Eso’s Chronicles 327 / 3
Odds and Ends
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin.

HOW DOES ‘GENU’ BECOME ‘IESU’? (2 of 4)

With a small clue, such as discovering that the word ‘pagan’ does not mean ‘heathen’, but consists of two parts, ‘pa’ and ‘gan’, we can make long strides such as daddy longlegs, a member of the arachnids called an  Opilione makes, whence it is also known as a Harvest Spider or Harvestman or Shepherd.

That’s pure gobbledygook, no? Not so fast.

Again, let us note that the word ‘opilione’ consists of two parts: Opil + ione. ‘Opil’ derives from ‘opal’ or color (https://www.google.lv/?gws_rd=cr&ei=BytJU6jYHaOGywOq6IGoAg#q=meaning+of+opalescent ) and stands for daddy longlegs many eyes, while ‘ione’ is easily read as ‘ian’, whence the English name for John. In this case, the word ‘harvestman’ derives from the word shepherd, which itself originally meant herder and was pronounced as Ian, or Yan, Ivan, Ion, Johann, Jan, Xian, x 100. Since herders were replaced by agriculturalists, the name was transferred to the latter; thus, also John, Ian, Xian, Janis, Jean, Zhan, etc., become peasants.

As for ‘pa + gan’, the ‘gan’ word also spells Jan, because the letter G may be easily pronounced as J in John or J in gendarme.

So, the many eyed ‘opilione’ stalks on and comes to a stop at the Italian name for ‘peasant’ or ‘paisan’. Is this word not the same as the ‘pagan’ of the Balts? The word, too, consists of two parts: ‘pa’ + ‘isan’. Interestingly, we note that ‘gan’ (or yan) is now spelled ‘isan’. A long time ago, I had a dear friend of Italian extraction, whom I often greeted by addressing him as “Paisan!” meaning not peasant or heathen, but ‘friend’.

Thus, it goes with words and names; and we can now return to the word ‘Genu’ in the title of these blogs and see more easily how it is connected to the ancient herders or Ians, and how Ians was also a name commonly held by kings—such as King John, Ivan the Terrible, Ghegis Khan, Prester John—all because the people who used these names saw a connection between herders of sheep, or goats, or reindeer, or pigs, or cows with a person who was responsible for keeping track of a herd or a community.

Perhaps we can also see how ‘’pa-gan’ becomes ‘pa-isan’ or the other way around, though we cannot necessarily explain how the letter G becomes IS or IS becomes G. Yet we cannot now deny giving consideration to the possibility that John or Ian came to be known as IESU, especially since one John the Baptist (known as John the Christener in other languages) is said to be his forerunner.

Seeing that Easter is soon upon us, we can go on to speculate of how the word ‘Christ’ derives from the word ‘skusts’, after the latter  metamorphosed into the word ‘krusts’ or ‘cross’.

In the Latvian language, the word ‘skusts’ comes from when a woman puts her four cornered shawl across her shoulders, then crosses the two loose ends across her breast and tucks them into her belt or knots them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quechua_Woman_in_Peru.JPG . The pattern that the wearer of the skusts then carries on her body is clearly a ‘cross’. If we now return to our favorite act of ‘pareidolia’, we may note that ‘skusts’ also echoes in such words as ‘skuhpsts’ (kiss) in Latvian, and the word ‘skull’, which we generally see with two shinbones crossed behind it.

If we wish, we may use our pareidolia also to touch the famous Latin American shawl known as a ‘ruana’. It is pictured in the link above. While the origin of the word according to the Chibcha people is derived from the word meaning ‘land of blankets’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruana , I will still dare to link the word to the time when the consonant L changed its pronunciation and became an R. Thus originally, a Ruana may have read Luana, a blanket of the people made of the wool of Llamas https://www.google.lv/#q=image+of+llama .

( To be continued.)