Incipit - Wikipedia

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Incipit
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The incipit (English pronunciation: /nspt/)[1] of a text is the

first few words of the text, employed as an identifying label. In
a musical composition, an incipit is an initial sequence of
notes, having the same purpose. The word incipit comes from
Latin and means "it begins".
Before the development of titles, texts were often referred to
by their incipits, as with for example Agnus Dei. During the
medieval period in Europe, incipits were often written in a
different script or colour from the rest of the work of which
they were a part, and "incipit pages" might be heavily
decorated with illumination. Though the word incipit is Latin,
the practice of the incipit predates classical antiquity by several
millennia and can be found in various parts of the world.
Although not always called by the name of incipit today, the
practice of referring to texts by their initial words remains
commonplace.

Contents
1 Historical examples
1.1 Sumerian
1.2 Hebrew
1.3 Ancient Greek
1.4 Papal bulls
1.5 Hindu texts
2 Modern uses of incipits
3 In music
4 In computer science
5 See also
6 Footnotes
7 Sources
8 External links

Decorated Incipit page to the Gospel of

Matthew, 11201140

Historical examples
Sumerian
In the clay tablet archives of Sumer, catalogs of documents were kept by making special catalog tablets
containing the incipits of a given collection of tablets.

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The catalog was meant to be used by the very limited number of official scribes who had access to the
archives, and the width of a clay tablet and its resolution did not permit long entries. This is a Sumerian
example from Lerner:
Honored and noble warrior
Where are the sheep
Where are the wild oxen
And with you I did not
In our city
In former days

Hebrew
Many books in the Hebrew Bible are named in Hebrew using
incipits. For instance, the first book (Genesis) is called Bereshit ("In
the beginning ...") and Lamentations, which begins "How lonely sits
the city...", is called Eykha ("How"). A readily recognized one is the
"Shema" or Shema Yisrael in the Torah: "Hear O Israel..." the first
words of the prayer encapsulating Judaism's monotheism (see
beginning Deuteronomy 6:4 and elsewhere).
All the names of Parashot are incipits, the title coming from a word,
occasionally two words, in its first two verses. The first in each book
are, of course, called by the same name as the book as a whole.
Some of the Psalms are known by their incipits, most noticeably
Psalm 51 (Septuagint numbering: Psalm 50), which is known in
Western Christianity by its Latin incipit Miserere ("Have mercy").
In the Talmud, the chapters of the Gemara are titled in print and
known by their first words, e.g. the first chapter of Mesekhet
Berachot ("Benedictions") is called Me-ematai ("From when"). This
word is printed at the head of every subsequent page within that
chapter of the tractate.

The first page of the Vilna Edition of

the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate
Berachot, folio 2a., with the word
"Me-ematai" in the box at the top

In rabbinic usage, the incipit is known as the "dibur ha-mathil" (

), or "beginning phrase", and refers to a section heading in a published monograph or commentary
that typically, but not always, quotes or paraphrases a classic biblical or rabbinic passage to be commented
upon or discussed.
Many religious songs and prayers are known by their opening words.
Sometimes an entire monograph is known by its "dibur hamathil". The published mystical and exegetical
discourses of the Chabad-Lubavitch rebbes (called "ma'amarim"), derive their titles almost exclusively from
the "dibur ha-mathil" of the individual work's first chapter.

Ancient Greek

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The final book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, is more popularly known as the Apocalypse
after the first word of the original Greek text, apokalypsis revelation, to the point where that
word has become synonymous with what the book describes, i.e. the End of Days ( eschaton [the]
last in the original).

Papal bulls
Traditionally, papal bulls, documents issued under the authority of the Pope, are referenced by their Latin
incipit.

Hindu texts
Some of the mantras, suktas from the hymns of the Vedas, conform to this usage.

Modern uses of incipits

The idea of choosing a few words or a phrase or two, which would be placed on the spine of a book and its
cover, developed slowly with the birth of printing, and the idea of a title page with a short title and subtitle
came centuries later, replacing earlier, more verbose titles.
The modern use of standardized titles, combined with the International Standard Bibliographic Description
(ISBD), have made the incipit obsolete as a tool for organizing information in libraries.
However, incipits are still used to refer to untitled poems, songs, and prayers, such as Gregorian chants,
operatic arias, many prayers and hymns, and numerous poems, including those of Emily Dickinson. That
such a use is an incipit and not a title is most obvious when the line breaks off in the middle of a
grammatical unit (e.g. Shakespeare's sonnet 55 "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments").
Latin legal concepts are often designated by the first few words, for example, habeas corpus for habeas
corpus ad subjiciendum ("may you have the person to be subjected [to examination]").
Many word processors propose the first few words of a document as a default file name, assuming that the
incipit may correspond to the intended title of the document.
The space-filling, or place-holding, text lorem ipsum is known as such from its incipit.

In music
Musical incipits are
printed in standard
music notation.
They typically
feature the first few
bars of a piece,
often with the most
prominent musical Incipit for Chopin's Nocturne in B-flat minor, Op. 9, No. 1, single-staff version
material written on
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a single staff (the

examples given at
right show both the
single-staff and
full-score incipit
variants). Incipits
are especially
useful in music
because they can
call to mind the
reader's own
musical memory of Incipit for Chopin's Nocturne in B-flat minor, Op. 9, No. 1, full-score version
the work where a
printed title would fail to do so. Musical incipits appear both in catalogs of music and in the tables of
contents of volumes that include multiple works.
In choral music, sacred or secular pieces from before the 20th century were often titled with the incipit text.
For instance, the proper of the Catholic Mass and the Latin transcriptions of the biblical psalms used as
prayers during services are always titled with the first word or words of the text. Protestant hymns of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are also traditionally titled with an incipit.

In computer science
In computer science, long strings of characters may be referred to by their incipits, particularly encryption
keys or product keys. Notable examples include FCKGW (used by Windows XP) and 09 F9 (used by
Advanced Access Content System).

See also
Epigraph
Exordium (rhetoric)
Preface
Prologue
Rubrication

Footnotes
1. "incipit". Oxford English Dictionary (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. September 2005. (Subscription or UK public
library membership (http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/freeodnb/libraries/) required.) The OED-recommended
pronunciation competes in everyday usage with several others: [nspt], [nkpt], [nkpt], [ntpit], and [n
tpt]. Of these, the use of second-syllable stress and of [k] for letter c is endorsed by Merriam-Webster on its
dictionary web site ([1] (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/incipit)). Pronunciations with [t] are based on
the Italian rendition of letter c before i. For discussion of the variants, see ChoralNet: [2] (http://archive.choralnet.org
/194865).

Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incipit

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Barreau, Deborah K.; Nardi, Bonnie. "Finding and Reminding: File Organization From the desktop".
SigChi Bulletin. July 1995. Vol. 27. No. 3. pp. 3943
Casson, Lionel. Libraries in the Ancient World. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2001.
ISBN 0-300-08809-4. ISBN 0-300-09721-2.
Lerner, Frederick Andrew. The Story of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing to the Computer Age.
New York: Continuum, 1998. ISBN 0-8264-1114-2. ISBN 0-8264-1325-0.
Malone, Thomas W. "How do people organize their desks? Implications for the design of Office
Information Systems". ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems. Vol. 1. No. 1 January 1983.
pp. 99112.
Nardi, Bonnie; Barreau, Deborah K. "Finding and Reminding Revisited: Appropriate metaphors for
File Organization at the Desktop". SigChi Bulletin. January 1997. Vol. 29. No. 1.

External links
Look up incipit in
Wiktionary, the free
dictionary.
Wikiquote has quotations
related to: Opening lines

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Incipit&oldid=751089733"

Categories: Latin literary phrases Clay tablets Publishing Formal sections in music analysis
Canonical documents
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