Ser wrote:And now I love that word.
Yeah, it's pretty nice.
Ser wrote:Looking at other languages' word for "paradise", it seems that somehow the Old Persian > Greek word "paradise" spread a lot via Christianity, but the Greek words for "hell" didn't.
I guess because the Christian concept of hell "absorbed" the mythological underworlds of various cultures (similarly to how various mythological creatures came to be seen as demons), so the words for them were extended to include the Christian concept and eventually lost the original connotations as the people became more Christianised. I think that began to happen in Finnish with
manala, but then the Swedish loanword
helvetti became more common and nowadays that's practically the only word used for hell in the Christian sense while the former remains in discussion of pre-Christian mythology (and poetry, etc. but that's a different matter entirely).
Ser wrote:East Slavic and South Slavic do have ад (from ᾍδης, "Hades"), but otherwise neither that nor γέεννα spread.
Well, a bunch of languages have borrowed the Arabic
جهنم (jahannam) along with the word for heaven,
جنة (jannat). But that's not from Greek, so even though both the Arabic and Greek words for hell originally came from Hebrew, it doesn't really count anyway.