Nowruz is my favorite
holiday, because I really feel like celebrating the arrival of
spring, and I like how this has been celebrated for hundreds of years in Persian culture as well as by people of various cultural and religious backgrounds.
I want to address the etymology of NOWRUZ, which is a compound word.
Literally, its
original meaning may be something like "new day". That the element NOW- is related
to adjectives such as new, neu, Latin novus, Sanskrit nava-, etc., is easy
to recognize. -RUZ means "day" in Middle and Modern Persian. The
original meaning of the word, however, was "light". The term is derived from an Old Iranian word related to Avestan *RAOCAH-, "light", itself derived from Proto-Indo-European *LEUK-(l <-> r and k <-> c sound changes are common in Indo-European languages), and is related to Sanskrit RUCI- "light", Sanskrit LOKA- "world", Latin LUX, as well as English LIGHT and German LICHT.
The basic root Indo-European *LEUK- "shine", as to be found in Vedic
(Sanskrit) ROCATE (with the l having changed into r) "shines" or German LEUCHTEN "shine", is also there in Greek LEUKOS "white".
(Btw, I already talked about the root *LEUK- in an earlier post, in a different context.)
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