The general approach to the meaning of any verse is the following.

• Determine the meaning of the words of the verse. This may entail looking at the original Greek or Hebrew of the words.
• In the process of determining the meaning, identify clarify difficult words or phrases.
• Look at the context of the verse in that chapter and/or in the preceding or following chapter.
• Look at the context of the verse in relation to the entire Bible.

Whenever multiple meanings are possible, provide them and the considerations for each of them.

The early Greek manuscripts had only what we today call uppercase letters, with no spaces or punctuation. The order eventually became left to right, down the page. The early writing acted much as a compact audio recording. When one read the phonetic alphabet letters in a continuous manner, one heard what was being said. Local dialects would be taken into account by the spelling of words - before there were dictionaries, precise rules, teachers who enforced the rules, etc.

Astronomy often uses the Greek alphabet as part of star names or sequences.

No one knows exactly how ancient Greek was spoken, but there are clues.

• There are written accounts of sounds that animals make, as well as onomatopoeia (words that sound like what they represent).
• Loan words to other languages help. For example, today the Greek «β» is pronounced in Greek as an English "v". If in ancient times, a word went from Greek into Latin with a Latin "b" sound, then it must have sounded like the Latin "b". If it were the Latin "v", then it would have been written in Latin with a "v".
• Monuments have been found with inscriptions that show transitions in spellings of words.

Note that the traditional way that Bible Greek is traditionally taught and pronounced was developed by a Dutchman, Erasmus, in the Middle Ages, and has little or no resemblance to how Greek was actually pronounced (either in ancient or modern times).

There are several periods of interest for the Greek language as it relates to astronomy.

• Classical Greek such as Herodotus, Xenophon, etc.
• Septuagint - Old Testament scriptures translated from Hebrew to Greek about 270 B.C. in Egypt.
• New Testament scriptures from about 100 A.D., using Koine Greek, the common Greek used by the common person.
• Middle Age Greek (not really of interest here)
• Modern Greek (for reference purposes using today's language)

For the present purposes, we are interested in the origin of words (mostly the Classical period) and the development and change of words, for which mainly the Septuagint and New Testament Greek are mainly used. These scripture translations have been well studied and documented, though at times translation issues and/or discrepancies can make them interesting from a theological point of view. We are not interested in any theological issues, just how the Greek was used, what the words meant, and how it relates to astronomy.

There are many aspects of Greek and astronomy that are interesting.

• How the constellations were named, including the zodiac?
• What did the Greek astronomers know? When did they know it? How did the do it? And so on.

In many cases, the works of the original Greek astronomer (scientist, mathematician, etc.) have been lost and are only known (or have been pieced together) from accounts of writers after them (Greek, Latin, Arabic, etc.).

Astronomy has many applications outside of just watching stars, some of which are the following.

• time measurement
• space measurement
• geometry of time and space

To narrow the focus, some of the ancient origins and linguistic development of selected terms and concepts from the field of astronomy are presented. In this context, some of the above topics will be discussed in a limited fashion.

Many of the astronomy terms to be discussed are linguistically related and will be presented in an order that fits together linguistically rather than an purely astronomical development.

Languages are interesting, especially languages such as Greek that have a very long history of continuity.

The NT (New Testament) of the Bible was written about 2,000 years ago in Greek, the lingua franca at the time. Since then, the Bible has, at various times, been translated into many languages.
Here as a chart of some translation of the Greek NT into other languages. The modern languages are those which I have spent some time studying.

The Greek language has a written history going back almost 3,000 years. Many words in use 2,000 years ago are still words today, written the same way, and with the same meaning. In many cases, the only difference is in the endings of the word.

Greek schools still teach some ancient/classical Greek and many Greeks can at least read some of the NT in the original Greek.

The method used was the following, done automatically with a custom Python program/script.

• Use the Greek for the LXX (Septuagint) Old Testament (from crosswire.org)
• Use the Greek for the NT (Textus Receptus, from crosswire.org).
• Convert every word to lower case and remove accents.
• Get frequency counts for each word by book of the Bible and by overall usage.
• For each word, use the Open Source Hunspell spell checker and a modern Greek dictionary.
• If a word is spelled correctly (or in the suggested list of words) then it is a match. Otherwise it is not a match.
• Note that many proper nouns (place names, names of people, etc.) are not handled by this method.

One aspect of the Greek language that is interesting is a word in the NT in the original Greek that has the same spelling and meaning today as it did then. The modern Greek translation, instead of using the original word, changes the word to match a modern Bible translation that has been influenced by scholars in the past 2,000 years.

Here we will look at and investigate some of these words. In some cases, one can see from the translation history when and where a word was changed to change the meaning of that text to something other than what appeared in the original text. This may or may not be important but it is interesting.

In some cases, the human mind can create and imagine meanings that are not in the original.

Details are left as a future topic.

At the time of Aristotle, the words for "definition" and "mountain" were still somewhat distinct. This, however, does not prohibit their similarity from being used as a play on words. In the following passage in Sophistic Refutations, Aristotle uses as an example the Greek words for "definition" and "mountain".

The ancient Greek word "προσῳδία" ≈ "song with accompaniment, tone or pitch of a word, diacritic mark" and comes from two Greek words.

• "πρός" ≈ "to, towards".
• "ᾠδή" ≈ "song, ode" and is the source of the English word "ode".

Aristotle continues. At the time, the spoken words were not the same as the written words that appear to be the same. This distinction was in Attic Greek but had disappeared by the time of the GNT (Greek New Testament).

There are parts of the tone or pitch of a word that do not appear to make a difference in most people understanding what is being said.

The Greek for "significance" is that of "meaning" or "semantics".

Aristotle is concerned with using similarities of words to deceive or mislead in logical or dialectic arguments that are not valid.

The Greeks used the alphabet from the Phoneticians as did the Hebrews.

The Greeks added vowels to the alphabet.

The Greeks dropped letters that, to them, had the same sound.

• The "c" (sound of "k") was dropped while "k" (sound of "k") was kept. The Roman hard "c" and "k" were redundant. Later, the hard "c" softened as in "Kaiser" becoming "Caesar". Likewise, the qoppa (sound of "k") was dropped.
• The digamma (sound of "f" or "v") was dropped while phi (sound of "f") was kept.

The digamma was kept for it's numerical value of six. The most famous and only digamma in the GNT is the six in 666 as (lowercase) «χξϚ» or (uppercase) «ΧΞϜ».

More: Greek digamma

More: Hebrew alphabet