The Straw That Learned to Write
There was in Proto-Indo-European a word *ḱolh₂mos, “straw, stalk.” From it descend Latin culmus, German Halm, English haulm—the stems left in a field after harvest—Russian soloma, and Ancient Greek κάλαμος, “reed.” Cousins, note, not descendants of one another: the word came down separately into each language.
A reed is a thing one writes with. Cut the stalk, trim the nib, dip it, and κάλαμος acquires the second meaning of “pen.” Latin took the word whole as calamus and English still keeps it for the quill of a feather. Travelling east, it became Arabic قلم qalam, and from Arabic passed to Ottoman and modern Turkish kalem, where it has settled down to mean “pen” and “pencil,” nobody having written with a reed for some centuries.
The Road Nobody Agrees On
By what hands the Greek word reached Arabic is an open question, with three answers on offer.
Nöldeke and Jeffery held that it came through Geʿez, in which ቀለም ḳäläm means “reed,” and also “ink” and “pen.” Wolf Leslau objected that the Geʿez word might itself have come from Arabic, which reverses the arrow. A third account, and a popular one, routes it through Aramaic and Syriac, the late antique Near East having converted Greek into Semitic on something close to an industrial scale.
There is a fourth consideration, inconvenient for all three. Arabic possesses a root q-l-m, “to cut, to trim,” and qalam has the shape of a noun formed from it. Against that: the sense “reed” as a plant is not attested for the Arabic word, which is what one would expect of a borrowing. So the Greek origin holds; the courier remains unidentified.
The Arabic word did, at any rate, get into the Qur’an. Sura 68 is named for it—al-Qalam, “The Pen”—and opens by swearing by the pen and by what they write.
The Boy Who Became a Reed
Κάλαμος has a mythological double. Kalamos was the son of the river god Maeander. He and Karpos were racing each other across the water; Karpos drowned, and Kalamos, in his grief, let himself drown too, and was changed into the reed at the water’s edge, whose rustling was heard as a sigh.
The pattern will be familiar. In the piece on the Yakutiye madrasa, Hyacinthus died in much the same manner to become a flower, the flower became a gemstone, and the gemstone became the name of a Mongol governor in Erzurum. The Greeks appear to have been unable to name a plant without first disposing of a youth.
The Object in the Case Is Named After It Too
Look at the calligraphy pens in the photograph—cut to draw a line from hairline to broad—and at the little bronze travelling writing set, an oblong case for the pen with an inkwell fixed to one end. Both were photographed in the museum inside the Yakutiye.
That object carries a name from the same root. Greek καλαμάριον is a case for a kalamos; from it come Talmudic kalmarin, a pen case or inkstand, Hebrew kulmus for the pen itself, and, further down the line, Italian calamaio and the obsolete Russian kalamar, an inkwell. Which is to say that the display case holds an object whose name and whose contents come off the same stalk.
Students of the madrasa may well have carried such things to their lessons. They will not have carried them on the first of September: the Turkish academic year has no fixed national start, and never has had.
The year itself is called eğitim öğretim yılı, “the year of educating and of learning”—one party teaches, the other learns, and the two together constitute the business of school. Since the second half of that arrangement continues for life, the greeting extends to all of us, whatever the date, and whatever the thermometer may say about autumn.
