The Origin of the Word Daemon (2002)
ei.cs.vt.edu
ei.cs.vt.edu
The Greeks believed in good spirits helping people ("Eudaemon") and evil spirits for darker purposes ("cacodaemon")[1]. It was believed that people had these spirits helping or harming them as the case may be.
The same goes for "genius", a spirit from whom we get the words genie as well as "Djinn". The common usage was that (quoted by Elizabeth Gilbert) a great person "had a genius", as in, a spirit helping them, as opposed to "is a genius", which is a later usage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacodemon this is also the origin of the "Cacodemon" in Doom.
Genie does come from genius, but djinn is an unrelated Arabic word.
[citation needed]
Various dictionaries disagree vehemently with you. (Also, djinn is not even an Arabic word. It's a romanized word.)
Thank you! I'm overly flattered. (Also, that is always what linguists mean when we write "romanized", or as the Japanese say, rōmaji.)
And the "related" appears to be ancient rather than a loan word from Arabic to French brought over as part of Arabian Nights.
There's a word in latin for genius (genii or geni) which is described as:
the deity or guardian spirit of a person, place, etc.
https://blog.collinsdictionary.com/language-lovers/we-take-a...
> The idea of a ‘genius’ originated in ancient Rome. The Romans believed that all people had a guiding spirit that attended them throughout their lives. Because this spirit was born with the person it was called a ‘genius’ (from the Latin verb gignere meaning ‘to give birth or bring forth’ – which also happens to be the root of our word ‘generate’). A person’s ‘genius’ dictated their unique personality and disposition. So if a person had an outstanding talent or ability, it was believed that this was due to their ‘genius’. From here it was a natural step for the word ‘genius’ to be used not only of the spirit that inspired a talent but also of the talent itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_(mythology)
> In Roman religion, the genius (Latin: [ˈɡɛnɪ.ʊs]; plural geniī) is the individual instance of a general divine nature that is present in every individual person, place, or thing.[1] Much like a guardian angel, the genius would follow each man from the hour of his birth until the day he died.[2] For women, it was the Juno spirit that would accompany each of them.
> Each individual place had a genius (genius loci) and so did powerful objects, such as volcanoes. The concept extended to some specifics: the genius of the theatre, of vineyards, and of festivals, which made performances successful, grapes grow, and celebrations succeed, respectively. It was extremely important in the Roman mind to propitiate the appropriate genii for the major undertakings and events of their lives.
It is from that word that French gets genie.
The classical pronunciation is [ˈɡɛniʊs̠]
If we go to classical Syriac the word ܓܢܝܐ ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ܓܢܝܐ#Aramaic ) is also described as a place for a worship of idols, a spirit, or a genius loci.
The pronunciation for the singular is [ɡɛnjɑ]
The arabic https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/جني#Arabic is described as being borrowed from the Syriac and is pronounced /d͡ʒin.nijj/
The 'd' and 'g' sounds are similar.
The Indo-European language splits at about 2500 BC into Italic, Indo-Iraian (which leads to Sanskrit), and Germanic.
Syriac is from the Semitic languages which split from the Afro-Asiastic branch.
Afro-Asiatic and Eurasian have a common ancestor about 10,000 BC.
(above dates and tree from https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-language-tree-was-co... )
This is a really old word that appears to have a common root and got borrowed back into French by accident... but that it got borrowed back by accident is because of its really old common ancestor.
> This is a really old word that appears to have a common root and got borrowed back into French by accident... but that it got borrowed back by accident is because of its really old common ancestor.
If you think there's a relationship between the Latin and Syrian words, you wouldn't seek to explain it by common ancestry from 10,000 BC. No linguistic relationship exists at that temporal distance. You would either say that the word was borrowed from one language into the other (common in general; hard to say if it happened here), or that they are similar through pure coincidence (also common).
> Afro-Asiatic and Eurasian have a common ancestor about 10,000 BC.
You should know that that is a hypothesis; there is no evidence for it other than the assumption that all languages ultimately share a common origin.
I did not intend to endorse the assumption that all languages have a common origin; I intended to impugn the claim that we can discern a relationship of any kind between Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic. We can't; the only relationship we can perceive between them is the one we begin by postulating.
That said, we also can't disprove that all "traditional" languages go back to a common root. It's just a meaningless claim the evidence for or against which can't exist.
One could certainly argue that it is a loan word one way or the other between those to groups, yet this remains a very old word that is at least older than Proto-Indo-European, or Arabic, Aramaic, or Syriac.
Jinn as found in Arabic has a relationship to genius in French. The word origins for genie (as in genius loci) can be traced back to PIE which puts it at 5000 BC in PIE.
Prior to PIE is speculative, nonetheless Semitic languages show a similar word with similar meanings as the PIE genius loci spirit.
It would be interesting to pursue that word through history to find if it prior to PIE or when it was borrowed from PIE into Semitic or from Porto-Semitic into PIE.
That was my first thought as soon as I read your post. I just assumed the guys at id picked a cool sounding name for the enemy.
Empedocles seems to have been the first Greek philosopher to have used the word "daemon" in this sense.
And it probably came to Latin from Greek: "δαίμων" is a deity, or spirit, not necessarily associated with something evil. As a sibling comment hints at, Socrates used to say that he had a "δαίμων" inside him, that advised him. This was used against him in his trial where one of the accusations was that he "introduced new daemons" ("εισάγει καινά δαιμόνια"), meaning new gods, new religions, he was essentially accused of prosyletising. And of corrupting youth, of course (well, one of his students was Alcibiades, a young man so debauched that it was easy to believe he had been corrupted by someone, probably many people at once, and many more times than one; probably being corrupted right now, as we speak).
Source: I grew up Greek and was corrupted as a youth by reading Socrates' words, as transcribed by Plato. Plato did not have enough deamonic powers in him to corrupt a wet noodle.
It's the same word. There's no distinction between them. Writing "daemon" instead of "demon" is the same thing as writing "paedagogy" instead of "pedagogy".
There is no inference available to be drawn.
> The usual ancient Greek sense [of demon], "supernatural agent or intelligence lower than a god, ministering spirit" is attested in English from 1560s
Or as Merriam-Webster will tell you:
> demon (noun)
> variants or daemon
> (usually daemon) an attendant power or spirit: GENIUS
Maxwell used the ordinary spelling of a common word. Why would anyone assume he meant to write something strange instead of something normal?
> people who weren't experts in Greek mythology
The word isn't really relevant to Greek mythology. It's relevant to Greek philosophy.