Daemon versus Demon

Curis from Ninjabread gives a lesson on Daemonology or is that Demonology...

The Changeling was sculpted several years back, and was only released this Summer with the plastic Wave 2 Daemons for marketing reasons. However, he did feature in both the Daemon books for Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000 - released way way back in the May of 2008, and has been a playable character for some twenty-seven months with no official model. However, as he could adopt any form a lot of players used any other model they saw fit - a lot like back in 1996 when Warhammer 40K's second edition Chaos Codex said Daemon Princes could take any form. Cue scores of players claiming their coke can, Homer Simpson toy or polystyrene offcut was a Daemon Prince.

Wish I could teach this history in schools.

On a tangent, have you ever wondered what the difference is between "Daemon" and "Demon"? Both spellings crop up in Games Workshop lore - why? Well my good friend Shiny Happy Turpin put this question to our Lord and Saviour Jervus at Games Day. He gave a three-sentence answer, which I've elaborated into a small essay using my bookshelf full of Latin reference books . (I suspect this is how his Standard Bearer column is written too.)

The Greeks believed in divine supernatural being called δαίμονες - which transliterates straight into the English alphabet as daimones. Oops, that gives us neither spelling. Well, the term δαίμον was imported into Latin as daemon, and only really crops up with real frequency in later Latin authors like the Venerable Bede and T. Maccius Plautus (though Pliny the Elder used it once). I digress...

Δαίμον becomes daemon in Latin because the αί characters are what we linguists call a diphthong, or gliding vowel - formed by two adjacent vowels. The sound αί made in Greek was identical to ae in Latin - both cases it's two letter representing one sound. So in time ae, being one sound, became represented with just one letter - æ. With this we develop English words like dæmon, mediæval and archæology.

Wind forward the clock some more, and printing presses and typewriters come along and this super-rare æ character causes problems. It's fairly uncommon (unless you published lots of articles on mediæval dæmon archæology) and so it finds itself dropped, and sometimes it switches back to the component a and e (like archaeology), and sometimes just the e (medieval). Generally people prefer just the e as it's simpler, and the more modern a language gets the simpler it gets. But people use ae when they want to conjure up an olde worlde atmosphere. Both are equally valid spelling and pronounced the same.

So this brings us to the modern day, where a fledgling young Games Workshop in its formative years sometimes use the modern spelling demon in some places, and daemon in others. It's a time when the left hand of the company doesn't really know what the right hand is doing, and parts of it are licensing their artwork to hair metal bands, and others are painting minotaurs with replicas of Mona Lisa. Only as time goes on and the Games Workshop setting and mythos crystallises they decide to stick to what things were called in the past. So the Golden Demon is spelt one way, and Warhammer Armies: Daemons of Chaos the other. It's just a case of tradition.

Here endeth the Ninjabread lesson.

- Curis from Ninjabread in Project Change XXX - The Changeling