Socrates did not originate the word, his usage is the most famous we have historically available.
The Greeks believed in good spirits helping people ("Eudaemon") and evil spirits for darker purposes ("cacodaemon")[1]. It was believed that people had these spirits helping or harming them as the case may be.
The same goes for "genius", a spirit from whom we get the words genie as well as "Djinn". The common usage was that (quoted by Elizabeth Gilbert) a great person "had a genius", as in, a spirit helping them, as opposed to "is a genius", which is a later usage.
There's a book, The Greeks and the Irrational, that suggests the idea of a soul or self separate from the body was a shamanistic idea that came to Greece via Scythian or Thracian influence.
Empedocles seems to have been the first Greek philosopher to have used the word "daemon" in this sense.
Linked from that same page is a citation [0] that djinn is, in fact, or Arabic origin. Where do you get that it's a romanized word? Unless you mean romanized in the sense that it's spelled using the latin alphabet, but that's overly pedantic even by HN standards.
> The idea of a ‘genius’ originated in ancient Rome. The Romans believed that all people had a guiding spirit that attended them throughout their lives. Because this spirit was born with the person it was called a ‘genius’ (from the Latin verb gignere meaning ‘to give birth or bring forth’ – which also happens to be the root of our word ‘generate’). A person’s ‘genius’ dictated their unique personality and disposition. So if a person had an outstanding talent or ability, it was believed that this was due to their ‘genius’. From here it was a natural step for the word ‘genius’ to be used not only of the spirit that inspired a talent but also of the talent itself.
> In Roman religion, the genius (Latin: [ˈɡɛnɪ.ʊs]; plural geniī) is the individual instance of a general divine nature that is present in every individual person, place, or thing.[1] Much like a guardian angel, the genius would follow each man from the hour of his birth until the day he died.[2] For women, it was the Juno spirit that would accompany each of them.
> Each individual place had a genius (genius loci) and so did powerful objects, such as volcanoes. The concept extended to some specifics: the genius of the theatre, of vineyards, and of festivals, which made performances successful, grapes grow, and celebrations succeed, respectively. It was extremely important in the Roman mind to propitiate the appropriate genii for the major undertakings and events of their lives.
This is a really old word that appears to have a common root and got borrowed back into French by accident... but that it got borrowed back by accident is because of its really old common ancestor.
> Afro-Asiatic and Eurasian have a common ancestor about 10,000 BC.
> This is a really old word that appears to have a common root and got borrowed back into French by accident... but that it got borrowed back by accident is because of its really old common ancestor.
If you think there's a relationship between the Latin and Syrian words, you wouldn't seek to explain it by common ancestry from 10,000 BC. No linguistic relationship exists at that temporal distance. You would either say that the word was borrowed from one language into the other (common in general; hard to say if it happened here), or that they are similar through pure coincidence (also common).
> Afro-Asiatic and Eurasian have a common ancestor about 10,000 BC.
You should know that that is a hypothesis; there is no evidence for it other than the assumption that all languages ultimately share a common origin.
The root word 'gene' goes back to at least PIE as "give birth, beget" (it similarly shows up in Sanskrit (janati) and Welsh (geni) and several others) and the contemporary Semitic language.
One could certainly argue that it is a loan word one way or the other between those to groups, yet this remains a very old word that is at least older than Proto-Indo-European, or Arabic, Aramaic, or Syriac.
Jinn as found in Arabic has a relationship to genius in French. The word origins for genie (as in genius loci) can be traced back to PIE which puts it at 5000 BC in PIE.
Prior to PIE is speculative, nonetheless Semitic languages show a similar word with similar meanings as the PIE genius loci spirit.
It would be interesting to pursue that word through history to find if it prior to PIE or when it was borrowed from PIE into Semitic or from Porto-Semitic into PIE.
So stated we already know it's false; Nicaraguan Sign Language emerged ex nihilo and has no ancestors. For something slightly less clear-cut than that, but also spoken, there are various creole languages around the world that show little to no grammatical relationship to their ancestors (though they are strongly related in terms of vocabulary).
I did not intend to endorse the assumption that all languages have a common origin; I intended to impugn the claim that we can discern a relationship of any kind between Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic. We can't; the only relationship we can perceive between them is the one we begin by postulating.
That said, we also can't disprove that all "traditional" languages go back to a common root. It's just a meaningless claim the evidence for or against which can't exist.
The acronym etymology is presented as fact at the start of Daniel Suarez's novel Daemon, which claims the expansion is "disk and execution monitor". I always found that etymology suspect.
The etymology is always suspect, but at least in this case the outcome does justice. This compares sharply to the bills where similar word play happen...
>> The former came to English from medieval Latin, while the latter was from classical Latin.
And it probably came to Latin from Greek: "δαίμων" is a deity, or spirit, not necessarily associated with something evil. As a sibling comment hints at, Socrates used to say that he had a "δαίμων" inside him, that advised him. This was used against him in his trial where one of the accusations was that he "introduced new daemons" ("εισάγει καινά δαιμόνια"), meaning new gods, new religions, he was essentially accused of prosyletising. And of corrupting youth, of course (well, one of his students was Alcibiades, a young man so debauched that it was easy to believe he had been corrupted by someone, probably many people at once, and many more times than one; probably being corrupted right now, as we speak).
Source: I grew up Greek and was corrupted as a youth by reading Socrates' words, as transcribed by Plato. Plato did not have enough deamonic powers in him to corrupt a wet noodle.
> Maxwell himself used "demon" but it is inferred that he meant to write "daemon" as there is nothing malevolent about his imaginary creature.
It's the same word. There's no distinction between them. Writing "daemon" instead of "demon" is the same thing as writing "paedagogy" instead of "pedagogy".
There is from connotation though. It's not like the example you mention which is just a case of UK vs US spellings. In both the US and UK, "demon" means an evil spirit and daemon has other meanings, either technical or relating to Greek mythology.
> The usual ancient Greek sense [of demon], "supernatural agent or intelligence lower than a god, ministering spirit" is attested in English from 1560s
Or as Merriam-Webster will tell you:
> demon (noun)
> variants or daemon
> (usually daemon) an attendant power or spirit: GENIUS
Maxwell used the ordinary spelling of a common word. Why would anyone assume he meant to write something strange instead of something normal?
Because the non-strange meaning was "demon" in the Judeo-Christian sense. Before UNIX, people who weren't experts in Greek mythology had never heard of any other meaning, even if it existed among scholars.
There's no question of what Maxwell meant. He is using the word in a relatively rare sense, yes. And he's spelling it exactly the way you'd expect. There is nothing out of the ordinary and therefore nothing to explain.
> people who weren't experts in Greek mythology
The word isn't really relevant to Greek mythology. It's relevant to Greek philosophy.
The Greeks believed in good spirits helping people ("Eudaemon") and evil spirits for darker purposes ("cacodaemon")[1]. It was believed that people had these spirits helping or harming them as the case may be.
The same goes for "genius", a spirit from whom we get the words genie as well as "Djinn". The common usage was that (quoted by Elizabeth Gilbert) a great person "had a genius", as in, a spirit helping them, as opposed to "is a genius", which is a later usage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacodemon this is also the origin of the "Cacodemon" in Doom.