[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

Basileus is not the original Greek word for king. The original word was "Anax," which while losing the status of a title, is still present in the Greek language and appears in such places as personal names.

The reasons why anax faded into dusty obscurity and basileus came to the fore are, at this far removed, lost to us. I've read speculation that "anax" had more of a sacerdotal association and "basileus", as it ultimately developed, was more secular in nature. There are also implications of what we could consider a feudal hierarchy at play where the anax was the high king and the basileus were autonomous rulers loosely subject to the anax. This is the political system at play in The Iliad. When the Bronze Age collapse occurred, there was no longer an anax but a host of petty basileus’ and that title came to dominate because it was so common.

But that is exactly what concerns us - if what you are saying is true, anax was out of the game a thousand years before the word had the chance to spread around Europe with the Roman Empire. I know that by the time of 1-3rd century, "basileus" was the common term in Greek, and - perhaps most importantly for its spread in subsequent centuries and potential use in the Middle Ages - it was used in the New Testament. That still does not say anything about whether or how it would get to the Western part of the Empire, but like I said - I think that if it was used in the Middle Ages, it could have been used as a "fancy extra title", using a "foreign word" in your list, perhaps in some "international" diplomatic meetings or somesuch.

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

Of course, this is very much not the case in German as the word for emperor is “Kaiser” coming straight from “Caesar.” Same thing in Russian with “tsar.” I’d be interested to know if there is a similar practice in other Eastern European languages.

Czech has "císař" as the word for "emperor", which is obviously derived from "Caesar" (and I think it is both influenced by Kaiser, as the Germans are immediate neighbours, but likely also some direct knowledge about Caesar). I would personally actually be interested in what do the Southern, Balkan Slavs have, because they would have been directly in contact with the Byzantium (or actually part of it), so I wonder whether their word for Emperor may be similar to Basileus rather than to Caesar/Kaiser/what-have-you.

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

The other royal persona (avgusteyshaya osoba ) that left quite a mark on European language development is Charlemagne, who I believe is credited with seeding his name all over Europe's languages (mostly in the form of Karl). In Russian it appears as korol, and means "king", same as "tsar", but is applied to non-Russian (perhaps even non-Slavic? not sure) kings. I know the word also appears in Western Slavic languages, but I will leave it to Legate maybe to talk on their behalf, he would do it much better than I.

In Czech (and Polish, Slovak etc.) there is the word král (król, etc.) which means "king" and it comes exactly from Karl (i.e. Charlemagne). So yes (and I assume that's how it travelled to Russian too).

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

But coming back to Farmer Giles with a question: wouldn't the root of baselius still echoed in Latin in some form, since it's via Latin that it gives words like basilisk to modern languages? Or am I getting the order of things wrong?

Basilisk specifically is a literal borrowing of a word, but yes, of course there are all these Greek-words-turned-Latin-and-later-(French-and-later-English-or-whichever-other-languages), but I think what others were trying to say was that Basileus, of all things, did not get actually transferred as is into wide use; however, it is true that there is for example the word basilica which definitely WAS used in Latin and DOES come from the same root (it was originally an adjective, meaning "royal", and later became stand-alone noun). So, I guess there is something.

Anyways, I hope to post soon something more about the progress of the story itself