The Origin of the word Daemon (2002) | Hacker News Reader

The Origin of the word Daemon (2002)

ei.cs.vt.edu

148 pointstrueduke46 comments

A bit more about the etymology: δαίμων (daimon) in ancient greek is simply a god, or a divine spirit [1]. It appears earliest in the Iliad (1.222), and is probably related to the the root da: "from PIE dai-mon- "divider, provider" (of fortunes or destinies), from root *da- "to divide."[2]. Classical Latin trascribed it as daemon, because "ae" was pronounced "ai". Some years had passed, and Latin-speakers stated saying "e" instaed of "ai"[3], and writing "demon". English, as was mention in the article, borrowed the word twice, in both spellings.

I think that since there's a gap in the meaning and writing of the two words, we might as well pronounce them differently, and so I follow the Greek and say "dai-mon".

[1] LSJ Greek-English Lexicon: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... [2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/demon?ref=etymonline_crossre... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_spelling_and_pronunciati...

Very interesting. Here in Spain some people wrongly translate it as "demonio" which means "demon". However people with more knowledge strongly disencourage saying it and recommend to say "daemon" even when probably near no one really knowing where it comes from. I like the word daemon though.

Checking the oxford dictionary I can see that demon and daemon are indeed related, and that it could theoretically be translated in the same way. I prefer to say daemon though.

When I first read the Maxwell thing it was explained as a demon. There was no doubt in my mind that daemon was just another spelling and pronunciation (day-mon) of that when I came across it later.

Except really its correct pronunciation is “demon”, just like how archæology and æon aren’t pronounced any differently because of the ash (which British English still uses). It drives me up the wall to hear “day-mon”.

Just out of curiosity, did you create a throaway account just for this comment?

Yes. I don’t take HN particularly seriously and don’t care to maintain an account here. :)

The guidelines ask:

> "Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create them routinely. On HN, users should have an identity that others can relate to."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I understand you don't take HN particularly seriously, but would you at least take the guidelines into account? If you're not willing to be a part of the community, would you at least respect it and not create throwaways for comments like this?

There is some kind of poetic irony in asking someone to take serious the guidelines of that which they do not take seriously in the first place.

The available alternatives when trying to encourage people to abide by community standards aren't particularly appealing.

Like constantly banning them with extreme prejudice for not towing the line? That already happens anyway, and it’s one reason why sites like n-gate exist. HN is a parody of itself.

That's all very interesting, but I'm still going to say "day-mon" and recommend others do as well, for a few reasons:

1. It's what everyone knows and uses. If you say "demon", it may take most people a few seconds to realize what you mean; "day-mon" is instantly understandable by all software people. Etymological purism should always take a back seat to clarifying thought.

2. "Day-mon" has better connotations among people unfamiliar with the concept. We don't need tech-illiterate people thinking there are demons in their computers, whereas a "day-mon" sounds like something benevolent and helpful (especially among younger people who might've read The Golden Compass books).

> It's what everyone knows and uses.

That's simply not true. Perhaps in your immediate circle, but even there I'd have doubts that it is actually so. I've been in the IT for about 20 years and I honestly don't know of any "software people" that pronounce the word as "day-mon", so I't most certainly not true for wider audiences.

> "Day-mon" has better connotations among people unfamiliar with the concept.

You'd get a blank stare from most that don't know what you're talking about and a remark about pronouncing the word wrong from most that do.

Why would you want to mispronounce a word just because you think the actual meaning is bad in some way, is beyond me. The word is what it is, pronouncing it wrong won't change it.

And if you do a bit of research, you'll see that it doesn't mean what some B-rate horror movie made you think that it does.

I suppose we just hang out in different circles, because I've been in various software jobs for about a decade and only ever heard "day-mon", never "demon".

I've heard both but personally prefer dēmən. Dāmən just sounds goofy to me, like someone trying to pronounce Gaelic (or Welsh!) without having learned anything about it first.

I wish some doctoral student in classics would write a blog post and settle the matter once and for all, but in the meantime it seems to come down to personal preference. There's precedent in other English words for either pronunciation (e.g. aeon, aegis, archaeology, Athenaeum, and Caesar on the one hand; aero-, faerie, and maelstrom on the other).

Until someone who actually knows what they're talking about weighs in, I'm tossing this whole argument in the same dustbin as emacs vs. vi and tabs vs. spaces. There are better things to waste our time on. :)

> Gaelic

Are you saying this is geelic, or what?

|Galik|, actually. (Though I meant someone trying to pronounce Gaelic words, not the English word "Gaelic.")

In any case, note that I said there's precedent for both in English. :)

Y'know, reading this whole conversation and seeing only these two pronunciation spellings reused, I can't help but wonder if some of us are agreeing but not realizing it.

Because there's at least 3 possible pronunciations:

* dee-mon

* deh-mon

* day-mon

I personally use the middle one for "daemon" and the top one for "demon".

>> It's what everyone knows and uses.

> That's simply not true.

Seconded - i've never heard anyone pronounce 'daemon' and 'demon' differently. Of course, data is not the plural of anecdote; perhaps we could ask Stack Overflow to put it in their next developer survey?

I watched a video by Lennart Poettering years ago on systemd and he pronounced it dah-men, which I thought was pretty slick. Though I still prefer to pronounce it "demon", mostly because that's how my undergrad system administrator friend pronounced it.

This may have been the video in question https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyMLi8QF6sw

If English corrupted the latin "ae" to sound like "ay", then the correct pronunciation in English should be daymon. When "ae" got replaced by "e" it was to reflect that pronunciation (in early English "e" wasn't pronounced as the sharp "ee" in modern English).

There is no "correct" pronunciation. There are different books in different countries (with different levels of authority) documenting different pronunciations, but that's about it. The fact that it bothers you is odd. Pronouncing it as "daymon" is a way of signaling that you're talking about something very computer-related and therefore adds clarity to the language. And on the flip-side if you consider daemon and demon the same word (as it has historically been; see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16304452 ), then why is it that the spelling "daemon" (and not "demon") is used so consistently in computing? It's quite clear that within computing, the words demon and daemon are _different_ and the fact that they are often pronounced differently reflects that.

Language evolves. Get over it.

The jargon file describes the different usage of daemon, demon , and dragon: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/daemon.html as it pertains to computing.

There seems to be a common misunderstanding here.

'Daemon' is just an alternate spelling of 'demon'. It's pronounced the same, means the same thing, and is simply the same word. Just as 'encyclopaedia' and 'encyclopedia' are the same word, or 'mediaeval' and 'medieval' are the same word.

Yes and no - they have the origin in the same word, but as the article point out the two spellings have acquired different connotations. So they are not exactly the same word anymore.

And since they are no longer the same word, the distinction is aided by difference in pronunciation.

I went looking for the Greek pronunciation of daemon/daimon, and this is what I found:

MP3: http://media.studylight.org/lex/grk/1142g.mp3

Source: http://classic.studylight.org/lex/grk/view.cgi?number=1142

The pronunciation of Kubernetes is also interesting.

MP3: http://media.studylight.org/lex/grk/2942g.mp3

Source: http://classic.studylight.org/lex/grk/view.cgi?number=2942

Some pronounce daemon as "day-mon" ie with a long a, whereas I have always heard demon pronounced as "dee-mon".

The second syllable is also different and I don't know the formal notation. day-mn and deemun is the best I can do, where "-" indicates a longer transition from the y to mn (the m flows into the n).

I like to pronounce it daymon if only to avoid inferences made by the uninitiated. De(e)mon does have the devilish scent.

Good story:

"Are you a Satanist?"

http://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html

To be pedantic, ae is a diphthong in Latin that sounds more like the ‘i’ in ‘fine’. It was definitely never pronounced with a long e in Latin. Even ‘demon’ in Latin would have been pronounced with a long a sound.

> I prefer to say daemon though.

They are pronounced the same way so not sure what you are referring to here.

Regardless of correctness this is how you will hear them pronounced.

daemon = day-mon

demom = dee-mon

Agreed, and if this is sufficiently consistent, I'd argue that these pronunciations have become correct.

Especially for people with the name Daemon.

I've never heard daemon pronounced that way. It's always pronounced the same way as demon but it may be a local thing.

What the answer doesn't explain about Socrates is that his daemon, according to his own telling, was constantly monitoring since childhood what he said and did, and would often warn him against saying and doing certain things.

In philosophy, it is often pronounced (and written) "daimon," after the Greek, to avoid confusion with demons in Christian mythology.

Me, I wonder about the relationship between Hindu devas, which are benevolent, and Zoroastrian daevas, which are basically demons. And then there's the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda vs Hindu asuras, which are demonic.

It's like Zoroastrianism just reversed the Hindu categories. I get that there's been millennia of bad blood, but this seems rather extreme.

And software demons are generally benevolent, not demonic. So does the usage come from Hinduism?

No, as mentioned it comes from Greek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(classical_mythology)

Sure, but where did the Greeks get it from? According to the Wikipedia article, it came from the Proto-Indo-European word "*dai-mon". And they were considered benevolent, like Hindu devas. Unlike Roman, Zoroastrian and Christian demons.

The romans did not have an evil conception of them either.

Maybe I misinterpreted what I read.[0]

> There are three Latin words for demons, ghosts and evil spirits. The first, the word 'daemon' is borrowed from Greek daimon and is not very common until Christianity takes hold. The other two words are much more common in the time of Virgil and Ovid.

So maybe daemōnēs were considered beneficial, as in Greek.

0) https://flavias.blogspot.de/2010/08/demon-in-toilet_14.html

That doesn't mean it didn't come from Hinduism. The concept and word were in Greek when Homer was writing, around 800 - 700 BC, and Hinduism was coalescing around 1500 - 600 BC (it says on Wikipedia). Greek and Sanskrit are related languages, and the Greek word has a root in their common ancestor. We know there was cultural interchange between the Greek and Indian worlds. Indeed, it's probably a mistake to think of them as separate worlds; Europe and India seems quite distinct now, but there was a time when it was all just the fertile crescent and its hinterlands.

Admittedly, it's probably wrong to say it came from Hinduism per se. But it doesn't seem impossible that the Greek, Hindu, and Zoroastrian ideas are from the same root.

Yes, and what I wonder is how for Hindu/Greek they're benevolent, whereas for Zoroastrian/Christian they're malevolent.

Edit: Cut Roman from malevolent side because I'm not sure.

My impression is that for the Greeks, they were explanations for natural processes. Why does the wind blow suddenly? Demon. Why did that rock fall into the sea? Demon. Why did i remember to pack some cheese? Demon.

Some of what the world does is helpful, and some of it is harmful. So demons can be benevolent or malevolent.

I'm not sure about this, though.

From 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2691752

the origin of the world daemon is a lot older than 2002

> Best I can tell based on my research, the word was first used by people on your team at Project MAC using the IBM 7094 in 1963.

The meaning of (2002) appended to an article title on HN is that the article was written / last significantly updated in 2002.

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