Hacker News Reader

Comment by dustintrex | Hacker News Reader

But is that a reference to the Bible? "To earn (my/your) daily bread" is a set phrase in English and many other European languages (French pain quotidien etc) as well.

View on HN

Hmm, Europe was dominated by Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church for centuries. I can't imagine why a memorable turn of a phrase attributed to the most important figure in the most important text of that religion would ever become a set phrase in those languages but not in the languages of countries where Christianity was never dominant. /s

You might be surprised how many of the common aphorisms you use every day come from the Bible. Ever gone the extra mile? Moved mountains at the eleventh hour to get to the root of the matter? Ah well, no rest for the wicked, it's like the blind leading the blind.

Unfortunately, I am not versed in linguistics, but I would suppose so, because its etymology [1] based on the words where it's derived from would mean "I am on something" in a literal or more metaphorical sense (could also be used as "I'm focused on something") and it's also widely used almost everyday in the "everyday's bread" way in our most common prayer (we used to sing that every morning at school) while also never being used in any other context except for my first post's phrase.

[1] https://el.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%94%CF%80%CE%B5%CE%B9%C...

This prayer or rather the use of epiousios in this prayer and its appearance only in this prayer and how it should be translated is exactly the topic of this discussion.

Definitely, and that's not surprising - many set phrases have their etymology in the Bible, due to its historical role not only in religion but also in how language and literacy was being taught over the last two millenia; and the phenomenon of set phrases being shared among many European languages (especially those which are not directly related, e.g. romance and germanic and slavic) is very common specifically for biblical expressions.

Yes, an enormous amount of western culture is derived from or influenced by Christianity and the Bible, due to the extremely long timeframe that it was integral to the culture (of Europe and the Middle East and Ethiopia). The other languages took the phrase from the Bible and translated it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com