Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ KTB_1 ‘to write; book; to prescribe, determine; to subscribe’ ↗kataba
▪ KTB_2 ‘(esp. Qur’anic) school’ ↗kuttāb
▪ KTB_3 ‘squadron’ (from ClassAr ^†‘to bring together, bind, draw together’) ↗katībaẗ
▪ KTB_4 ‘…’ ↗…

♦ Semantic value spectrum in ClassAr (acc. to BAH2008): ‘to gather together, layers of material; to put letters together (i.e. to write), to write down, book, letter, record; army regiment; to ordain, prescribed, decreed, to impose, to contract; a set amount’

conc

As Kerr2014 rightly states, »writing is a relatively new phenomenon in human history. Its first beginnings hearken back to S Mesopotamia of the fourth millennium BC, and then somewhat later in Egypt. Our own alphabet developed under Egyptian influence and its origins are to be found among Sem miners in the Sinai during the first half of the second millennium BC. Consequently, the original meaning of this root cannot logically have been ‘to write’.« Rather, the ComSem √KTB seems to have carried a meaning like *‘to prick, cut’ (Huehnergard2011: WSem *√KTB ‘to prick, cut; later, to write’) or *‘to draw together, bring together, conjoin’, preserved in several ClassAr derivations as well as in MSA katībaẗ [v3]. This KTB is possibly based on a biconsonantal root *KT ‘to be/make tight, tie together, conjoin’ etc. or (Bohas) an etymon {b,k}. Whether the notion of ‘writing’ [v1] is derived from this *KTB, and if so, how, is still not clear (but cf. suggestions in DISC, below). In any case, it seems to be a NWSem innovation which later was borrowed into Ar and SSem. If it is not a development from ‘to draw, bind together’, one can think of Akk takāpu ‘to pierce, puncture, stich; to cover with dots, spots’ as its most likely ancestor. – [v2] ‘school’ is traditionally seen to be derived from [v1] ‘to write’, as a transfer from the pl. of the PA I (‘the writing ones’) to the place where pupils sit and are tought how to write. But this seems doubtful and a derivation from ‘to draw, bind together’ (as in the case of katībaẗ) should not be excluded beforehand.

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▪ For v1 ↗kataba
▪ For v3 ↗katībaẗ

disc

▪ Nöldeke1905¹ thought that “KTB ist ursprünglich wohl ‘stechen’, daher [v1] ‘einritzen, schreiben’ (wie [Gr] gráphein); Syr maḵtəbā ‘Pfriem’ (noch heute im Ṭūr ʕAbdīn üblich, Priem-Socin 132). Von ‘Stechen’ kommt man zum [v3] ‘Nähen’; daher das maghrebinische maktūb ‘Tasche’ (s. Dozy).”
▪ In a similar vein, Huehnergard2011 thinks the meaning of *KTB, which he classifies as a WSem root, was ‘to prick, cut’, and from there [v1] ‘to write’.
▪ [v3] Fleischer1927² argues that a comparison of the roots KTː (KTT), KṮː (KṮṮ), KTB, KṮB, KTF, KṮF, KTM, KṮM, etc. unquestionably suggests, for the biconsonantal base KTː, KṮː, a basic meaning of ‘dicht sein und machen, anschließen, verbinden, zusammenhalten, zusammenbringen usw.’
▪ [v3] Bohas2012: ‘nouer et serrer fortement avec une ficelle ou une courroie l’orifice de l’outre; boucler une femelle, c.-à-d. lui mettre une boucle sur le derrière pour l’empêcher de recevoir le mâle’: from etymon {b,k}.
▪ On the question how [v1] ‘to write’ may have developed from [v3] ‘to draw together, bring together, conjoin’—Jeffery1938 mentions that already Buhl tried to connect the two values³ —, Rolland2014 suggests that it was »[p]robablement par un glissement de sens comparable à celui que nous avons relevé plus haut pour le latin lego et le grec λεγω [legô]. / Hasardons une explication: l’acte d’écrire se caractérise par le fait qu’il consiste à relier des lettres les unes aux autres, des mots les uns aux autres, des phrases les unes aux autres, pour constituer un texte, c’est-à-dire, littéralement, un tissu. Lorsque, plus tard, viendra le moment de relier les uns aux autres des feuillets écrits, on voit que la langue arabe aura deux bonnes raisons de recourir à la racine K-T-B pour désigner cette activité.«⁴
▪ However, it may be simpler to think of a book or another piece of writing as a ‘record’ in which the writer ‘(re-) collects’ information, thoughts etc. or where these are ‘brought/sewn together’.
▪ The problem poses itself differently, and can perhaps be solved in an easier (and more convincing?) way if we assume, with Nöldeke1905 and Huehnergard2011, that the original meaning of the root is ‘to prick, cut’ (for which we would also have to compare, with metathesis, Akk takāpu ‘to pierce, puncture, stich; to cover with dots, spots’). Should this be true then both [v1] ‘to write’ and [v3] ‘to sew (together)’ could be seen as developed from there, the first as ‘to prick’ > ‘to carve (signs into stone, wood, etc.)’ > ‘to write’; the second as ‘to prick’ > ‘to perforate (leather, textiles, etc.)’ > ‘to sew’ > ‘to sew together’ (whence, on yet another level, ‘to bind together, conjoin’ > ‘squadron’).

1. ZDMG 59 (1905): 419, fn. 1. 2. In J. Grill, “Ueber das Verhältniss der indogermanischen und der semitischen Sprachwurzeln”, ZDMG 27 (1873): 427, fn. 1. 3. Jeffery1938: 249, fn. 1, however, does not give a reference to Buhl but to Fleischer in ZDMG, xxvii, 427, n., adding that »[F]rom this [s.c. ‘to draw together, bring together, conjoin’] we have katībaẗ ‘squadron’.« 4. J.C.R., “Hypothèses sur l’étymologie de l’arabe كتيبة katība ”, article s’inspirant d’une intervention faite au cours de la séance de la SELEFA le 20 mars 2014.

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