God (word)

• 1. Introduction

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  The word god reaches back long before English existed. Its story runs through a Bronze Age writing system called Linear B, where a related term appears as te-o, plural te-o-i. That fragment is an early ancestor of the Greek word theos, itself just one branch of a much older word family. Somewhere else in that family tree, a separate Germanic word, pronounced gudą, took shape and eventually became the English god.

  Before English existed, that Germanic word carried a meaning modern scholars still cannot agree on. Christianity later forced sweeping grammatical change onto it, altering both its gender and its number. This documentary follows that transformation, from an early Bible translation into a minority Germanic language, through to the capitalization rules still followed today.

• 2. A Word Before Christianity

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  Cognates of gudą appear across the old Germanic languages, from guþ and gudis in Gothic to guð in Old Norse. Old Saxon, Old Frisian, and Old Dutch all used god, while Old High German used got. Linguists broadly agree the word traces to a Proto-Indo-European neuter passive perfect participle, written ǵʰu-tó-m. Its exact ancient sense, though, splits into two competing readings.

  One reading treats the root as meaning to pour, making gudą either a libation or the idol poured upon. Watkins linked this sense to the Greek phrase χυτη γαια, poured earth, which meant tumulus, or burial mound. He proposed the Germanic word first referred to the spirit believed to inhabit a burial mound. The other reading treats the root as meaning to invoke, making gudą either an invocation, a prayer, or that which is invoked.

  That invoking sense would matter again once missionaries began writing the word into a translated Bible.

• 3. The Gothic Bible

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  Bishop Ulfilas translated the Bible into Gothic in Nicopolis ad Istrum, a city in what is now northern Bulgaria. His translation, sometimes called the Wulfila Bible, is often cited as the oldest surviving instance of the word God appearing in a Germanic language. Its oldest surviving portion, a manuscript known as the Codex Argenteus, is estimated to date from the fourth century. That was the same century in which the Goths converted to Christianity, largely through Ulfilas's own efforts. Throughout that translation, two Gothic words, guda and guþ, stood in for God.

  That same Gothic translation was also the first to render Greek theos and Latin deus with this Germanic word. The word god went on being used for both terms in Bible translations that followed.

  Theos itself carried a far older ancestry, reaching back centuries before Ulfilas ever set that word down in Gothic.

• 4. Tracing Theos

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  Greek θέω, meaning to run, is one term scholars connect to theos, the Greek word for god. Another proposed relative is θεωρέω, to look at, to see, to observe. Latin feriae, meaning holidays, and fanum, meaning temple, appear in the same proposed family, alongside the Armenian word di-k`, meaning gods.

  A different theory, credited to De Saussure, ties theos instead to the root dhu̯es-, meaning smoke or spirit. That root survives in Baltic and Germanic words for spook, and it is thought to be cognate with the Latin fumus, meaning smoke. Under this reading, the divine and the ghostly share a single ancient root.

  Whatever its deeper root, that Gothic vocabulary still carried an old grammatical quirk, one about to resurface in the next translation.

• 5. From Neuter To Person

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  When the word god entered English, the language still sorted every noun into a grammatical gender, masculine, feminine, or neuter. God and its cognates started out neuter, but conversion to Christianity pushed the word toward the masculine. Grammatically, that shift served to separate the personal deity of Christians from the impersonal divine forces that pagans recognized.

  The Gothic phrase guþ meins, meaning my god, shows the old neuter grammar still lingering beneath the surface. Guþ lacks the final -s that masculine nouns typically carry, behaving as though it were still neuter. Meins, the possessive word for my, takes that final -s exactly as it would alongside any other masculine noun. The mismatch preserves a fossil of the word's pre-Christian grammar inside a distinctly Christian sentence.

  Before conversion, god and its cognates likely carried a general, mostly plural or collective sense, describing divine powers rather than one being. Afterward, the singular form came to dominate, referring specifically to the Christian deity. Used this way, the word increasingly behaved less like a common noun and more like a proper name.

  Centuries later, English formalized that shift on the page, deciding exactly when the word deserved a capital letter.

• 6. Capitalizing The Divine

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  Capitalized God first referred specifically to the Abrahamic deity, a use that grew directly out of Christian texts shaping the rules of English spelling. Today that capitalized form can also signify any monotheistic conception of god. It extends to English translations of the Arabic Allāh, the Persian Khuda, the Indic Ishvara, and the Maasai Ngai. Capitalization in English marks the specific name by which a particular god is known. It is not used for multiple gods, nor for the generic idea of a deity.

  Pronouns for a god are often capitalized too, He, Him, and His, as a sign of reverence among adherents of a religion. That capitalization traditionally follows the masculine gender, unless the pronoun specifically refers to a goddess.

  Ngai, the Maasai word now written under that same capitalized rule, shows a convention built for one specific ancient god still doing service for many others today.