General words for religious buildings?

[nancylebov]

As far as I know, English doesn't have general words for religious buildings-- it's synagogue, church, mosque, and it will annoy or confuse people if you interchange them.

Temple or shul might substitute for synagogue (there's cultural variation on that one, of course), and Hindu temple is the only catchphrase I've got for any other religion.

Are there languages which do have general words for religious buildings? Is it a sign of being calmer on the subject if a culture has such words? Is there a legal term in English for religious buildings?

ETA: The idea I was trying to get was that if there were a common word or phrase that people used to refer to houses of worship, including the one they go to, it might indicate that they thought of all religions as being the same sort of thing.

For example, you might refer to your local supermarket by its trademark but there'd be nothing odd about saying that you're going to a supermarket, because there's no strong group loyalty which leads you to think that your preferred supermarket is qualitatively different from other sorts of supermarket.

Comments

[green_knight]

English has 'place of worship' as an al-round term. (I'd also prefer 'religious site' to 'building' because not all places of worthip are indoors.)

I'm trying to think of a German term and fail. A good place to ask would be the linguaphiles community on livejournal; it is frequented by speakers of a lot of languages.

[siderea]

Yeah, I was going to say "house of worship" if one means a building, but not all sites of worship are indoors.

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

"House of Worship" or "House of Faith"?

[madfilkentist]

"House of worship" immediately came to my mind, though of course it's a phrase rather than a word.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

"House of worship" is good, but I haven't heard "House of faith" before. I find it hard to imagine someone saying that they're going to a house of worship, especially if it's their own religion.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

House of Worship is pretty common, actually, when you're trying to be nondenominational.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

I have said it to refer to my own church. It's also very commonly used in writing to a bunch of strangers (as in sending a municipality some medical information flyers and encouraging them ask local houses of worship to distribute them).

"Faith community" is another one I've seen in public writing.

[jonbaker.livejournal.com]

What would an Ethical Culture place be? They're explicitly atheist (mostly atheist Jews, IME, e.g. Asimov), and I don't know if they really "worship", but they do have a big meeting room for some kind of services. At least, the big one in NYC had such a room, where Asimov's funeral was held.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Even within English-speaking Christianity, there are many words - church, chapel, cathedral, shrine. And JWs with their Kingdom Halls.

There's also a question of gathering sites for religious rites as contrasted with holy sites...

[trinker.livejournal.com]

As a side note, in English, Buddhists have been using both "Buddhist church" and "Buddhist temple".

[(Anonymous)]

the field of religious buildings is extremely wide, though. In Islamic societies it can encompass pretty much any civic structure - schools, hospitals...

I would use temple for any house of communal worship: Christians have used it for all non-Christian/heterodox Christian worship buildings. See Tempio Malatestiana, Templo da sagrada Familia and Templo Calvario. I kinda like "religious building" though.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

But in general you have be careful about what you say about someone *else's* religion. See tod_hollykim's comment below. I prefer "house of worship", myself, for the generic case.

I've found useful a book called How to be a Perfect Stranger: The Essential Religious Etiquette Handbook (mmm,,,... 4th edition now). That is, what do and don't you want to do and say when attending an event in someone else's religion? (Catholic wedding and Jewish shiva are two that come to mind.)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I used to hear tabernacle, but it went out of favor. Temple, or houses of worship?

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

I've had too many Jewish friends who don't like the use of "temple" unless it's referring to the one in Jerusalem. When I'm going to Jewish services with friends, more often than not we're going to shul -- but these friends will refer to it as a synagogue unless they know everyone in the group will know what "shul" means.

I'd prefer "place of worship" as the generic term, as I know multiple "set aside" spots that are outdoors. But I don't know anyone who uses "place/house of worship" in the singular, only in the plural as an intentionally all-encompassing collective.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I didn't know that. When I was a kid, the local Reform building was a temple and the Conservative and Orthodox buildings were synagogues.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's definitely a YMMV situation. When I was in high school, one of the two local Reform buildings was a "temple" and the other was a "congregation".

[jonbaker.livejournal.com]

With the Reform, calling the house of worship a "Temple" has to do with their religious position that the Temple in J'lem will not be rebuilt. Thus, since there can be no Temple in J'lem, its function is replaced by synagogues. But I know many Conservative Jews who refer to "going to temple", or have synagogues called Temple Something. Some may have started out Reform and later switched affiliation to Conservative, I suppose.

Synagogue is pretty much a straight Greek translation of "beit haknesset", house of gathering. Schule is German for school (in Hebrew "Beit midrash" - house of explanation (of the Torah)). Synagogues often double as places of religious education, so either term fits.

Shtibl - little room - is another word, usually describing a chasidic synagogue in a house, rather than in a dedicated building.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Is J'lem an abbreviation for convenience, or is there more significance to it?

[jonbaker.livejournal.com]

Convenience only. You see it in, e.g., the JPost. Probably helps hyphenation/word spacing on short newspaper lines.

[tod-hollykim.livejournal.com]

And then The Quakers use meeting hall. They don't have a church per se.

[avram]

Looking up etymologies online...

• Church comes (via Old English cirice and West Germanic kirika) from Greek kuriakē, meaning "of the lord". Possibly a shortening of kuriakē oikia ("house of the Lord") or ekklēsia kuriakē ("congregation of the Lord").
• Temple comes from the Latin templum ("cut off"), referring to a sacred region set aside from normal space.
• Mosque seems to come to English via a long chain of other languages, but is ultimately derived from the Arabic masjid, a place of prostration.
• Synagogue comes from the Greek, and means either "assembly" or "learning together".

So it looks like temple is a pretty reasonable single word for a building set aside for worship. But then there's the complication, in Judaism, of "the Temple" referring one particular building, and many Jews not wanting to use that word to refer to other Jewish worship-houses.

On the other hand, the notion that we should have a single, simple word for all houses of religious worship (setting them aside from buildings used for purposes that we don't consider worship) assumes that our culture has a firm grasp of the distinction between the religious and the non-religious. I don't think that assumption is actually true.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Temple is the most generic, but church is the modern usage for generic -- "a Jewish church is called a synagogue" is a typical way to teach Xian children how to call a synagogue, for example.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

I can promise you that no Jewish person has ever used "church" as a synonym for "synagogue", though. Hegemonic language choices aren't strictly usage patterns--I think that Christians calling a shul a "Jewish church" or a mosque a "Muslim church" are using metaphor, not synonym.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I don't think "metaphor" is quite the right word, but I'm not sure what would be. And yes, I think some posters are underestimating how much of Judaism is actually Jewish-not-Christian.

[carbonel]

The TV show Highlander used "holy ground," which sidesteps the entire issue, because many faiths don't necessarily consider their place of worship to be holy.

[gildedacorn.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest "consecrated place," but see carbonel above.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Taking a look at Roget, I find that "house of worship" is the first entry and I would guess the most generic, though, as madfilkentist notes, it's a noun phrase. If I wanted a single word, I would have to go for an archaic usage, oratory, whose precise meaning is a place devoted to prayer. But even that won't work for some forms of Buddhism, which call for meditation on the impersonal dharma rather than prayer to any sort of higher being. I'm not sure if there's a word for a place where one goes to meditate.

If we think in terms of the sacred, or of places where sacred activities take place, perhaps the right word is "sanctuary." The most basic meaning is "a consecrated place," but to consecrate is simply to dedicate something to a purpose (sc. a religious purpose), and any location that is to be used for any religious purpose, and that is prepared for that use in any way, could be said to have been consecrated, I think. Perhaps "sanctum" would more strongly convey the specifically religious focus to a modern audience.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

"Oratory" generally has a very specific meaning within today's English-speaking Christianity, though; I have never heard it used to refer to anything other than a very high-ceremonial Christian house of worship (Brompton Oratory, Oratoire du Louvre, and so on).

If someone used it to refer to a mosque or a shul or an Evangelical Protestant church, I would be very confused.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

If I were looking for a word to apply to the place of worship of some unfamiliar culture I'd probably go with Temenos as the most general, neutral term. But as Nancy notes above, nobody's going to say "I'm just popping over to the temenos" or "there's an Evangelical temenos on the ground floor."

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Now I know why you're asking I have to say no, I can't think of any natural term people already know that doesn't distinguish their own religious buildings from those of others. I find this totally natural because my undestanding of religion is that it's a method for forming a communal identity, so "our space" would be the word's function: a sense of other people's truths as potentially equivalent to our own strikes me as a pretty new phenomenon that could only develop after different bases for identity (eg nationalism) had become well established.

That anonymous comment above is me, BTW.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Today's xkcd is relevant.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Where I grew up, "church" meant Anglican or RC church, and all other Christian houses of worship -- Baptists etc -- were called chapels. I was in fact quite taken aback to hear Americans saying they went to church when in fact they were Methodists or Presbyterians. As far as I was concerned they went to chapels in the same way that Jews went to synogogues. So even within Christianity this varies by place.

I've had a problem with this in writing secondary world fantasy, where I haven't wanted to use church or temple because they pull too specifically towards this world cultural expectations. I used "nemet" in Lifelode which is (or is derived from) an Old Welsh word for a sacred space.

I am suddenly reminded of Dunsany's "Idle Days on the Yann" where the people of different religions pray at the same time so that no one god will have to listen to two prayers at once.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Huh. In my version of English, a chapel is a Christian place of worship within (or at least in association with) another institution--e.g., a chapel within a hospital. Duke University's church, which is quite sizable ("the world's only Methodist cathedral", I've heard it called) is "Duke Chapel".

[subnumine.livejournal.com]

Both of you are ringing changes on the original sense of chapel: a Christian place of worship which isn't the (officially sanctioned) parish church or cathedral.

Papersky is also experiencing time travel: in 1776, the Methodists were a variety of Anglican, so they had churches. So they still do - in the United States.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

If I remember correctly, a relatively small room set up for worship in the synagogue I went to when I was a kid (Beth Shalom in Wilmington, DE) was referred to as a chapel.

If the main room for worship (the one with the Torah scrolls and the eternal light) had a name, I don't remember it.

Now that I think about it, I can't swear that the smaller room didn't have an eternal light and a cabinet for Torah scrolls.

I think the chapel was used for overflow on the High Holy Days-- I assume most religions have peak load problems.

I have faint memories of it being used for something else in Hebrew school (not classes) but I can't quite remember what.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

Here I thought you were deriving "nemet" from Greek νέμος. But then, the Old Welsh might well have done just that, via Latin "nemus".

[subnumine.livejournal.com]

I think your ETA is more or less on target: Latin and Greek have several words for "place of worship", mostly distinguished by function or architecture: templum, aedes, ara, naos, nemus, taurobolion. Only "taurobolion" implies a particular religion or nationality, and that's because the Mithraeans are the only ones to have that particular function, of having a bull's blood pouring over the worshipper.

The Christians invented a new word, kyriake, the Lord's house, because they didn't think they were doing the same sort of thing as other people.

Anybody know Hindi?

praisgod barebones said:

[(Anonymous)]

In Turkey jamii seems to cover churches as well as mosques . I don't know about synagogues. (kilise exists for churches as well - presumably deriving from ecclesia)