Wednesday, October 3, 2018

No, "gegenees" is not the singular form

Pathfinder, like its parent Dungeons & Dragons, likes to take monsters from real world mythology and mutilate them into bestiary entries. As Paizo produced more bestiaries, they quickly started scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Case in point: the gêgeneês (Greek γηγενεης), only briefly mentioned in the myth of the Argonauts, get an entry in Bestiary 5. For the most part they are barely changed from the myth, since there was not much to begin with, except that Paizo gives them tusks, blue skin, and mistakenly uses the plural of their name as the singular and plural forms.

Sorry Paizo, but there are distinct singular and plural forms. The singular is γηγενης (gêgenês), the plural is γηγενεης (gêgeneês); pronounced in Ancient Greek /gɛːgenɛːs/ and /gɛːgeneɛːs/, respectively. The Modern Greek spelling is γηγενής (gigenís) and γηγενείς (gigeneís), respectively; pronounced /ʝiʝenís/ and /ʝiʝeneís/, respectively. The word is a compound literally meaning "earth-born"—from ("earth") + geneā́ ("birth")—idiomatically it means "native, indigenous." It is popularly considered a cognate with or root of the word giant and synonymous with autochthon, although some sources consider this etymology of giant untenable.

It was never loaned into English so there is no standardized English pronunciation. For the sake of English readers we can translate and anglicize it as the calque and cognate geogene (plural geogenes), or a compound of geo- ("earth") and gene ("born"), patterned after indigene. I find that much easier to pronounce.

So the geogenes are a generic barbarian tribe of giants that are only mentioned briefly in the myth of the Argonauts. I suppose another name for them could be hexachir (plural -es)—from a compound of ἑξα- ("six") and χείρ ("hand"), patterned after Hecatoncheires—meaning "six-handed." I only got a tiny handful of results for that neologism on Google, however.

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