Widdershins (sometimes withershins , widershins or widderschynnes ) is a term meaning to go counter-clockwise, anti-clockwise, or lefthandwise, or to walk around an object by always keeping it on the left. Literally, it means to take a course opposite the apparent motion of the sun viewed from the Northern Hemisphere (the face of this imaginary clock is the ground the viewer stands upon). The earliest recorded use of the word, as cited by the Oxford English Dictionary , is in a 1513 translation of the Aeneid , where it is found in the phrase "Abaisit I wolx, and widdersyns start my hair." In this sense, "widdershins start my hair" means "my hair stood on end".
25-556: The use of the word also means "in a direction opposite to the usual" and "in a direction contrary to the apparent course of the sun". It is cognate with the German language widersinnig , i.e., "against" + "sense". The term "widdershins" was especially common in Lowland Scots . The opposite of widdershins is deosil , or sunwise , meaning "clockwise". Widdershins comes from Middle Low German weddersinnes , literally "against
50-486: A church , and a number of folk myths make reference to this superstition ; for example, in the fairy tale Childe Rowland , the protagonist and his sister are transported to Elfland after the sister runs widdershins round a church. There is also a reference to this in Dorothy Sayers 's novels The Nine Tailors (chapter entitled The Second Course; "He turned to his right, knowing that it is unlucky to walk about
75-532: A common parent language . Because language change can have radical effects on both the sound and the meaning of a word, cognates may not be obvious, and it often takes rigorous study of historical sources and the application of the comparative method to establish whether lexemes are cognate. Cognates are distinguished from loanwords , where a word has been borrowed from another language. The English term cognate derives from Latin cognatus , meaning "blood relative". An example of cognates from
100-548: A 2001 Dragonlance fantasy novel by Jeff Crook Conundrum , a memoir written by Jan Morris Conundrum Press (disambiguation) , two book publishing companies in North America Conundrum , a supervillain who appeared in the Spider-Man comic books Other fields [ edit ] "Conundrum" (song) , an instrumental song by Jethro Tull on their album Bursting Out "Conundrum" ( Dallas ) ,
125-638: A church widdershins ...") and Clouds of Witness ("True, O King, and as this isn't a church, there's no harm in going round it widdershins"). In Robert Louis Stevenson 's tale "The Song of the Morrow," an old crone on the beach dances "widdershins". In the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches it is normal for processions around a church to travel in an anticlockwise direction. This remains
150-621: A common origin, but which in fact do not. For example, Latin habēre and German haben both mean 'to have' and are phonetically similar. However, the words evolved from different Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots: haben , like English have , comes from PIE *kh₂pyé- 'to grasp', and has the Latin cognate capere 'to seize, grasp, capture'. Habēre , on the other hand, is from PIE *gʰabʰ 'to give, to receive', and hence cognate with English give and German geben . Likewise, English much and Spanish mucho look similar and have
175-506: A counter-clockwise and 'widdershins' direction, that is to say, a direction that runs counter to the apparent movement of the Sun within the sky from the vantage of the ground. This runs counter to the prevalent directionality of Buddhism (in general) and orthodox Hinduism . This is in keeping with the aspect and directionality of the ' Sauvastika ' (Tibetan: yung-drung ), sacred to the Bönpo. In
200-412: A similar meaning, but are not cognates: much is from Proto-Germanic *mikilaz < PIE *meǵ- and mucho is from Latin multum < PIE *mel- . A true cognate of much is the archaic Spanish maño 'big'. Cognates are distinguished from other kinds of relationships. An etymon , or ancestor word, is the ultimate source word from which one or more cognates derive. In other words, it
225-492: Is regular. Paradigms of conjugations or declensions, the correspondence of which cannot be generally due to chance, have often been used in cognacy assessment. However, beyond paradigms, morphosyntax is often excluded in the assessment of cognacy between words, mainly because structures are usually seen as more subject to borrowing. Still, very complex, non-trivial morphosyntactic structures can rarely take precedence over phonetic shapes to indicate cognates. For instance, Tangut ,
250-483: Is the source of related words in different languages. For example, the etymon of both Welsh ceffyl and Irish capall is the Proto-Celtic * kaballos (all meaning horse ). Descendants are words inherited across a language barrier, coming from a particular etymon in an ancestor language. For example, Russian мо́ре and Polish morze are both descendants of Proto-Slavic * moře (meaning sea ). A root
275-444: Is the source of related words within a single language (no language barrier is crossed). Similar to the distinction between etymon and root , a nuanced distinction can sometimes be made between a descendant and a derivative . A derivative is one of the words which have their source in a root word, and were at some time created from the root word using morphological constructs such as suffixes, prefixes, and slight changes to
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#1732798812299300-820: The Paraguayan Guarani panambi , the Eastern Bolivian Guarani panapana , the Cocama and Omagua panama , and the Sirionó ana ana are cognates, derived from the Old Tupi panapana , 'butterfly', maintaining their original meaning in these Tupi languages . Cognates need not have the same meaning, as they may have undergone semantic change as the languages developed independently. For example English starve and Dutch sterven 'to die' or German sterben 'to die' all descend from
325-799: The Southern Hemisphere , the Bönpo practitioner is required to elect whether the directionality of 'counter-clockwise' ( deosil in the Southern Hemisphere) or running-counter to the direction of the Sun (widdershins in the Southern Hemisphere) is the key intention of the tradition. The resolution to this conundrum is left open to the practitioner, their 'intuitive insight' (Sanskrit: prajna ) and their tradition. Cognate In historical linguistics , cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in
350-740: The Proto-Indo-European *nókʷts 'night'. The Indo-European languages have hundreds of such cognate sets, though few of them are as neat as this. The Arabic سلام salām , the Hebrew שלום shalom , the Assyrian Neo-Aramaic shlama and the Amharic selam 'peace' are cognates, derived from the Proto-Semitic *šalām- 'peace'. The Brazilian Portuguese panapanã , (flock of butterflies in flight),
375-463: The case regardless of which hemisphere they are performed in. In Judaism circles are also sometimes walked anticlockwise. For example, when a bride circles her groom seven times before marriage, when dancing around the bimah during Simchat Torah (or when dancing in a circle at any time), or when the Sefer Torah is brought out of the ark (ark is approached from the right, and departed from
400-462: The free dictionary. Conundrum may refer to: A riddle , whose answer is or involves a pun or unexpected twist, in particular Riddle joke , a riddle that constitutes a set-up to the humorous punch line of a joke A logical postulation that evades resolution, an intricate and difficult problem. Literature [ edit ] Conundrum (Lyons novel) , a 1994 Doctor Who novel by Steve Lyons Conundrum (Dragonlance novel) ,
425-532: The language of the Xixia Empire, and one Horpa language spoken today in Sichuan , Geshiza, both display a verbal alternation indicating tense, obeying the same morphosyntactic collocational restrictions. Even without regular phonetic correspondences between the stems of the two languages, the cognatic structures indicate secondary cognacy for the stems. False cognates are pairs of words that appear to have
450-595: The left). This has its origins in the Temple in Jerusalem , where in order not to get in each other's way, the priests would walk around the altar anticlockwise while performing their duties. When entering the Beis Hamikdash the people would enter by one gate, and leave by another. The resulting direction of motion was anticlockwise. In Judaism, starting things from the right side is considered to be important, since
475-475: The perception or recognition of faces in something essentially different Mechanical puzzle , a puzzle presented as a set of mechanically interlinked pieces Disentanglement puzzle , a type of mechanical puzzle that involves disentangling one piece or set of pieces Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Conundrum . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change
500-620: The right side is the side of Chesed (kindness) while the left side is the side of Gevurah (judgment). For example, there is a Jewish custom recorded in the Shulchan Aruch to put on the right shoe first and take off the left shoe first, following the example of Mar son of Ravina whom the Talmud records as putting his shoes on in this way. The Bönpo in the Northern Hemisphere traditionally circumambulate (generally) in
525-983: The same Indo-European root are: night ( English ), Nacht ( German ), nacht ( Dutch , Frisian ), nag ( Afrikaans ), Naach ( Colognian ), natt ( Swedish , Norwegian ), nat ( Danish ), nátt ( Faroese ), nótt ( Icelandic ), noc ( Czech , Slovak , Polish ), ночь, noch ( Russian ), ноќ, noć ( Macedonian ), нощ, nosht ( Bulgarian ), ніч , nich ( Ukrainian ), ноч , noch / noč ( Belarusian ), noč ( Slovene ), noć ( Serbo-Croatian ), nakts ( Latvian ), naktis ( Lithuanian ), nos ( Welsh/Cymraeg ), νύξ, nyx ( Ancient Greek ), νύχτα / nychta ( Modern Greek ), nakt- ( Sanskrit ), natë ( Albanian ), nox , gen. sg. noctis ( Latin ), nuit ( French ), noche ( Spanish ), nochi ( Extremaduran ), nueche ( Asturian ), noite ( Portuguese and Galician ), notte ( Italian ), nit ( Catalan ), nuet/nit/nueit ( Aragonese ), nuèch / nuèit ( Occitan ) and noapte ( Romanian ). These all mean 'night' and derive from
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#1732798812299550-457: The same Proto-Germanic verb, *sterbaną 'to die'. Cognates also do not need to look or sound similar: English father , French père , and Armenian հայր ( hayr ) all descend directly from Proto-Indo-European *ph₂tḗr . An extreme case is Armenian երկու ( erku ) and English two , which descend from Proto-Indo-European *dwóh₁ ; the sound change *dw > erk in Armenian
575-530: The two-hour series finale of primetime soap opera Dallas "Conundrum" ( Star Trek: The Next Generation ) , a 1992 fifth-season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation The Conundrum, a mountain unicycle made by Surly Bikes Conundrum, an NSA code word for Chrononaut Frank B. Parker in the television series Seven Days HMS Conundrum , the unofficial name of floating drums used to lay undersea oil pipelines between England and France during World War II See also [ edit ] Hidden faces ,
600-533: The vowels or to the consonants of the root word. For example unhappy , happily , and unhappily are all derivatives of the root word happy . The terms root and derivative are used in the analysis of morphological derivation within a language in studies that are not concerned with historical linguistics and that do not cross the language barrier. conundrum [REDACTED] Look up conundrum in Wiktionary,
625-488: The way" (i.e. "in the opposite direction"), from widersinnen "to go against", from Old High German elements widar "against" and sinnen "to travel, go", related to sind "journey". Because the sun played a highly important role in older religions, to go against it was considered bad luck for sun-worshiping traditions. It was considered unlucky in Britain to travel in an anticlockwise (not sunwise ) direction around
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