On Crazy Etymologies

Given the amount of interest in our prior article, we decided to put our musings on the etymology of Jassa or Jaś in a separate post here so that we can ask whether:

1) the reference is to asas as in “heights”, or to

2) the grumpy giant Thjasse (itself a corruption of Dedu Jasse?) of the Icelandic Sagas or to

3) the Celtic Esus (is Teutates – the Tu-tata? the “here dad” or is it the “volk dad” (or is that the same, e.g., *theudisk – tutejse?) and what of Taranus where taran means a “battering ram” or “to crush” to this day in some Slavic languages), or to

4) Istanu of the Hittites, or to

5) the Demi-God Iasion, consort of Demeter (Lada?), or to

6) the adventurer Jason, or to

7) the Hittite adventure Hupasiyas (Yas!), or whether

8) the Poles/Czechs/Slavs are Iazyges (yazik means “tongue” and Slovo means words so...but what of the Ossetians!?),or were

9) believers in the old Aessir (Odin & Co. are supposed to have come from Asia and to have fought the vans (Veneti)?), or were

10) worshippers of King David’s father Jesse (Yassa in, e.g., Arabic), and whether

11) this has something to do with Osos of Tacitus (“From the Gallic language spoken by the Gothinians, and from that of Pannonia by the Osians, it is manifest that neither of these people are Germans” or “Cotinos Gallica, Osos Pannonica lingua coarguit non ease Germanos”), and whether

12) Saint Jerome was onto something more when he made his Psalm 83 reference right after saying “and, alas for the commonweal, even the Pannonians [have invaded the Roman Empire] for Assur also is joined with them” (first listing Quadi, Vandals, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepids, Herules, Saxons, Burgundians and Allemani as the other invaders), and whether

13) Egypt (Osiris and Isis) (wait a minute didn’t our friend, Cornelius Tacitus himself say that the Suevi worshipped Isis, something that he could not explain?) Assyria (Ishtar) is where all this leads to, or

14) perhaps India with the Asuras, and is

15) Zoroaster involved somehow in any of this! (and what of Ahura Mazda?), or is

16) Genghis Khan behind all of this with his Yassa code of laws (but is that word a Mongol or Turkic one?), and

17) when the inhabitants of Ukraine and Poland were taken captive into yassir, is it somehow relevant that yassir  meant carrying away but also… harvest (but maybe only of people? but what if originally only of certain people such as Slavic people?, e.g., also yasla/yaselka – carrying devices as also in a wooden manger), and

18) what of Mount Ossa (with Zagora at its foot) just by Mount Olympus, and

19) are there any other wacky ideas (Arafat anyone?)? How about Boris Rybakov’s observation of a lizard worship (among the Ilmen Slavs?) in the Rus?  (yashchur, yasher) which he noted was also present in Lithuania and sounded to him a bit like the Polish Yassa?  Perhaps the lizard or dragon was Yassa?  There is an earlier (Sumerian?) Deity – Ištaran – associated with “justice” but also with having a bright visage and, more frequently, with a snake (dragon?) and ” whose logogram was ^dMUŠ, or ^dMUŠ.TUR, ‘snake’ and ‘little snake’ respectively.” (Wiggermann F.A.M.). Yash and Yashchur? (Jas, jaszczur?). Here is a picture from Rybakov’s book showing the various yasher carvings:

And we know the Dacians were (perhaps) Gets – see below picture re: Anglosaxon version of yet/get) and were carrying dragons on their banners (Sauromatae?); others, including Romans later, too; and what, speaking of Russia, what about that lake there up north?

 Thoughts

Up front we ought to come clean and say that we do not believe most of these have any relevance at all to Jassa or Yassa and we make them here to show the absurdity of drawing connections everywhere you can.  See for example this prior post on the same topic here.

Because this word is a rather simple one in its construction, it is hardly surprising that  it appears in many different places in the world in different contexts.  Had the Slavs’ God’s name were Merovingian and there were a separate reference to a Merovingian in, say, China then we would be duly impressed and willingly to consider the craziest hypotheses.  However, that is not the case with the syllable yas or jas.  (Even were some of these deities somehow related, we ought to point out that it is not necessarily the case that they derive one from another as opposed to from some original deity name).

On the other hand, while Aleksander Brueckner explained the Polish God Jesse, Jesze, Yassa or Yessa  as an appelative of “let it be”, “let it happen” (imploring), this is hardly dispositive and one need only point out that the name of Dadzhbog, “let God give” is also a form of an appelative and is an attested God name in Russia (see PVL).

Here is the redoubtable Linde with his 1807 Polish language dictionary on the similar word “jeszcze” meaning, roughly, “yet”:

A note on the abbreviations: Dl. means Dalmatian, Rg. means Ragussan (i.e., from Dubrovnik), Bs. means Bosnian, Cro. means Croatian, Crn. means Carinthian (i.e., some dialect of Slovenian), Vd. means Windish or Styrian (another Slovenian dialect).  The others are obvious (and some are interesting, such as Angl. which obviously means English and Anglos. meaning Anglosaxon)

Further, “let it be” or, more likely, “there is” is a well known reference to a number of deities (see the general Indoeuropean, “is”, “ist” or “jest” as the source ultimate) – and examples from the Middle East are obvious.

All that said, there is an interesting reference to a similar deity name that likely is related to Jassa if only by virtue of geographical closeness and it comes from the Polish region of Kaszuby.

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