Arabic-L:LING:etymology and emphasis

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Arabic-L: Fri 16 Nov 2001
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
[To post messages to the list, send them to arabic-l at byu.edu]
[To unsubscribe, send message to listserv at byu.edu with first line reading:
           unsubscribe arabic-l                                      ]

-------------------------Directory-------------------------------------

1) Subject: etymology and emphasis
2) Subject: etymology and emphasis

-------------------------Messages--------------------------------------
1)
Date:  16 Nov 2001
From: DLNewman <d.newman at planetinternet.be>
Subject: etymology and emphasis

Hello (again),

1. It seems the computer gremlins were in a confederacy against me in my
last message:
the translation of /khaMR/ is of course 'alcoholic beverage' (not 'time'!),
whereas /gaRaS/ ('bell') does not have /I/ at the end.

2. With regard to the etymology question, it is worth adding that the Latin
'tabula' is also the etymon of /Tabliyya/, which in Egyptian Arabic denotes
a low round table. However, the intermediary here, I suspect, was not
Italian, but French ('tablette').

3. As for Louis Boumans' comment, evidence would not seem to support this
(at least not across the board for all dialects), as shown by examples like
/diktatuur/, /tanbar/ ('stamp'), 'jandarma' (and many more). Indeed, /U/
(both short and long) also often has this effect: e.g. /dukTuur/,
/uTumuubiil/. All these examples are, in fact, drawn from sources dating
back to the 19th century, which was arguably the first time loanwords from
European languages arrived in great numbers. The use of emphatics in
loanwords is of course not new, and can already be observed in mediaeval
borrowings from Greek (e.g. /dimuqraTiya/). For some cases at least, I can't
help but wonder whether the use of the emphatic did not originally serve to
clearly mark the word as foreign in writing, and later became a convention.
Equally interesting is the fact that in a number of spoken varieties of
Arabic the emphatics in borrowings (from European tongues) are often
replaced by their non-emphatic counterparts.

Daniel Newman

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)
Date:  16 Nov 2001
From: "Schub, Michael" <michael.schub at trincoll.edu>
Subject: etymology and emphasis

The Lebanese Jesuit elegant Arabic translation of the Bible
[ISBN 2-7214-4547-2, 1988] does indeed have {the originally
Ethiopic} /maa'idah/ for "table" as opposed to /Taawilah/
at 2Kings 4.10.  Best wishes,

                                        Mike Schub

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
End of Arabic-L:  16 Nov 2001