Grapho

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Oniw17, Dec 16, 2007.

  1. Oniw17 ascetic, sage, diogenes, bum? Valued Senior Member

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    Is Greek? Or what other language is it?
     
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  3. draqon Banned Banned

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    hebrew
     
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  5. USS Exeter unamerican american Registered Senior Member

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    The "ph" with the "f" sound makes me think it is Greek.
     
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  7. draqon Banned Banned

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    will it is Greek for sure...but I found origins in Hebrew as well
     
  8. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    If you're just asking about the root "-graph-", a component of many English words (including "graph" itself which is an abbreviation of "graphic formula"), it came through Latin from the Greek verb graphein, "to write." Recent English coinages like photograph and graphology took the root directly from Greek.

    In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest indivisible unit of a written language, analogous to a phoneme in spoken language. Graphemes include elements in a phonetic writing system such as letters or kana, ideograms such as Chinese han zi (kanji in Japanese) and Egyptian hieroglyphics, as well as punctuation marks and other typographic symbols.

    I'm frustrated trying to trace the etymology of graphein itself. Writing is a very new technology and the words needed to talk about it were coined, rather than inherited from the Stone Age. For example, the Latin word scribere seems to have originally meant "to scratch an outline," since it's related to the Greek word with that meaning, skariphasthai. Our word is native Anglo-Saxon writan for "to inscribe," from the original sense "to scratch or draw."

    Apparently the first words used to describe writing, in many cases, came from the idea that we were "drawing" words. Nonetheless I can't find the origin of Greek graphein, which yields one of the most common word-building components in Modern English.

    It's very unlikely that a word with a structure like graph could be of Hebrew origin. Ancient Hebrew has a very rigid phonetic structure which makes the consonant cluster GR virtually impossible to occur. You generally only see two consonants together when two words have been joined, such as Beth-Lehem, or in Modern Hebrew where the schwa has become a silent vowel.
     
    Last edited: Dec 17, 2007

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