Paraskevidekatriaphobia: a morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th

Now that's a mouthful.

Cool, I'd only seen dekatriaphobia '13-phobia' before.

Coined by a modern Greek no doubt. The word paraskeue: 'preparation' is used in the NT (Mk xv.42, Jo xix.14, 31; Lk xxiii.54) to mean the day of preparation before the Sabbath. Now the Sabbath starts on Friday evening and ends on Saturday evening, so paraskeue: would run from Thursday sundown to Friday sundown. Approximately our Friday, I suppose.

Thanks for the info, jheem. How do you know this stuff?

(I could probably ask this to everyone here at AWAD.)

Interesting. I had always heard of '13-phobia' as triskaidekaphobia, not the other way around. I don't know enough about Greek to know if the order is essentially irrelevant, but wondered.

cheer

the sunshine warrior

triskaidekaphobia (or spelling variants) is merely the fear of the number 13; this one attempts to specificiate Friday the 13th.

How do you know this stuff?

The Latin stuff I mostly know; the Greek stuff is seriously augmented by dictionaries and grammars though I did take Homeric Greek a long time ago in a distant galaxy. (I also studied historical comparative linguistics.)

Sam'l Johnson said that there were two types of knowledge. We either know something of itself or wherre to look it up. Or words to that effect.

Can anyone come up with a 13-syllable equivalent? (all languages fair game... )

triskaidekaphobia

tris '3'
kai 'and'
deka '10'

As I said earlier in the thread, it looks like a Modern Greek coined the word. Maybe not. Could've been somebody else.

Thanks for the info, jheem. How do you know this stuff?

Nuncle Jheem's special. I'm just an accolyte.

A popular theory is that Friday the 13th got its bad rep from Friday, Oct. 13, 1307, when the forces of Philippe le Bel descended at daybreak on the houses and other properties of the Knights Templar all over France, dragged the Knights off to prison and put them in charge of the Inquisition, and seized all the Templar property they could lay their hands on. All this since Philippe had his tongue hanging out to enrich himself at the expense of the Order of the Temple with the connivance of his puppet pope, Clement V, whose election was bought by Philippe and who never went to Rome, being the first of the Avignon popes. As it turned out, they didn't get much of the Templars' fabulous wealth; either it was better hidden than he knew, or they had had some forewarning and got it out of France. One theory is that it's buried off the coast of Nova Scotia.

Or buried under the chapel at Rosslyn?

triskaidekaphobia (or spelling variants) is merely the fear of the number 13

But jheem mentioned dekatriaphobia as the fear if 13. I had never seen that before and merely wondered if there was more to it than just a spelling variation. How does Greek work and under what circumstances is this sort of inversion of affixes/word components allowed?

Thassall

How does Greek work and under what circumstances is this sort of inversion of affixes/word components allowed?

There are two things that lead me to believe that the word was coined by a present-day Greek rather than some classical philologist on her lunch break: the transcription of the words and the inversion of the number morphemes.

First, Friday. The Classical Greeks didn't really have a Friday before they were christianized. So paraskeue: beging pronounced in the odern Greek manner, /paraskevi/. (Note that in words like euthanasia and euphemism, the eu- prefix is pronounced /ju/, not /ef/ like it would be, with the ypsilon becoming an f or v depending on environment.) Now, in Classical Greek, 13 is treis kai deka '3 and 10', but in Modern Greek it's dekatreis (not that the ei diphthong gets reduced to i, so /dekatris/). The order of the morphemes changed during the 2000 year development of Classical Greek to Koine to Modern Greek. I would spell treiskaidekaphobia with the ei intact, but others reduce it. Hope that helps.

That's the most popular alternate theory. We must read the same books, Pfranz.

Did your post wind up in this thread because you were being harried by a mysterious albino, Bob?