Talk:Nabla

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Does anybody know if Hebrew here should disambiguate to Jew or Israelite? (For all I know, the very existence of this thing is legendary.) -- Toby Bartels 23:11, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)

In the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, it's spelled nebel and described as an "ancient Jewish instrument". The instrument is mentioned many times in the Old Testament. In the Oxford English Dictionary, too, the primary spelling is given as nebel (defined as "an ancient Hebrew stringed instrument"), with nebhel, nevel, nable and nabal given as alternate spellings. The etymology for nabla, the mathematical symbol, indicates that the mathematical symbol was named after the instrument νάβλα, which is translated as "Phoenician harp" in the etymology. Thus, the Greek νάβλα and the Hebrew neḇel appear to be cognates referring to two distinct (but similar) instruments.

My personal view is that the instrumental use is uncommon enough that we could move nabla symbol to nabla and move this disambiguation page to nabla (disambiguation), or reduce it to a disambiguation link at the top of the article (or discard it entirely, and perhaps put a link for nebel (instrument) on the nebel disambiguation page). For now, I'll wait for a second opinion before doing anything. —Caesura^(t) 23:41, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Origin of word

In [1] they say its an Assyrian harp.Billlion 11:48, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)