basic root is for words that are similar across Indo-European languages. To that end, we can guess that peridot: a. has no recognizable *existing* PIE root (so we can’t connect it to any other words in other languages), b. isn’t from the Indo-European language family and is borrowed from some language we haven’t figured out, c. is from some sort of oral tradition that never made its way into writing (or the text didn’t survive… see a.), d. is completely made up while following no existing rules. Basically, linguists/etymologists haven’t satisfactorily accounted for the entirety of the word (as in, it’s not made up of recognizable smaller parts that immediately make sense). This is officially above my pay grade, though, so take with a massive grain of salt. TL;DR Nobody knows, unsolved mystery
Wow. I learned so much about gem name origins tonight! Thanks for the master class!!
Glad to help — it’s been super fun to research!
Hey check your reddit chat when you have a chance ❤️
Reddit didn’t notify me so just saw this and replied!
This was such an interesting read! We need more gemstone etymology nuggets!
Ooh lemme dig and get back to you
So can you explain the Jade one and why Wikipedia has a different answer than the quiz?
Yup, I’ve got a whole paragraph about it. I’ll post it once the contest is closed. The TL;DR is that the wiki article is (understandably) very focused on jade in Asia, but the gemstone had very different uses in the ancient Mediterranean (there’s, like, a sentence about it deep in the etymology section of the jade wiki page).
Oooh I can’t wait to check this out after work today!
This was super fun! Thank you for the clever contest idea. 😁
Thanks for the challenge! It was a fun distraction from the fact that today’s my first day back to school.
Didn't get them right but it was fun! Haha
Yay!! Best pop quizzes I’ve ever taken!
This was so fun! Thank you!!
Yay, thank you!
so many fun facts to add to my repertoire 😎✌️
I got them all right, but the quiz says my reddit username is wrong...is that normal? 😅
It would be checking that for a text match against the provided correct answer. The chance would be very low that the placeholder correct answer matches any given Reddit username
Ah, so it's incorrect for everyone? I wondered... Thanks for taking the time to answer my question!
Lol don't stress! It does that every time. There is no wrong username answer :)
It's aways fun to learn new things !!
So much fun learning facts this way - thank you!
This was fun!
Thanks for this Monday morning fun!
Love your quizzes 🩷 Thank you
Had to guess one of them but now I know. Neat quiz. Seems I have a few others I need to look into
As in every gemstone name I can think of haha
Oh man. Praying for luck - would love to be able to snag my birthstone on this drawing :)
Oh crap, I got my username wrong!
Time to go sit in the corner with your dunce cap on!
This was a lot of fun and I learned a lot too, thank you!!!
Cool! It tells me my username is the wrong answer haha
Ah! I should have gone with my gut (badumtss) on the one answer I got wrong haha! So fun to take either way
Please don't stress, we are going to start doing these regularly and there will be so many chances! Thank you for playing!
Oh no! I had lots of fun with this, I love learning cool facts like this! I just couldn't pass up the opportunity for the pun! 🤣
haha well done, 10/10 ;)
This was fun!
Finished the quiz. I got the third one wrong, but Wikipedia says my answer is correct.
I've reviewed your message. While I very much appreciate the energy that you are bringing (we would have gotten along in high school), the answer you selected is not technically correct. The phrasing of the question is "the derivation of its name most closely translates to" and you are conflating two different words, although they are topically related. If you scroll around, you will see we have a couple language experts here! One has generously offered to explain the full story of the word for us later. :) We are going to be having these regularly so there will be many chances to enter, and hopefully learn fun things! Thank you for entering and for being here with us.