Re: Abdul Alhazred: Let's retroconlang the Mad Arab!
| From: | Peter Bleackley <peter.bleackley@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, May 22, 2006, 7:55 |
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staving Andreas Johansson:
>I had something a bit different in mind, however. A recurring name in
>Lovecraft
>is that of Abdul Alhazred, the "Mad Arab" who wrote the infamous
>_Necronomicon_. The name, deriving from Lovecraft's youthful infatuation with
>the Arabian Nights, isn't a "real" Arabic name, but a made-up Arabic-sounding
>one. Now, my idea was, could someone familiar with Arabic suggest a plausible
>early-medieval Arabic name that might without too great distortion have been
>mutated into "Abdul Alhazred" in European tradition?
One of the few things I know about Arabic is that "Abdul" comes from the
construct state of abd "servant", and is usually followed by one of the 99
Divine Names of Islamic tradition - eg Abdullah parses as abd-al-illah,
"Servant of God". We therefore need some plausible meaning for hzrd (hmm
that's four consonants rather than three - could one be a prefix or
suffix?). Preferably something along the lines of "unholy" or "diabolical",
to fit in with Lovecraftian themes.
Pete