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

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