From cowan Tue May 14 14:52:39 1991 Return-Path: Message-Id: From: cowan (John Cowan) Subject: Re: bye, various comments, culture/religeon. To: lojban-list Date: Tue, 14 May 91 14:52:06 EDT In-Reply-To: ; from "Eric S. Raymond" at May 13, 91 5:59 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.2 PL13] Status: RO Eric Raymond writes (in a message that looks like it was meant for the list, but went only to me): > John Cowan writes: > > la artr. protin. asks for translations of "so'icevykri" (pagan)... > > ["so'icevykri"] is "many-gods-believer"... > > Then Mr. Cowan is in error; "so'icevykri" is `polytheist', not `pagan'. > > The English word `pagan' has some additional connotations which vary between > speakers (etymologically, just it means `country-dweller', reflecting the > historical fact that Christianity was at first a religion of urbanites). > > To a member of one of the so-called "ethical monotheisms" it has ethnocentric > connotations of savagery, primitivity, and backwardness. > > To those of us including myself who call *ourselves* pagans, it connotes not > just polytheism, but nature-centered polytheism with a substantial magical > element. Even this oversimplifies, because modern pagan (`neo-pagan') > theology also embraces pantheism and comfortably involves many who (like > myself) could be described from another angle as materialist atheists. > The subtleties involved aren't easy for people confined to a Judeo-Christian > semantic map to understand and would be *very* hard to capture in a tanru. > > For the moment, I think `pagan' is not a word we should grapple with. It's > too loaded. The coinage "so'icevykri" should stand as `polytheist'. > > John Cowan's name makes an amusing synchronicity with his (understandable) > mistake. Many Celtic Wicca traditions (which form a large and important part > of the modern pagan movement) use `cowan' as a term of art derived from a > Welsh word meaning `outsider'; it means `non-initiate' with connotations of > `ignorant person'... :-) :-) > > (No offense meant, John...) Hmmp. I will now bore you with the true etymology: "Cowan" is of Irish origin, and represents the name which also Anglicizes as "Gowan", "McGowan", "McCowen", etc. The "C" comes from "mac", the normal Irish word for "son of..." Originally, Irish names were patronymics like Russian middle names, but long ago the patronymic system was abandoned in favor of English-style patrilineal surnames. The "owan" part represents "Eoin", the old Irish form of "John", taken directly from Latin in the early days of Celtic Christianity. "Sean"/"Shawn" is a later form, an Irish-adapted version of English "John". Until my father's time, the name was pronounced "ko,n" (in Lojban phonetics) or even "kawn" (to rhyme with yawn) but my father changed it, supposedly under the prodding of a high-school football coach. The change then spread to the others of his generation, so all living Cowans related to me use the pronunciation "kau,n" (in Lojban phonetics). That doesn't stop most of the world from reading off the name as "ko,n", especially in New York, where it is generally assumed that "Cowan" is some weird variant of "Cohen".