blogging, or not blogging
Per our friends (my friends, especially) at the Wikipedia article Vates, licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0 etc etc:
Vates in English is a borrowing of a Latin noun vātēs (pronounced [ˈwaːteːs]), "prophet, poet". This Latin noun was either a cognate of Celtic *wātis (in which case the two words were descended from a common Italo-Celtic origin), or else a loanword directly from Celtic…Proto-Celtic *wātis developed in medieval Irish as fáith "prophet, seer". Less directly, it is related to gwawd "panegyric" in Welsh.
Celtic wātis is widely thought to have cognates in the Germanic languages, such as the Gothic term wods "possessed" (though Ludwig Rübekeil 2003 has suggested that the name of the Common Germanic deity *Wōđinaz may in fact be an early loanword, an adjective *vatinos based on Celtic vates).
If the Celtic word *wātis, the Latin vates, and similar Germanic words are cognates rather than borrowings, they can be derived from an Indo-European word *(H)ueh₂t-i- "seer"…"Ovate" is used as a direct translation of the Welsh word ofydd (derived from the Roman poet Ovid) and it is also plausible that ovate is derived from ofydd.
Prophets and poets and madmen all shade into one another, spectra as the colour spectrum, implausible plausibilities. You can pick your reality, but you can’t pick anyone else’s. Yet you can “plot and scheme to make a world where we learn to see patterns of meaning in each other, and in ourselves, and to live in such a way that we can live up to those patterns”.
I am interested in a lot of things. Follow along with them.
