▪ Not from Ar
ḫāriṭaẗ ~
ḫarīṭaẗ, but perh. from the main source is Engl
card : »(e
C15) ‘a playing card’, from oFr
carte (
C14), from mLat
carta/
charta ‘a card, paper; a writing, a charter’, from Lat
charta ‘leaf of paper, a writing, tablet’, from Grk
χártēs ‘layer of papyrus’, which is prob. from Eg (see below). The form has been influenced by It cognate
carta ‘paper, leaf of paper’. Compare
chart (n.). The shift in Engl from
-t to
-d is unexplained« –
EtymOnline.
▪ Cf. also Fr
chartre, from ClassLat
chartula ‘petit écrit’, en LLat et mLat ‘acte, document’, from ClassLat
charta ‘feuille de papyrus préparée pour recevoir l’écriture’, d’où ‘écrit’ et ‘lettre’, spécialement en LLat (pl.) ‘écrits, actes authentiques; pièces d’archives’; en mLat ‘acte dispositif’ –
CNRTL.
▪ Grk (
χártē <)
χártēs is, in its turn, quite likely to be a borrowing. Beekes and others (EtymOnline, Kluge, etc.) assume that the donor must have been Eg; but, apparently, there is no semantically or phonologically obvious Eg etymon. The only candidates in
TLA that could come close to Grk
χártēs are the divine epitheton Eg
ḥr.jt-wʾḏ=s ‘the one (goddess) who is on her papyrus column’ and
sḫr.t ‘bundle of papyrus rolls, scroll’. The former is semantically prob. too specialised to pass as a serious candidate for the etymon of Grk
χártēs; the latter could fit with regard to the semantics, but we would have to assume a metathesis Eg
sḫr.t [> *
ḫrts] > Grk
χártēs. So, is it perh. from a Sem language (Phoen?, as Rolland2014 asks)? This would be similar to the view, put forward by ClassAr sources, that
ḫarīṭaẗ is a quasi-PP I from ¹
ḫaraṭa, i.e., the *‘(container made from) scrapped off (skin, i.e., leather)’.
▪ ...