Talk:Adonai

How is Adonai related to Adonis?
The term Adonai (sg. Adon), under #English, is purported to be related to Adonis. The latter is a Greek term used for a mythological character beloved by Aphrodite; the former is a Hebrew term used for the God of Christianity and Judaism—roughly equivalent to “Lord” in English, which is why this term is preferred in many such translations of the Holy Bible—whence it would seem to me that these two words are not, in fact, related.

When I look at Ἄδωνις on here, what I see is that it is believed to have been derived from Phoenician 𐤀𐤃𐤍, but this doesn't seem as though it would follow. For one, the meanings are substantially different, which, however, doesn't in and of itself tend to impact whether two words are related. But what makes such a conjecture suspect to me is that Adonis is a character who was created during the times of Ancient Greek—i.e. when Phoenician was still alive. It would hardly make any sense for a loanword from a contemporary language with fairly frequent cross-exposure not to have at least a similar meaning to that of its source language. To wit, “Lord” and “Beloved One” are not substantially similar.

Moreover, although Greek is classified as an Indo-European language, there are many words which are of non-Indo-European origin—loanwords aside, I mean. Namely, I am referring to a series of words from the so-called “pre-Greek substrate” to which a (figurative) myriad of terms and proper nouns in Greek are attributed. Is this not also the case for Adonis, then? Why? OzzyMuffin238 (talk) 13:49, 29 September 2022 (UTC)