THE ARMENIAN PENCIL FROM VENICE

Despite pens, computers, and smartphones, the humble pencil still has its place in our lives for writing, from the classroom to the checkbook to the office. Mass production of pencils began in the seventeenth century in Germany, and the famous brands we know today emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.  

The word “pencil” comes from Middle English pencel, meaning an “artist’s small brush,” before evolving to its modern sense—a graphite writing implement—after pure graphite sticks were used for marking things in sixteenth-century England. In turn, Middle English pencel was a borrowing from Old French pincel, “artist’s paintbrush.” Predictably, the source of the latter was Latin (Medieval Latin pincellus, “painter’s brush”).  

But the Armenian word մատիտ (madid or, in classical rendering, matit) came from very different sources.     

You do not find the word in ancient or medieval sources, and it does not appear in the New Dictionary of the Armenian Language (Նոր բառգիրք Հայկազեան լեզուի), a sort of Bible of Classical Armenian published in 1836-1837 by three monks of the Mekhitarist order in Venice. Instead, we find there a definition for “pencil” under the word կապար (gabar or kapar, “lead”) as “lead pen” (կապարեայ գրիչ / gabarea krich or kaparea grich), and the equivalents kurșun kalem (meaning literally the same) in Turkish and lapis in Italian.

By then, however, someone had borrowed the word for “pencil” from Italian matita, an Italian synonym for lapis, as մատիտ (pronounced matit in Classical and Eastern Armenian, madid in Western Armenian, as we have already indicated). Both matita and lapis came from Latin lapis haematites (“hematite stone”). Rods of hematite, an iron oxide, were once used as pencils before graphite.   

It is logical to think that the first to use the word madid was a Mekhitarist monk in its central hub of Venice. A Brief Grammar of the French Language, prepared by the disciples of Abbot Mekhitar (1676-1749), the founder of the order, and published in Armenian in 1816, contained an appendix with a list of essential French words, where we find crayon (“pencil”) and its correspondences madid in Armenian and kurșun kalem in Turkish. 

In 1835, Fr. Sukias Somalian, the abbot of the Venetian congregation, published a Pocket Dictionary of the English and Armenian Languages, where the word “crayon” was translated as both madid and gabarea krich. Incidentally, we find “pencil” translated as krich gabarea, but not as madid. The latter entered subsequent bilingual dictionaries, and by 1875, Fr. Madatia (Matthias) Bedrosian, another Venetian Mekhitarist, translated it as “pencil” in his Armenian-English dictionary. He also included մատիտակալ (madidagal) as “pencil-case.”  

And so it goes until today.