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Re: Good/Beneficient (was: More Nyenya'a)

From:Josh Roth <fuscian@...>
Date:Sunday, October 21, 2001, 6:14
In a message dated 10/20/01 4:42:13 PM, DigitalScream@AOL.COM writes:

<snip>
> Well, sometimes there's no link between the different meanings, or >the >connection's been utterly lost. It was a great joke with my Arabic >professor. After we knew all the patterns and what kinds of words they >produced he'd say, "So what does x root mean in y pattern?" And we all >guess >something logical and we'd be hopelessly wrong. There doesn't necessarily >need to be a perceptible relation. Here's an example: > >almaaghrab (="the west", the Arabic name of Morrocco, since it's on the >west >coast of Africa) >gharab (="evening", since the sun sets in the west, so when it's over there, >it's evening) >ghurba (="the feeling of loneliness and otherness one gets in being in >a >country that isn't one's own", > you can kind of see this, since countries they invaded like >Spain >and such were to the > west...?) > >gharb (="crow". Your guess is as good as mine.) > >-David
Hebrew has cognates for some of these. Using ` to indicate `ayin, Hebrew has: `erev = evening) `orev = crow) `arav is the verbal root for becoming evening, and being dark (among other things). In Hebrew `orev is the ..err... well in modern Hebrew present tense form, also the participle form I guess, and the same form is used to denote a noun that does that verb. Thus a crow is a be-dark.er* :-) I'm not sure how the Arabic noun relates to the verb, but it's probably similar. (If someone else is better at Hebrew etymology, please forgive me!) * or a be.dark-er; people do these morpheme things differently, and I don't know which is preferrable Josh Roth http://members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html