Mors

Hello everyone, As was promised in the last episode on Myth and English, in this podcast, I want to talk about Mors. Mors is the Roman Personification of Death. What I find particularly interesting about Mors is her geneology. As I said, in the Somnus and Hypnos Podcast, she is a sister to Somnus, Sleep, and parented by Nox, Night, and Scotus, darkness. What's even more fascinating for me is that mors and مردن in Farsi share the same root. You can easily find the similarity between these two words, when you conjugate مردن for the third person singular which is mord. mordan in modern persian goes back to Pahlavi which is murtan. Mortal collocates with sin. A mortal sin is one which is so horrible that is punished severely according to many religions. The game mortal kombat, my all time favorite video game, suggests the idea that if you fight the battle, the only way to get out is for one of the fighters to die. This brings us to another collocation, mortality rate. Mortality rate is a measure of the number of deaths in a particular population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit of time. As you might know, one who never dies is immortal, like angels and gods and stuff. another word with the same root is mortician. A mortician is a person who washes the dead body of an animal or a person, and another word in the same category is morturary which is a room or building in which dead bodies are kept, for hygienic storage or for examination, until burial or cremation. This word is synonymous with the word morgue. Another word with the same root is mortgage that comes from mort + gage which translates as dead pledge. It is not unlikely to interpret the original meaning of this word as a promise which you intend to keep until you die. However, mortgage in modern day is a loan that the borrower uses to purchase or maintain a home or other form of real estate and agrees to pay back over time, typically in a series of regular payments. The property serves as collateral to secure the loan. The next word is mortify. Mortify means to put someone to death if we were to look at it from an etymological point of view, but in its modern use it means to cause someone to feel very embarrassed or ashamed. The form of this word suggests a high level of embarrassment giving the sense of being so embarrassed that you feel like you're dead. Allow me to bring this podcast to an end by explaining another word, post-mortem, which literally translates as after death. Post-mortem can be both a noun and an adjective. As a noun it means autopsy or "an examination of a dead body to determine the cause of death". For example, "The hospital will want to carry out a post-mortem." As an adjective it means "occuring or performed after death" as in "post-mortem changes in the body." Thank you very much for listening. Take care.

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Mors is an episode from Lingo Phoenix's Podcasts.

This episode is 00:03:39 long.

This episode was published on May 19, 2021.

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