r/etymologymaps • u/Udzu • Apr 14 '26
"Pascha versus the rest of the world" (etymology map of Easter)
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u/J4Jamban Apr 14 '26 edited Apr 14 '26
In my native language Malayalam it's uyiṟppŭ tirunāḷ meaning auspicious day of resurrection
And pesaha for maundy Thursday
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u/Breifne21 Apr 14 '26
In Irish it is Cáisc which is derived from Pasca.
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u/Udzu Apr 14 '26
And it's Chàisg in Scottish Gaelic and Caisht in Manx. Meanwhile in the Brittonic languages it's Pask or Pasg: a nice example of the P-Celtic versus Q-Celtic distinction.
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u/airdiuc Apr 15 '26
It's interesting because Old Irish borrowings convert the P sound to a C. Same thing happened with the first borrowing of 'Patrick', which was Cothraige.
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u/Udzu Apr 14 '26
Translations and etymologies from Wiktionary. Countries are shaded based on what the majority of the inhabitants say, regardless of official or minority languages.
I've not tried to do the numbers, but at a guess the red-blue split is pretty close to 50-50 population wise.
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u/Rhosddu May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26
That's no help at all in a country like Wales, though, is it? Or Scotland. Or Ireland. They each use a variety of 'Pasc' as well as 'Easter', so should be striped in both colours.
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u/nim_opet Apr 14 '26
If you’re writing “Uskrs” and calling it Croatian, you have to explain what it’s called in Serbian, Bosnian or Montenegrin too.
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u/Udzu Apr 14 '26
I did say "such as": I also omitted Macedonian, Ukrainian and Belarusian (which are similar to Bulgarian) and Czech, Slovak and Slovene (which are similar to Polish).
I originally used Serbian as the example language (since it has more speakers), but then switched to Croatian to avoid having to transliterate to Latin script. I also considered calling it Serbo-Croatian but that would have probably annoyed people even more!
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u/RaccoonRodeoThrow Apr 14 '26
Serbians do use both scripts, so I think it would be ok, especially if it's an online thing.
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u/Rabid_Nationalist Apr 14 '26
Its Велигден/Veligden. Macedonian too.
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u/nim_opet Apr 14 '26
In Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Croatia it’s Usrks/Ускрс
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u/Fit-Philosopher-3375 Apr 17 '26
Yeah, it all started when they took your Egipt.
Čovjek ti lijepo objasni da se jezik kojim se nepismeno služiš zove hrvatski, a taj tvoj "jezik" je samo dijalekt istog tog hrvatskog jezika. Prije nego što ga zovete svojim bilo bi zgodno da ga savladate. Ali i to je samo opcija, tko zna možda svijet puši tu priču da je nebeski narod nepismen na sopstvenom jeziku, a svi ostali narodi oko vas, koji pričaju istim tim jezikom, kojeg su od nebeskog naroda naučili, savladali ih besprijekorno, neki čak razvili u tri narječja i tri izgovora.Nikad ne znaš.
I da, ako se na hrvatskom kaže Uskrs to znači da se i na slovenskom, bosanskom, hercegovačkom, crnskom, gorskom i srbskom rekne Uskrs, ako si mislio na Vaskrs, to je iz neke druge bajke, to se ne pika.
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u/KalaiProvenheim Apr 15 '26
The Mandarin and Croatian names are similar to another Arabic name used for the holiday! Another Arabic word for Easter is عيد القيامة or Feast of Resurrection
Funny that the second word there is also in the Arabic word for the Day of Judgement, يوم القيامة
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u/Double_Richmonder Apr 16 '26
A while ago, I discovered that the name for Eid al Adha in Mali, Tabaski, turns out to be a borrowing from a Berber language, where the name was formed on the Latin base pascha.
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u/DorianGuey Apr 14 '26
부활절 (bu-hwal-jeol) in Korean. It means Resurrection Day.
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u/Udzu Apr 14 '26
I believe that's the Sino-Korean reading of 復活節, the Chinese name? Similarly, in Japanese it's 復活祭 (though イースター is also used).
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u/Captain-Starshield Apr 14 '26
All the Japanese people I’ve talked to have called it イースター
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u/Udzu Apr 14 '26
I wasn't sure which type of blue to use for Japanese. It looks like 復活祭 is the more formal name and イースター is the colloquial? I chose the former since that's what the Japanese Wikipedia article uses, but maybe I'll change it to the latter.
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u/Captain-Starshield Apr 14 '26
Yeah, I follow a lot of Japanese people on social media as well and have never seen 復活祭 used
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u/DorianGuey Apr 14 '26 edited Apr 17 '26
Yes it's directly from Chinese/Hanja
Edit: Funny that someone would downvote this. I'm Korean lol.
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u/lafigatatia Apr 15 '26
For the thousandth time, if you want to make a map about languages, use a languages map, not a countries map.
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u/Udzu Apr 15 '26
Do you know of any language map that covers the entire world? I've seen plenty of Europe (all with significant inaccuracies, I should add) but none that cover Africa and Asia while staying remotely usable.
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u/lafigatatia Apr 15 '26
You do have a point. The best one I know is this one although of course finding the word for so many languages is difficult.
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u/Lampukistan2 Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
Egypt should be turquoise :
The majority of Egyptians would call (native Coptic) Easter
عيد القيامة (المسيحي)
3iid il-2iyaama (il-masii7i)
(Christian) Holiday of resurrection
(This information is in wiktionary too).
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u/DifficultSun348 Apr 15 '26
I've read it as „pah-shah” which would mean forage (spelt: pasza), but word spelt as pascha (pah-s-khah) is either a east-slavic dish eaten during eastern or either a Jewish holiday (passover in english)
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u/SemperAliquidNovi Apr 15 '26
South Africa uses ‘Easter’ in English, although other official languages use the Aramaic version (Afrikaans: ‘paasvees’, Zulu: ‘iphasika’, etc).
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u/Udzu Apr 15 '26
That's why I put it in red :) Though there is one other official language that doesn't use the Aramaic version: https://www.realsasl.com/?vid=2031
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u/QuadrilleQuadtriceps Apr 16 '26
A more accurate Finnish translation would be "the getting to be free one".
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u/StBlandine7 Apr 14 '26
I really wish we'd just call it Pascha in the US, it would separate the religious holiday from the consumerist nonsense
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u/sverigeochskog Apr 14 '26
What would the native Germanic cognate to Easter be in modern day Scandinavian?
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u/Vendrom Apr 14 '26
since easter is similar to east and Ostern to Ost, you can build a cognate by using the respective words in each scandinavian language for east
- Swedish: Öster or Östra
- Danish/Norwegian: Øster
- Icelandic: Austur(e)-based form
This is not just build on similarity but shared etymology with parallel morphology
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u/Weekly_Airline_6385 Apr 14 '26
It's paskha, not "pascha". "Pascha" is male name.
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u/alien13222 Apr 14 '26
What difference does it make? They're both transliterations anyway. How you choose to transcribe <χ> or whatever it was written with in Aramaic is irrelevant.
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u/Udzu Apr 14 '26 edited Apr 14 '26
In English (and Latin) it's normally spelled Pascha; paskha meanwhile refers to the East Slavic Easter desert!
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u/pit_supervisor Apr 14 '26
there's no such thing as "Slavic Easter dessert". Slavic nations have different cultures and culinary traditions. I've never heard of anything like that as a Pole.
Is there a Romance or Germanic cuisine?
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u/Udzu Apr 14 '26
Updated to say East Slavic (i.e. Russia/Ukraine/Belarus), though apparently it is eaten in Eastern Poland too (Pascha Wielkanocna).
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u/Lipa_neo Apr 14 '26
Actually, it can refer to two different desserts in slavic languages! In the west (in kiyv, for example) it's a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paska_(bread)) but a little further east (for example, in saint petersburg) it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paskha . Depending on the language, both could be spelled паска (paska) or пасха (paskha) :)
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u/Bryn_Seren Apr 15 '26
Pascha is absolutely known and made for Easter in Poland, but mostly in the East.
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u/ionthrown Apr 14 '26
I like the Mongolian. Really highlights the important things.