Bibliotheca Polyglotta

The traditional explanation as a figurative use of the pl. of the PA of ↗kataba —‘writing ones, writers’ > ‘place where people/pupils who write are to be found, school’—cannot be accepted without some hesitation. On the other side, the nominal pattern FuʕʕāL for a n. in the sg. is rare and would be difficult to explain.

hist

lC8 Ḫalīl b. ʔAḥmad, K. al-ʕAyn : maǧmaʕ ṣibyān al-muʕallim, cf. also Asās 386 b 17f.; Ibn Saʕd III 2, 103, 7.9; Buḫ. IV 326, 1; etc. (WKAS).

cogn

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disc

▪ Lane summarizes the Class lexicographers’ opinions as follows: »‘school, place where the art of writing is taught’; accord. to Mbr and F, the assigning this signification to the latter word is an error; it being a pl. of kātib and signifying, accord. to Mbr, the ‘boys of a school’: in the A it is said, this word is said to signify the boys, not the place: but al-Šihāb says, in the Šarḥ al-šifa, that it occurs in this sense in the classical language, and is not to be regarded as a postclassical word: it is said to be originally a pl. of kātib, and to be fig[uratively] employed to signify a ‘school’.«
▪ This explanation seems to be doubtful. But to regard the word as a genuine sg. of the FuʕʕāL type is not much more convincing either since the pattern is very rare and, alongside with kuttāb, there exists, with almost identical meaning, the n.loc. maktab. A plausible explanation would have to account for this parallelism and the choice of the FuʕʕāL pattern. In any case, if the traditional etymology should not be true, then one could think of a derivation, like that of katībaẗ, from kataba in the sense, now extinct, of ‘to draw together, bind together’ (similar to ǧāmiʕaẗ, lit. ‘the uniting one’, for ‘university’), see ↗katībaẗ.

west

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deriv

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