ARABIC-L: LING: Spanish carrot

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Fri 05 Feb 1999
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: Spanish carrot

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1)
Date: 05 Feb 1999
From: "Robert R. Ratcliffe" <ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp>
Subject: Spanish carrot

I recently read in a historical linguistics textbook that the spanish
word for 'carrot' zanahoria comes from Arabic. Since the words I know
for carrot in Arabic are xizzu (Moroccan) and jazar (Classical and
elsewhere), I asked a hispanicist colleague about this and got the
following response.  Does anyone know a plausible Arabic source for this
word "safunariya".  Is anything like found in any modern dialect?


> Corominas's Etymological Dictionary of Spanish offers a "Vulgar
> Arabic"
> word transliterable as "safun^ariya", variants of which were (are,
> perhaps) found over North Africa, common in the 13th Century, but
> probably a foreign borrowing into Arabic before that (says Corominas).
>
> The first Spanish documentation is mid 14th-century, written in
> Spanish
> as ",cahanoria" (that is, starting with c-cedilla, representing [ts]).
>
> Judeo-Spanish and Catalan offer versions beginning with "safan-". I
> see
> no reference there to compounds with "yellow" such as you refer to;
> you
> may well be onto something here ...
>                                         Roger Wright

++++++++++++
Robert R. Ratcliffe
Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics,
Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku
Tokyo 114 Japan

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End of Arabic-L: 05 Feb 1999