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[[es:Pregunta: Con respecto a los tres grados de gloria, ¿qué significa la palabra "telestial"?]] | [[es:Pregunta: Con respecto a los tres grados de gloria, ¿qué significa la palabra "telestial"?]] | ||
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What does the word "telestial" mean, as used in Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon's vision (see D&C 76) of the post-mortal worlds?
Telestial is a neologism (a "new word") that was coined as part of the revelation of D&C 76. English allows and even encourages creation of neologisms richly all the time (see for instance Shakespeare). That's just the way the language works, and is one of the reasons English has become a lingua franca in our modern world.
Celestial and terrestrial are both derived from Latin. The word caelum means "sky, heaven"; turned into an adjective, that form becomes caelestis "heavenly"; and apparently that ending was extended with another Latin adjectival ending, -(i)alis, to get the form caelestialus. The Latin ending -us was dropped when the word was anglicized (and the ae diphthong was reduced), giving us "celestial."
Terrestrial underwent a similar evolution. Terra means "earth"; terrestris is the adjectival form, "of or relating to the earth"; and terrestrialus would be an extended adjectival form, with the -us ending being dropped in English, for terrestrial.
Telestial appears to have been formed by analogy to celestial. Working backwards, the hypothetical forms would be telestialus, then telestis. The -stial is thus an adjectival formation. The question then becomes what the root tele signifies.
There is of course no answer book we can open to find out for sure what was intended.
All we have at this point is guesswork to go by, but it is an interesting linguistic question.
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