New’ was borrowed from Africa through ancient Egypt

Fireworks light up Times Square as the Countdown Ball drops as thousands of revellers gather in New York's Times Square to celebrate the ball drop at the annual New Year's Eve celebration on December 31, 2013 in New York City. AFP PHOTO / TIMOTHY CLARY 

In Summary

• Neyen immediately reminded me of nyien, which is how Dholuo (my Nilotic mother tongue) renders it deep inside Africa.
• Thus, for our purposes, the concept of a 12-month year refers only to the cosmic relationship between a specific planet – the one that the Latins called Terra (our earth) – and its specific sun (which the Nilotes called Hor or Heru or Helu, the term that the Greeks borrowed as Horos or Helios and the Latins as Horus or Helius.

Of the two words which compose the term “New Year”, the first has Nilo-African roots and the other Teuto-European.

In his book The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple lists “new” among hundreds of African words which entered European languages through the ancient Egyptian colony of Colchis (in what is now Turkey).

Temple traces new to newahh, the Nilo-Coptic etymological root of such European words as the Latin nova, the German neue, the Dutch nieuw, and the French neuf or neuve and nouvel. “Noyen”, the pronunciation of neuen – which is the dative form of the German neue – is highly instructive.

It always reminds me of the language of a small Slavic village in south-eastern Europe where one day I discovered that the indicative word is neyen.

Neyen immediately reminded me of nyien, which is how Dholuo (my Nilotic mother tongue) renders it deep inside Africa.

For nyien means unused, recent, modern, trendy, newly produced or newly arrived.

On the other hand, the modern English year comes from the Old English gear.

Word historians point out that in “g” words from the original northern Germanic tongue, the “g” tended to soften into a “y” sound whenever such a word moved into a south-western Teuto-Germanic situation, such as England.

IDENTICAL PRONUNCIATION

Among the Sachsen (“Saxons”) of modern Germany – including in Berlin, where I lived for a number of years trying to tame The Awful German Language (as Mark Twain called it) – the adjective gut (“good”) and the noun Jud – a form of Jude (“Jew”) – tend to be pronounced identically as yood.

The Old English gear is etymologically akin to the German Jahr (pronounced yahrrr).

But whereas English has betrayed its Teutonic root and prefers the Latin-rooted decade and century, German remains faithful to its Teutonic base and speaks, instead, of Jahrzehn (“years ten”) for a decade and Jahrhundert ( “years hundred”) for a century.

Most people know that a year is the time it takes for a planet to make one revolution around its solar mother.

To revolve around our sun once, the earth takes 12 months. But in some cosmic situations, a planet may take a drastically smaller or bigger number of months to revolve around its sun.

If – as the Nilo-Coptic Egyptians held – Sirius is the self and the heavenly home of the goddess Isis, reigning over a community of highly intelligent beings, then the idea of a 12-month year cannot apply because, there, it takes 50 months for one of the solar pair to revolve around the other.

Thus, for our purposes, the concept of a 12-month year refers only to the cosmic relationship between a specific planet – the one that the Latins called Terra (our earth) – and its specific sun (which the Nilotes called Hor or Heru or Helu, the term that the Greeks borrowed as Horos or Helios and the Latins as Horus or Helius.

This relationship has spawned the plethora of interesting idiomatic English expressions – revolving around the noun year – which the reader will do well to discover for himself.