Muses: where the word “music” comes from

The nine musesThe word “music” derives from Greek mousike, which originally referred to any of the arts governed by the nine Muses (or mousa), daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. Eventually it came to mean the science of composing melodies, and in the Middle Ages was one of the four primary sciences that were studied as part of the quadrivium. Greek culture greatly influenced other Mediterranean cultures, which borrowed the word — musica (Latin), moosiqi (Farsi or Persian), and musiqa (Arabic) — and spread from there to most of Europe: for example, musique (French), musik (Germanic languages), muusika (Estonian), muzyka (Polish), muziek (Dutch), and “moozeeka” (phonetic Russian spelling). Some European languages with different linguistic roots did not adopt this word, however. These include Hungarian (zene), Icelandic (tonlist), and Slavic (hudba). Continue reading →