To Zeus!

The ancient Greeks called their main god Zeus, but when the Romans crafted their own pantheon, they wanted new names for these gods. Instead of Zeus, their chief god was named Jupiter.

I couldn’t help but notice how similar the word Zeus is to the Latin word for god, deus. I wondered if the same sort of phenomenon we’ve seen with name brands becoming more of a descriptive term for all things within that category.

You might ask for a Coke instead of a soda, and during the 80s you listened to a Walkman while carrying around Kleenex. I imagined that this might be exactly the type of thing that happened to poor old Zeus as he was replaced by Jupiter, only the Romans didn’t really say “Zeus” the same way the Greeks did.

I imagined that instead, it came out more like “deus.”

I imagined wrong! Unlike Coke or Kleenex, both the word deus and the name Zeus can be traced back to the much older Proto-Indo-European root word *dyeu-. This word referred to the sky in general, but could also mean something like to shine.

You can probably see how the modern word deity also comes from the same word Zeus and deus come from. So does adieu, which breaks down into “to” and “a god” (hence my cheeky title, “To Zeus!”).

There are lots of words derived from that PIE *dyeu-. There’s theology and monotheism and atheist, of course, and even more obvious connections to modern phrases like deus ex machina, but my favorite one is the word divine. This word traveled from Greek to Roman, where deus became divinus.

This word showcases phonetic evolution, something that’s incredibly important to understand if you want to follow the evolution of languages. When the Romans wanted an adjective to describe their gods and the realm they inhabited, they used the word deus, but in order to structure it into an adjective, it became something like deunus.

That eu sound in deunus was difficult for Roman ears to interpret, and for Roman tongues to pronounce. It was way easier for them to use something more akin to a modern English w, so the word sounded more like dewunus. Romans didn’t have the letter w, so they represented that sound with the letter v instead, and they ended up with divinus over time.

Zeus, divine, deity, and polytheism all came from the same original root word. That’s impressive enough, but there’s one more word that derives from *dyeu-. It’s one of the first words most of us learn to say.

It’s the word day.

While the Latin-speaking world went in one particular direction, giving us deus and all those derived words, the Germanic-speaking cultures did something else entirely. They went with *dagaz, with that g- sound breaking up the two syllables with something palatable for Germanic ears.

*dagaz became dæg in Old English, which became day in modern English.

While one part of Europe took this language toward the direction of everyday things, hearkening back to the sky or day concept inherent in the original word, the other half went with the divine interpretation.

You can probably see how and why the idea of a sky and brightness were conflated with the idea of the most powerful deity. To Zeus, to-day!