OU blog

Personal Blogs

Richard Walker

The Tavern and the Tabernacle

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Richard Walker, Wednesday 5 November 2025 at 22:02

"There is a tavern in the town, in the town
And there my dear love sits him down, sits him down
And drinks his wine 'mid laughter free,
And never, never thinks of me."

When I first visited Greece and went to a taverna I thought that name might be a borrowing from English. After all Greek has a word "bar". But in fact both languages have borrowed from Latin, Greek directly and English via French (and now again from Greek, so taverna is now an English word too). 

The Latin taverna seems to have been something like a shop/stall/shed/tent, with connotations of being moveable. A related word is tabernacle, used in the English translation of the Bible to mean a moveable sanctuary or temple, and deriving from the diminutive form tabernaculum, "tentlet" (the suffix is the same as in pendulum, "little hanging thing").

Other related words are architrave, where the -trave element is from an Italian words for beam and the unusual word contubernal, "living in the same tent". More surprisingly there may just be an ancient connect with tree, which may originally meant "beam" or "dwelling". You can see the semantic connection.

Permalink
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 3345630