Grammar
Ultimately from Proto Indo European gerbh, “to scratch”; also the ancestor of carve, crab, crayfish, crawl, and graph. Interestingly, Proto Indo European had another root, ghrebh, which also meant “to scratch”, and is the ancestor of grub, groove, and grave. It’s hard to believe that ghrebh and gerbh are unrelated, but 8000 years later, there appears to be no evidence either way.
Gerbh became graphein, “to write” in ancient Greek, and from this was derived gramma, “letter”. The Greek phrase grammatike tekhne, the “art of letters”, referred to philology and literature. Latin borrowed this as grammatica, which became grammaire “learning” in Old French, and was grafted into English in the late 1100’s as gramarye.
In Middle English, gramarye referred to “learning in general”, including astrology and magic. In Scots English, the word came to mean especially occult knowledge, and evolved into glamour before being borrowed back into the main trunk of English through the writings of Sir Walter Scott. From this came glamorous in the 1880’s. Think of that when you hear a celebrity described as glamorous, or see a picture of a glam rocker…
In modern linguistics, a grammar is usually defined as a formal system that describes, with mathematical precision, all the possible expressions in a human language. That is, if you know the grammar of language L, you can tell whether or not a given expression is grammatical in L. No complete grammar of any human language has been fully described by linguists, although children learn about 99% of at least one human grammar by age 5.
It’s not surprising that the word grammar has had such a glamorous history, since its phonosemantics are wrapped up with intimations of power and manifestation. “Gr” is a powerful emanation from Source, an emanation that is balanced and even (short “a”), and results in manifestation (”m”). The “ar” at the end, which is really a syllabic “r” (that is, “r” pronounced as a vowel) lends a sense that the grammar itself is an agent with its own agenda.
