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

On Fri, 26 Oct 2001 10:04:01 -0400 John Cowan <cowan@...>
writes:
> This leads to a weird conlang question with a concultural twist.
> Suppose
> Muhammad had wound up converting the Jews instead of/in addition to
> the Arabs and surrounding peoples.  What would the Hebrew words for
> "Islam" and "Muslim" have been, based on "shalom"?  And of course,
> this spawns a whole new conuniverse!
> --
> John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
-

Muhammad did convert Jews... just not all of them, and those that did
just melted into the rest of the the Muslim world.  I don't think that
"Islam" and "Muslim" would have been based on "shalom" in that alternate
universe... the Arabic root SLM in "Islam" and "Muslim" means _submission
[to God]_, while the Hebrew cognate ShLM doesn't have that connotation...
as far as i know it only has the basic meanings of "wholeness" and
"peace" (which are related).


-Stephen (Steg), whose Arabic 101 test today was really easy!
"¿mew?"