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Arabic-L: Mon 03 Aug 2009
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1) Subject:proposed etymologies for ojalá and Iraq
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1)
Date: 03 Aug 2009
From:<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; white-space: normal; ">David Wilmsen <<a href="mailto:david.wilmsen@gmail.com">david.wilmsen@gmail.com</a>></span>
Subject:proposed etymologies for ojalá and Iraq
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; white-space: normal; ">Two queries have been bothering me ever since they appeared on Arabic-l. My answer to the first I am almost positive about: the origins of the name for the country of Iraq is a native Arabic word and not of Persian origin at all. It suddenly occurred to me at one point, in the midst of doing something else entirely, that the word "erg" describes the geo-morphological feature of a large sandy desert, which ever since my undergraduate days I have known was a word of Arabic extraction. It is much more parsimonious to assume that عراق then is simply the plural of erg (with the realization of the qaf as a /g/, bedouin style) than it is to follow the speculations of early lexicographers who, upon failing to find a native Arabic word for the plural (they must not have been looking hard enough), speculated that it must be Persian. So it simply means in native Arabic "the sandy wastes" or "the sandy basins", or as Professor Deeb observed in his posting of 1 February 2007, "the wastelands". <br><br>Traditional and modern Arabic lexicography is a treacherous landscape, rather like and erg.<br><br>Now, as to ojalá, I have been told since childhood that it comes from the Arabic ان شاء الله but was never convinced. Even when I knew very little about phonological processes, it seemed to me that there was simply too much lost in the transformation from Arabic to Spanish. Some have ventured that it comes from a more intellectually satisfying لو شاء الله. A perfectly sound phrase. But is it used? Perhaps it was during the 900 years or so of the Arab presence in the Iberian penninsula. But I cannot attest to hearing it much nowadays. Anyone else? And we still have the difficulty of the ش being reanalysed as /x/.<br><br>A much more satisfying alternative derivation is available in the vernacular ْعلى الله<br><br>This is used in Egyptian Arabic to express hope, as with its (presumed) Spanish daughter, oftentimes in the presence of doubt that whatever is hoped for will actually occur. <br><br>Here we need only to account for the realization of ع as /x/, (and the loss of one /l/, but that seems trivial by comparison). If you teach non-native speakers of Arabic, you may find the realization of ع or its unvoiced counterpart ح as /x/ not all all implausable!<br><br>I find these two explanations particularly satisfying because arriving at them requires resorting to the vernaculars as a repository of stored ancient information about the language. We bind ourselves too tightly when relying solely upon the inherited wisdom of the writings about the classical language. As Jonathan Owens points out in his <i>A Linguistic History of Arabic</i>, when we do that, we are missing half the language. <br><br><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; white-space: pre;"><br></span></font></span></span></font></p><p align=""><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; ">--------------------------------------------------------------------------
End of Arabic-L: 03 Aug 2009
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