The Roots of Some Bookish Words

There are three main words in English that refer to books, one from the Greek, one from Latin, and one from old English.  All have their roots, as it were, in trees.

The Greek root “byblos,” (book, writing) literally referred to the Egyptian paper, made from the inner bark of the papyrus plant, that was used in ancient books.  The great source for this paper was the Phoenician (remember the Phoenicians?) city of Bublos or Byblos, a name which the Greeks appropriated to refer to paper and to books themselves.  This word appeared in English as “bible,” which originally mean any book, and then, of course, The Book.  The Greek root also appears as “biblio-” in “bibliography” and “bibliophile.”  Papyrus, the name of the Egyptian reed from which these byblos were made, is the source of our word “paper,” although by the 12th century most paper in Europe was made from rags rather than from the papyrus plant.

The Latin root “liber” (book) originally meant the inner bark of a tree, but eventually came to be used to refer to a sheet of papyrus used for writing.  Eventually the meaning of the word was extended to a long document and a section of a longer work, such as a book of the Bible or a book of the Aeneid.  From this root we get our word “library” and “librarian,” and through the Italian, “libretto.”  The word “libellus” was a diminutive form of the word “liber,” and meant “little book.”  In Elizabethan England, “libels,” or little books or pamphlets often contained personal political attacks, and eventually the word came to refer not to these little books themselves, but to their defamatory content. 

And the English word “book” has its origins in the old English word “boc,” a name for the beech tree, and extended in meaning to refer to an inscription made on a beechwood tablet.  Although “boc” was replaced by “bece” and eventually the modern “beech” as a term for the tree, the old meaning is still evident in the term “buckwheat,” which means literally “beech wheat,” because the buckwheat plant has seeds that resemble beechnuts.

I’ll have some more connections with these roots next week. 

Cursive, capital, font

Some words used to describe the appearance or style of writing have interesting etymologies.

The term “cursive,” comes from the Latin root curr/curs, meaning to run or flow.  Technically, the term refers to anyone style of handwriting that “flows,” i.e., provides for joins between the letters that allow the writer to form his letters rapidly.  The word is related to such disparate words as: current, cursory, incur, occur, precursor, succor, course, corridor, corsair, and discourse.

The word “capital,” as in the phrase, “capital letter,” comes from the Latin root “capit,” meaning “head.”  In Roman times the term was applied to the style of writing that was used when carving inscriptions into the capitals (tops or “heads”) of columns.  We now use the term to refer to a specific set of large letters used at the beginnings of sentences and of proper nouns, but the Romans did not make the same sort of distinction.  Capital letters for them consisted of the formal style of lettering used when carving in stone, as opposed to a freer, more informal style used when writing with a reed pen or on a wax tablet.  These two different styles were also refered to as “majuscules” and “miniscules.”  The modern combination of the two didn’t occur until the Renaissance and the development of an exceptionally beautiful cursive that the Italians referred to as “cancellaresca,” but we now refer to as “italic,” in honor of the country in which the form was developed.  You can see an example of this script in a letter of the humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam, displayed at: http://www.unigre.it/pubblicazioni/lasala/WEB/T_APP3_E.HTM.

There is a dizzying array of words from the root “capit,” including: achieve, chattel, cattle, chaplain, chapel, a capella, cape, chaperone, and escape.  More about the relationship among these words in a later post.

The terms “upper case” and “lower case,” as synomyms of majuscule and miniscule did not occur until after the development of Gutenburg’s printing press.  The terms refer to the location of each style in the printer’s box of metal type.

The term “font” also owes its origins to the printing press.  This word comes from the Latin “fundere,” meaning to pour forth.  The term refers to the casting involved in creating metal type.

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.

Where does the word “alphabet” come from?

Not long ago the world was entertained by the discovery that Senator and Presidential candidate Barack Obama and Vice President Dick Cheney were distant cousins.  The reason the national press cared to report this bit of frippery was certainly the delicious surprise of finding that two politicians with diametrically opposed views were in fact linked in some fundamental, antecedent way.   How could two such different individuals have emerged from the same root?  What different journeys did the descendants of their common ancestor take to produce such different people?

The interest in the Obama/Cheyney connections exemplifies one of the great joys of our mental lives: seeing connections among things we had previously considered separate and wholly distinct.  As a reading teacher and an avowed antiquarian, I myself have long been fascinated in particular with the origins of words and how these origins reveal countless surprising and interesting connections.  To find such interesting origins and connections, moreover, one does not have to restrict oneself to merely fanciful and unusual words like “pantaloon” or “gobbledygook.”  Strange and rare connections exist among our most quotidian and ordinary words.  Why does the word “one” have a /w/ sound but no “w,” whereas the word “two” has a “w” but no /w/ sound?  What does electricity have to do with amber and the ancient Asian city of Magnesia?  What is the connection between capital letters and the word “escape?”

Thus, in the interests of exercising this delight in surprising connections,  I will be offering ta  series of etymological trivia (“trivia” from Latin, “tri” meaning three and “via” meaning road, referring to the gossip that is frequently exchanged among travelers at crossroads)  about the meandering journeys that the common words in our classrooms have taken and the engaging connections among them that have developed along the way.

It seems sensible to start with the etymology of my company name, abecedarian.  It is, in fact, a real word.  It is constructed out of the letter names “a,” “b,” “c,” and “d” plus the suffix “-arian,” as in “librarian,” or “humanitarian.”  It means a person interested in teaching or learning the alphabet, or, more generally, a person interested in the basics or rudiments of a subjects, or, also, a person who is just beginning to learn something.

Clearly, there can be no abecedarians without the alphabet.  Nor is there anything else quite as central to our elementary classrooms as the alphabet.  I myself can still remember the alphabet charts in imposing Palmer Script (more on Palmer Script later) that ran across the blackboards of elementary classrooms I attended.

As many of you may already know, the word “alphabet” comes from the words for the the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha (α) and beta (β). These two words were combined to refer to the entire sequence of letters, just as we use the phrase, “the ABC’s,” to refer to the entire set of 26 letters used to write English.  

The names of the Greek letters, as well as the letters themselves, were not invented by the Greeks.   Rather, at some time during the ninth or eighth centuries B.C.E.,  the Greeks began to appropriate the set of letters used by the Phoenicians, a sea-faring people who lived in the territory occupied today by Syria and Lebanon.  The Phoenicians traded widely and established many colonies throughout the Mediterranean.

 The Greek letter names “alpha” and “beta” are derived from the names for the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, namely, “aleph” and “beyt.” The Greek letter names have no meaning in Greek other than as letter names, and there is no special relationship between the shape of the letter and the sound it represents.  The same relationship, or lack of relationship among letter shape, letter name, and letter sound, characterizes the English alphabet as well.  The Phoenician alphabet, however, is different in this regard.  Each letter in this alphabet is a stylized rendering of a common object.  The name of the letter is the name of the object that the letter represents, and the sound that the letter represents is the first sound of its name.  For example, the letter “aleph,” is a stylized rendering of an ox; the word “aleph,” means ox in Phoenician; and the sound represented by the letter is the rough breathing sound that begins the Phoenician word “aleph.”   Likewise, the letter “beyt” is a stylized sketch of a house and the word “beyt,” means house in Phoenician and represents the /b/ sound that begins the word “beyt.” 

The Phoenicians themselves did not invent their alphabet, but adapted an earlier Semitic set of picture-letters developed around 2000 B.C.E  that was itself created by appropriating certain elements of the Egyptian writing system, which we know of as hieroglyphics (from the Greek word “hierogluphikos,” a combination of “hieros,” or holy, and “gluphe,” or carving).   Hieroglyphics themselves, invented around 3000 B.C.E. , were an elaborate set of pictures that represented either particular words or certain consonant sounds. What these Semitic borrowers did was to appropriate about two dozen of these stylized Egyptian pictures and applied to them the words from their own language, similar in meaning to the Egyptian words, but completely different in pronunciation since they were from a different language.  Unlike the Egyptian writing system, this new system had symbols that represented only sounds of the language, and not whole words and concepts.  Hence the alphabet was born, and was passed on to a variety of Semitic tribes, included the Phoenicians.  Over the thousand or so years between the alphabet’s invention and the time the Greeks appropriated the Phoenician alphabet, the stylized pictures became more abstract and less representational, clearly assuming shapes that we would identify as letters as opposed to pictures.

The alphabet we use today to write English is directly descended from this early alphabet, via the Phoenicians and the Greeks.  The Greeks brought it via trade and colonization to Italy around 700 B.C.E. , where a mysterious Italian tribe called the Etruscans modified the Greek letters and applied to them the sounds of their own language, dropping some of the Greek letters that they didn’t need.   By around 600 B.C.E., a small but growing Italian tribe, the Romans, adopted the alphabet for their language, Latin.  This tribe grew into the Roman Empire.  During the last centuries of the Roman Empire, Rome also became the home of Christianity and Latin thus became the language of the Church.   Around 600 C.E., Christian missionaries brought the Roman alphabet with them to Great Britain, where three Germanic tribes, the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, had, over the last couple of centuries since the departures of the last remnants of the Roman Empire gained control of much of the island.  These tribes of what was becoming known as Angleland (our modern “England”) spoke a Germanic dialect that was the ancestor of modern English.  They seem to have brought with them from the Continent their own set of letters known as “runes.”  This angular writing was well-suited for carving in wood, which was the most common writing material of northern Europe, and may have been derived from the Etruscan alphabet several centuries earlier.  However, the 23-letter Roman alphabet (the Romans did not have the letters “j”, “u” or “w”—more on how these letters entered our alphabet in a later entry) brought to England by Christian missionaries soon supplanted the runic alphabet as the medium for writing down English. Because the proto-English spoken at this time had several sounds not represented by the Roman alphabet, early English scribes added 4 additional characters, eth, thorn, yogh, and wynn, which remained in the writing system for several hundred years before being eliminated or replaced in the late middle ages.

In my next post, I’ll write about some other interesting letter names as well as the word “letters.” 

Images of the Phoenician, Greek, Etruscan, and Old English alphabets can be found on the Omniglot website at the addresses below:

 

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/phoenician.htm

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/greek.htm

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/etruscan.htm

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm