So, I was reading this article about Dr. Stephanie Frampton at MIT regarding classical book collections:
Which contained, among other interesting tidbits:
Does anyone else have any information on this bizarre etymological mystery?
Taking a new look at ancient books
In profile: MIT Literature Associate Professor Stephanie Frampton studies the material culture of ancient writing.
news.mit.edu
Which contained, among other interesting tidbits:
No way, I thought. That's got to be a folk etymology. And yet, when I googled it, here's what Wiktionary had to say:In Latin the word “elementa” means both atoms and letters, and likely comes from the alphabet’s “L,M,N” sequence.
Interesting, certainly (even if it still strikes me as rather bit far-fetched). But then it continued:Of uncertain origin. Perhaps ultimately from L M N, first three letters of the second half of the Canaanite alphabet, recited by ancient scribes when learning it (in sense compare English ABC(s) (“fundamentals”)). This idea has been criticized though due to the absence of any evidence for use of a half-split in the Latin alphabet itself and the lack of evidence for the use of "el", "em", and "en" as letter names in early Latin. An alternative related idea is that elementum was borrowed into Latin from a Semitic term (probably via Egyptian) halaḥama, which derives from the old South Semitic initial character sequence, h-l-ḥ-m..., though this presents some difficulties as well.
Huh? I'm confused. Why would someone model a neologism for "letter" on the word for "nourishment"? What have the two got to do with one another? I've read this paragraph five times at least and still can't figure out what they're talking about.Alternatively could be a neologism to translate the equivalent Greek term στοιχεῖον (stoikheîon, “element, letter”)(introduced in the sense of "element" by Plato), which, like the Latin elementum, has the dual meaning of "element" and "letter". This neologism would be modelled on and alluding to alimentum (“nourishment”), modified to be a mnemonic for the sequence of letters "L M N"; this would make it related to alere (“to nourish”), olēscere (“to grow”), both from Proto-Indo-European*h₂el-.[1]
Does anyone else have any information on this bizarre etymological mystery?