Arabic-L:LING:proposed etymologies for ojal áan d Iraq

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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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:David Wilmsen <david.wilmsen at gmail.com>
Subject:proposed etymologies for ojalá and Iraq

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".

Traditional and modern Arabic lexicography is a treacherous landscape,  
rather like and erg.

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/.

A much more satisfying alternative derivation is available in the  
vernacular ْعلى الله

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.

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!

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 A  
Linguistic History of Arabic, when we do that, we are missing half the  
language.



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