A Brief Note
on the Etymology of the Word ‘Note’
André H. Roosma
16 Jan. 2012
We note and scribble a lot, these days.
At a piece of notepaper, in a notebook, electronically, or howsoever.
Did you know that the word ‘note’ – commonly assumed to be known in English since the 13th century – probably finds its origin in the
Middle-East, some millennia earlier?
This brief note discusses this word ‘note’ – both the
verb to note and the noun referring to the brief writing or the
musical note, including all related words, such as: notice, notation,
notepad, et cetera.
I will deal especially with its etymology – the origin of it.
More often already I have written at this website about the old Semitic
– the language which is in fact the Biblical Hebrew of the early parts
of the First Testament of the Bible and the common ancestor of most
Semitic languages.1 This language and its wonderful,
pictographic script are attested by archeological finds from the second
millennium before Christ.
In this language and script, in all likelihood there existed the word
   – nut, with u
pronounced as oo in good, or later as ow in low.
The signs of this are, from right to left:
- nun (noon): sprouting seed; fruit, offspring, ‘what comes forth from’;
- wawu (wawoo): tent pin, any pin with a sharp point;
- tav (tav or tau): (cross-)sign.
So, the meaning of this is: what comes forth from drawing signs (e.g. letters) with a hard, pointed pin (in stone or clay); in other words: a note; a (brief) piece of text / writing, or a small graphic.
In Arabic this word still exists: نوت - not - musical note,
and نوتة - nota - (text) note.
In the 13th century this word was adopted into
English; probably via Latin and French.2
| 1 |
More information on the old Biblical script, as referred
to here, in the Hallelu-YaH Draft Research Report:
‘The Written Language of Abraham,
Moses and David – A study of the pictographic roots and basic notions
in the underlying fabric of the earliest Biblical script’  , a living document by
André H. Roosma, 1st English version: 18 April
2011 (1st Dutch original:
January 2011). |
| 2 |
It is probably due to ignorance with regard to the
early Semitic, or to Greek/western dominance thinking, that most etymological
dictionaries (see several examples in the Online Etymology Dictionary by Douglas
Harper, 2001-2011) do not go any further back than to derived Latin
variants such as nota, notare, noto and notus.
It seems that the roots of English are rather sought in Greek and Latin,
than in a much older and more ‘basic’ language such as the
(Biblical) early Semitic... |
|
