A word about “letters”

From the origins of the word “alphabet” and the use of some Greek letter names in modern English, let us now turn our attention to the origin of the word “letter.”

This word comes from the Latin word “litera,” which is the source of many other English words as well.  Those of us devoted to eradicating “illiteracy” are devoted to ensuring that no one remains unlettered, i.e., unable to read.  We may hope, further, that the “literate” person (a reader, and hence, more generally, one who is educated) may choose to read “literature,” letters or writing of high quality.

Ironically, while knowing the letters in these senses is associated with education (from ex + ducere, to lead out of) and erudition (from ex + rudis, to lead away from roughness or rudeness), we also use this idea to refer to an understanding of a text or situation that is fundamentally incomplete.  For example, we want our literate students to be more than “literal” thinkers and to comprehend figurative speech and related nuance beyond the strict meaning of the words on the page.  Also, we are rightly skeptical of the civic-mindedness of those of us who rigorously adhere to the letter of the law when such adherence clearly violates the law’s spirit, or intended purposes.

When we find such legalistic wrangling, we may well want to obliterate it.  The word “obliterate” literally means to write over letters, that is, to remove them by smearing them off the parchment.  Because parchment was so valuable in the pre-industrial world, old manuscripts were often turned into palimpsests (one of my favorite words of all time), documents in which an original writing has been scraped off or removed, often incompletely, and on which a new text is written.  Sometimes great discoveries are made when the original text of a palimpsest is finally revealed.  For instance, a number of important works by Archimedes, a great mathematician who lived in Sicily in the 3rd century B.C.E, have been discovered underneath a Christian prayer book written over 13 centuries after his death.  The works of Archimedes in this palimpsest include some examples of solutions to problems that were deemed insoluble until the formal development of calculus some 17 centuries after Archimedes’ death.  (For more information, visit:  www.archimedespalimpsest.org.)

The Greek word for letters, “gramma,” is also the source of several English words, including “grammar,” “grammatical,” and “grammarian,” all now referring to the study of the proper usage of words in sentences.  The Greek stem “gram,” meaning letters or writing, also appears in a number of words such as “telegram,” “cardiogram,” “diagram,”  “program,” and that favorite of reading teachers, the “phonogram.”  The measurement unit “gram,” also is derived from “gramma,” whose meaning was extended over time to refer to a small weight.

More weighty matters next week.

More words from Greek letter names

The last post covered the etymology of the word “alphabet,” which comes from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.  A couple of other English words are also derived from the names of Greek letters.  “Jot,” meaning to write down quickly and briefly, comes from the name for the smallest Greek letter, iota.  (More on the relationship between the letters “i” and “j” in a later entry.)  The original meaning of “jot” is something insignificant.  This is the meaning found in the passage from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, (5:18), “For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. “  The word “tittle,” by the way, is the name for the dot used over the letter “i,” and also refers to a small, insignificant thing. 

The word “gamut,” meaning the full range of a thing, comes from a contraction of the words, “gamma ut.”  “Gamma,” is name of a Greek letter, which in medieval times was appropriated to refer to the note below A in the medieval scale.  (The ancient Greeks themselves used their letters to refer not only to the sounds of the language, but as symbols for musical notes as well as for numbers.)   “Ut,” was the name for the first tone of the scale, and was taken from the accented syllables of a hymn (in Latin) to St. John. Whereas the term “alphabet” employs the names of the first to letters to refer to the entire sequence of letters, the term “gamma ut” or “gamut” uses the first and the last notes on the scale to refer to the whole scale.  The modern meaning of the word is a metaphorical extension of this original meaning.

Two other Greek letter names deserve mention:  omicron and omega.  The Greeks used two forms of the letter o, a “small” or short-sound, o-mikron, literally o-small, and a large or long-sound, o-mega, literally o-large.