Incipit: Difference between revisions

The incipit of a text, such as a poem, song, or book, is its first few words or opening line. Before the development of titles, texts were often referred to by their incipits. Incipit comes from the Latin for "it begins". In the medieval period, incipits were often written in a different script or color from the rest of the work of which they were a part. Though incipit is Latin, the practice of the incipit predates classical antiquity by several millennia, and can be found in various parts of the world. Today, incipits are most commonly used to refer to untitled poems and songs. Incipits are also used in catalogs of music, particularly catalogs of symphonies. In this case, the incipit is the first four bars of the first violin part of the score.

Early uses of incipits

Hebrew incipits

Many books in the Hebrew Bible are named in Hebrew using incipits. For instance, the first book is called Bereishit ("In the beginning ..."), a name which was translated directly into Greek for the Septuagint and from there into English as "Genesis". However, this convention was not followed for most of the other books; for instance, Lamentations (which begins "How lonely sits the city ...") is called in Hebrew Eykhah ("How").

All the names of parshiot are incipits.

Sumerian incipits

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.

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

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 and songs, such as Gregorian chants, operatic arias or the poetry 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").

The Ghazal genre of Persian and Urdu poetry tradition is also catalogued and referred to through incipit.

On many word processors, incipits are also used: the "save" dialog box proposes the document's first few words as the default file name.

References

• Barreau, Deborah K.; Nardi, Bonnie. "Finding and Reminding: File Organization From the desktop". SigChi Bulletin. July 1995. Vol. 27. No. 3. pp. 39-43
• 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 99-112.
• 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.