عَشْوائي
root: ع-ش-و / adjective / definition: random
I was introduced to the beauty of Babylonian names in a recent Akkadian class and have grown mildly obsessed with the idea of naming my future child (or pet… perhaps a terrapin) with something like May I See Your Light in Akkadian, which I might have to shorten down to Nūrka if I don’t want the aforementioned child/terrapin to hate me.
Babylonian names are really interesting, though, and you can find names that are full sentences or even questions. Everyone should read about them.
By the way, the contents of this post might will be very random. I fell asleep immediately after I got home yesterday evening after teaching for 6 straight hours and slept until the morning.
It seems my brain was very active during those 15 hours of sleep because there are too many miscellaneous thoughts springing around in my mind that I need to set down somewhere, and I’m not sure anyone around me will have the patience to listen to my babbling. So the blog will have to take one for the team.
I wonder why, in the Arabic dictionary, terms referring to “the masses” are linked to the colour black. Take الدَّهماء from the root د-ه-م and سَواد النّاس from س-و-د as examples.
Does suffering make you a more gentle person? I don’t think it works that way necessarily, but Arabic links these two things through the word حَمول which can describe someone as both “long-suffering” and “gentle, mild-tempered”.
Other than العَرَب, the Arabs can be referred to as أَهل الضّاد (“the people of the letter Ḍād“, seeing as ض is hailed as Arabic’s unique phoneme) or بَنو ماء السَّماء (“the sons of the sky’s water”—ماء is very much linked to honour in Arabic). Are there any other terms used to refer to the Arabs?
Under the word حَنان (“compassion”) in the dictionary, we find its dual form with a possessive pronoun suffix added: حَنانَيك which, for some reason, means “have mercy!”.
I’m questioning whether that really is the dual form or if it’s something that looks similar, because I have no idea why the dual would be used here. Something to investigate.
For a few of the planets in our Solar System, we find two separate terms for them in the dictionary. For example:
Jupiter: المُشتَري and البِرجيس
Mars: مِرّيخ and القاهِر
Saturn: زُحَل and كَيوان
I wonder whether this is because one is more of an attributive and the other is the official name. Or maybe one is more of a historical term. Or maybe the astronomers thought each one was two separate planets because their calculations were wrong or their telescopes weren’t adjusted correctly… We’ll never know.
But if you’re interested in astronomy terms in Arabic, check out the vocabulary list I created a while back. And you’ll probably want to read Five Dual Nouns Meaning “the Sun and the Moon”.
I love finding quinquiliteral (5-letter-root) terms in the dictionary. I came across خُزَعبَل a little while ago, it means “idle talk”.
When I find quadriliteral or quinquiliteral words, I always wonder how they came to be. Because, for example, some quadriliteral words are reduplicated and some are compound. Some are imported from other languages.
I don’t know if finding out the origin of خزعبل is an idle pursuit.
If you’ve ventured far enough into the pages of Lane’s Lexicon you may have discovered the interesting calendar on page 1254 which shows the compares the months of the year with the six seasons, the quarters, and the periods of rain. Take a look, it’s quite interesting.
Seeing as I specified “linguistic” in the title of this post, I’ll leave off my observations about the way humans perceive temperature and my recent thoughts about lightning. I’ll have to find someone around me who’ll listen. Poor them.
.في أمان الله
If you’d like to receive email notifications whenever a new post is published on The Arabic Pages, enter your email below and click “Subscribe”:
The Arabic Pages 
Gerald Drissner talks about forms like حَنانَيك in his first Arabic for Nerds book (Question 204 in the first edition). Turns out there are other forms like it (لبّيك اللّهمّ لبّيك, سَعدَيكَ). He says the word “is put into the dual form for the sake of corroboration (emphasis) meaning”, and the منصوب case indicates the word is “used as an exclamation of admiration – a special form of the expression of admiration”. The personal pronoun refers to Allah, he says.
Amazing! Thank you so much for sharing Kierán, that’s interesting to know 😄