The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville - Pot-pourri

i. Discipline and art (De disciplina et arte) 1. Adiscipline
(disciplina)takes its name from ‘learning’ (discere),
whence it can also be called ‘knowledge’ (scientia). Now
‘know’ (scire) isnamed from ‘learn’ (discere), because
none of us knows unless we have learned. A discipline
is so named in another way, because ‘the full thing is
learned’ (discitur plena). 2. Andan art (ars, gen.artis)
is so called because it consists of strict (artus) precepts
and rules. Others say this word is derived by the Greeks
from the word , that is, ‘virtue,’ as they termed
knowledge. 3. Plato and Aristotle would speak of this
distinction between an art and a discipline: an art consists
of matters that can turn out in different ways, while
adiscipline is concerned with things that have only one
possible outcome. Thus, when something is expounded
with true arguments, it will be a discipline; when something
merely resembling the truth and based on opinion
is treated, it will have the name of an art.
ii. The seven liberal disciplines (De septem liberalibus
disciplinis) 1. There are seven disciplines of the liberal
arts. The first is grammar, that is, skill in speaking. The
second is rhetoric, which, on account of the brilliance
and fluency of its eloquence, is considered most necessary
in public proceedings. The third is dialectic, otherwise
known as logic, which separates the true from the
false by very subtle argumentation. 2.Thefourth is arithmetic,
which contains the principles and classifications
of numbers. The fifth is music, which consists of poems
and songs. 3.The sixth is geometry, which encompasses
the measures and dimensions of the earth. The seventh
is astronomy, which covers the law of the stars.
iii. The common letters of the alphabet (De litteris
communibus) 1.Thecommon letters of the alphabet are
the primary elements of the art of grammar, and are used
by scribes and accountants. The teaching of these letters
is, as it were, the infancy of grammar, whence Varro
also calls this discipline ‘literacy’ (litteratio). Indeed, letters
are tokens of things, the signs of words, and they
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Book I
Grammar (De grammatica)
have so much force that the utterances of those who
are absent speak to us without a voice, [for they present
words through the eyes, not through the ears]. 2. The
use of letters was invented for the sake of remembering
things, which are bound by letters lest they slip away
into oblivion. With so great a variety of information, not
everything could be learned by hearing, nor retained in
the memory. 3. Letters(littera) aresocalled as if the
term were legitera, because they provide a road (iter)
for those who are reading (legere), or because they are
repeated (iterare)inreading.
4. TheLatinand Greek letters seem to be derived
from the Hebrew, for among the Hebrews the first letter
is called ‘aleph,’ and then ‘alpha’ was derived from it
by the Greeks due to its similar pronunciation, whence
A among Latin speakers. A transliterator fashioned the
letter of one language from the similar sound of another
language (i.e. derived the names and shapes of letters
of similar sound from the “earlier” language); hence we
can know that the Hebrew language is the mother of all
languages and letters. But the Hebrews use twenty-two
characters, following the twenty-two books of the Old
Testament; the Greeks use twenty-four. Latin speakers,
falling between these two languages, have twenty-three
characters. 5. Theletters of the Hebrews started with
the Law transmitted by Moses. Those of the Syrians and
Chaldeans began with Abraham, so that they agree in
the number of characters and in their sounds with the
Hebrew letters and differ only in their shapes. Queen Isis,
daughter of Inachus, devised the Egyptian letters when
she came from Greece into Egypt, and passed them on
to the Egyptians. Among the Egyptians, however, the
priests used some letters and the common people used
others. The priestly letters are known as (sacred),
the common letters, (common).
The Phoenicians first discovered the use of Greek letters,
whenceLucan (Civil War 3.220):
If the report is trustworthy, the Phoenicians were the
first to dare to indicate by rudimentary shapes a sound
meant to endure.