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> The same goes for "genius", a spirit from whom we get the words genie as well as "Djinn".

Genie does come from genius, but djinn is an unrelated Arabic word.



> 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.)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/genie


Linked from that same page is a citation [0] that djinn is, in fact, or Arabic origin. Where do you get that it's a romanized word? Unless you mean romanized in the sense that it's spelled using the latin alphabet, but that's overly pedantic even by HN standards.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jinni


> but that's overly pedantic even by HN standards.

Thank you! I'm overly flattered. (Also, that is always what linguists mean when we write "romanized", or as the Japanese say, rōmaji.)


This is interesting and... it appears to be complicated.

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.


> Afro-Asiatic and Eurasian have a common ancestor about 10,000 BC.

> 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.


The root word 'gene' goes back to at least PIE as "give birth, beget" (it similarly shows up in Sanskrit (janati) and Welsh (geni) and several others) and the contemporary Semitic language.

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.


I don't think we can even assume that all languages have a common origin though. Maybe that is not the case.


So stated we already know it's false; Nicaraguan Sign Language emerged ex nihilo and has no ancestors. For something slightly less clear-cut than that, but also spoken, there are various creole languages around the world that show little to no grammatical relationship to their ancestors (though they are strongly related in terms of vocabulary).

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.




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