In this ancient Roman wall painting (retouched) from first-century Pompeii (77 CE) a serious young business couple (just married?) look out at us in a most modern mode. The woman holds a stylus to her chin, much as we might a pen or pencil. In her hand is a folding tabula or wax tablet with the day’s accounts perhaps summarized. Beside her, her husband holds a scroll. At the top of his scroll we may see the origin of the phrase ‘red tape.’ They are not slaves. He wears a summer toga. Her hair style is that of an upper-class Roman matron of the first century CE.
Tabula Rasa: A Useful Latin Phrase Tabula rasa or blank slate — no, not a brain scan of Sarah Palin, it’s a neat Latin phrase worth knowing. The literal Latin meaning of tabula rasa is ‘scraped tablet.’ It was the small wooden board coated on one side with wax upon which Roman school children incised their letters learning how to write. Pupils used a stylus to imprint the letters. A stylus was a pen-like piece of metal with a point on the end. Modest heat and new wax could return the tabula to pristine condition. It was NOT made of scratched-on slate, as some erroneous online “experts” proclaim. How would one quickly remove scratches from slate in a classroom? Stultus est ita magister digitalis ‘such an online teacher is a fool.’
Rasa is a passive past participle of the verb radere ‘to erase, to scrape away, to shave off’ used as a postpositive adjective agreeing in gender and number with the feminine noun tabula. English is very familiar with an agent noun derived from the same verb, namely, razor ‘thing that scrapes away a beard or cuts hair.’ The word came into England and into English with the Norman Conquest after 1066 CE. Its Anglo-Norman form was rasur, its Old French, Middle French and modern French forms include rasoir, all from a Late Latin root word rasorium. When the tabula was full of letters, its incised wax was scraped free of those letters, and the Roman pupil was then ready to refill it with her or his Latin alphabet lessons. Eventually new wax had to be applied. Tabula rasa’s developed meaning is ‘blank slate’ or ‘clean slate,’ referring to the human mind before receiving knowledge through experience, through reaction of the senses to the external world of objects. Source of the Latin Phrase The Latin term tabula rasa is a calque or loan-translation of a Greek phrase found in Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul, usually referred to by its Latin title de Anima. In Greek, the Aristotelian title is περὶ ψυχῆς ‘peri psuches,’ a philosophical inquiry about the different kinds of souls possessed by living creatures, including, of course, humankind. Aristotle’s phrase is pinakis agraphos literally ‘tablet not written on.’ Aristotle suggests that a newborn babe’s mind is as blank as a clean slate. Only earthly sense experiences will influence how the child becomes a human being — quite different from Plato’s concept of pre-formed, pre-filled, idea-laden souls up in heaven waiting to flutter down to earth and enter human bodies. As is frequently the case, Aristotle’s intuitions about human nature and about the world were far more scientific than the vague and eo-fascist meanderings of Plato.
More Borrowing of the Latin Tabula In Latin, the earliest meaning of tabula is ‘wooden plank,’ then it meant the thing made up of boards or planks, namely, a wooden table. Now the word tabula is diminutive in form but its ultimate etymon (*tab?) is unknown. Most etymologists have dismissed any connection of tabula with Latin tabes ‘decay, rot, wasting away.’ Into German The modern German word for table is Tafel. It pops up occasionally in English texts in typically Germanic compound words like Tafelwein ‘plonk,’ ‘cheap wine’ literally in German ‘table wine,’ similar to the French phrase vin de table. While tabula kept its pristine Latin form, the German Tafel shows a second borrowing where a Vulgar Latin intervocalic /b/ underwent a familiar lenition to /v/ and then to /f/. Lenition Defined In phonology, the scientific study of speech sounds, lenition is a softening of articulation. When a bold /b/-sound is spoken more softly a lighter /v/-sound may result. Lenis is a Latin word meaning ‘soft.’ Lenis ‘soft’ and fortis ‘strong’ are Latin adjectives used as technical terms in phonology. Tafelmusik ‘table music’ is a term from German musical history. From the mid-16th century to the late 18th century it named light music played as background at feasts and banquets, sometimes while diners were eating, sometimes accompanied by a male choir. Major composers of Tafelmusik include George Philipp Telemann, Michael Praetorius, Carl Friedrich Zelter and Johann Schein. There is a well-known current baroque orchestra and chamber choir named “Tafelmusik.” Into Italian The Italian words derived from Latin tabula show direct borrowings and also show the lenition of intervocalic /b/ to vocalized /v/. Direct Borrowings:
One of the first long bursts of Italian I ever uttered outside a classroom sounded forth in a Roman restaurant 40 years ago. I was so proud I carried it off that I can still remember part of that sentence. The waiter approached our tourist quartet and I said, “Ci vorrebbe un piccolo tavolo vicino alla finestra, un posticino pieno di luce e parfumato da fioriti di bosco ‘We’d like a little table near the window, a pleasant little space full of light and perfumed by woodland flowers’. The waiter smiled at my foreigner’s Italian and replied in Italian, “We have everything except the little flowers of the woodland, signore. You’ll have to send out for them.” I gave him a big tip for being so gracious.
Another wall painting from Pompeii depicts a pensive woman thinking carefully about the next word she is going to incise in the wax of her multi-leaved tabula.
copyright © 2012 William Gordon Casselman
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