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Re: Abdul Alhazred: Let's retroconlang the Mad Arab!

From:Peter Bleackley <peter.bleackley@...>
Date:Monday, May 22, 2006, 7:55
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