the word is ultimately a misreading of Greek sittybos “cauldron,” also… must be “cauldron”,
I did my best to make heads or tails of your cryptic post but in the end I threw in the towel: by reading your “also” in German (as “thus”) one could spot a subtle form of critic in it, but the rest of the sentence is in English… I’m at loss.
However I couldn’t prevent the “sittyboss – syllabus” puzzle from piquing my curiosity.
Firstly, if syllabus originated from a misreading, the slip must have occurred in the Latin-transliterated form: lambda and tau are graphically very different (in particular in their capital form Λ and Τ), thus only a blind monk might have misread σίττυβος as σίλλυβος. Whereas had a sloppy scribe just forgotten to cross his t’s, sittybos could easily have become sillybos, that a few centuries would then smoothly mistreat into syllabus.
My second point is rather embarrassing: I’m well aware that if an ant disagrees with Zeus (or a measly me with OED) there’s little doubt about who’s right and who’s to become the laughing stock of the audience. Still I can’t get out of my head that the “wrong” etymology of syllabus – from σὺν-λαμβάνω (take together) – reflects almost verbatim the German zusammenfassen (put together, summarise), which is exactly what a σίττυβος was supposed to do.
And that a (not really thorough) search for the etymology of σίττυβος hasn’t gotten me very far: it led me just to a not terribly specific “word of Pre-Greek origin” and to an analogy with κάκκαβος (of Pre-Greek origin too), that was indeed a three-legged cauldron or pot – and in one quotation assumed the disturbing meaning of ‘chamberpot’. Nothing that I could imagine hanging on an ancient dignified scroll…
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Excellent – I made no sense, heads or tails of it either.