During college the power of word roots proved itself again and again. Raymond Williams' book, Keywords (middle 1970s) made a big impression, as did an article by the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner in studying ritual process and language. Turning to 'Holy' there are overlapping semantic fields and historical intersections with holy, whole, hale, heal, healthy, hallowed. In other words bodily health (or departure from same) has something to do with wholeness and holiness. There is a mind-body connection that many have seen with their own eyes.
Taking a same word-root approach to righteousness, there is another string of words that shade from one into the other as they cross adjacent fields of meaning. The words true (as in truth; also as in straight line or in-tune), right, just, good, fair, and beautiful form a chain of meanings that touch on lexical terrain of geometrical angle, justice, aesthetics, morals, and godliness. So, at least in the case of English there is a chain that connects these foundations of human value and aspiration.
It would be instructive to compare near neighboring languages of Dutch, French, but also Latin, Greek, Persian, Hindi; then jump to languages far from the Indo-European families such as Chinese, Indonesian, Korean, or a Polynesian, Australonesian, or Bantu set of terms.
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