Dave-
The epigraph which you quoted: "the master builder does not follow his own opinion, but has plans and descriptions to know how to arrange the chambers" —one could venture to opine that this erotic, id est, esoteric, literature perhaps, speaks an allusion to the zealot Pinchas, whose name can, with some stretch of the imagination, be transliterated expansively into Greek as: phi-omicron-iota-nu-iota-kappa-omicron-sigma, or in English: “Phoenix”. The master builders are described by Chazal in the finality of Talmud, Bavli, Berakoth as: “sages;” The chambers may also be an allusion to the otiyot—the things which builders are so artfully skillful at arranging. Presumably, Pinchas haCohen would have possessed authoritative scribal skills, and thus, perhaps, his namesake’s association with the the thing that came to be known as the scribe’s writing pad, namely: "pinqas."
Note: In your previous article on the word ‘daftar’—the comment was offered that the word ‘gram’ derived from the Greek word ‘gramma’ is one of the smallest elementary units of measure—and literally a ‘letter.’ However, the Greeks also used the name of the letter ‘iota’ as a sub-elementary particle.
It's worth mentioning as an aside that in the Kaufman manuscript of the Mishna, the word is vocalised פִינְקֶס, while in the Babylonian tradition it is vocalised פֵינקָס or פֵינקַס.
Chantraine's Dictionaire etymologique de la langue Grec has no good etymology for pinax, pinakos, but gives its original meaning as "plank" -- which can be used to write on or paint on. (He compares Latin codex, which originally means treetruck, then tablet, then book; and English "book" from beechtree, I think.) The -ax, -akos ending is a fairly rare Greek noun suffix.
Phoinix, phoinikos comes from the adj. phoinos, "red." Phoinix originally means tawny red or crimson or purple. The word Phoinix "Phoenician" may or may not be a development of the word for the color. But anyway, the -ix, -ikos ending is an adjectival suffix.
Kutscher mentions a number of examples of board becoming page/book. In addition to pinax / pinkas and codex, he discusses daf דף, which I wrote about earlier. Another example he gives is liber, Latin for book, which originally meant "the inner bark of trees".
And for that matter, leaf (of a book or a tree) -- cognate to liber. And for THAT matter, paper from papyrus, and Bible from biblion (book) from Byblos, which exported papyrus.
When I took an Arabic class, we were taught that finjan means "cup".
As Arabic doesn't have "p" sound, it obviously substitutes another sound for it. It seems that words that entered Arabic "back in the day" change the "p" sound to an "f" sound. Hence pinax eventually becoming finjan. However, nowadays the "p" sound becomes a "b" sound. Computer is kumbyutir.
"However, nowadays the "p" sound becomes a "b" sound. Computer is kumbyutir."
To clarify, I mean words that entered Arabic in the modern era.
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