Dictionary Finds: Zaʿtar, Saʿtar, and Ṣaʿtar

مِسْكين

root: م-س-ك-ن / noun / plural: مَساكين / definition: poor thing

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If you know me in-person, you’ve probably been fortunate enough to be an unwilling spectator and/or listener to my gleeful blabbering about some dictionary find or linguistic observation.

This weekend, my husband—yet again, مسكين…—was in the line of fire as I gushed about three little Arabic nouns I’d found in the dictionary.

Apparently my face lights up, eyes growing wide and spilling over with joy, when I talk about language. So keep that image in mind and prepare to be dazzled by (or, at least, to react with a mildly-interested hm to) my latest lexical discovery.

You may have heard of زَعْتَر (za’tar). It refers to both wild thyme, and the spice blend in which it’s a main ingredient.

Now, if we flick over to page 437 of the Hans Wehr dictionary, we find the word زعتر…

…but it refers us straight over to the similar-sound سَعْتَر for a definition. No problem. I assume سعتر was the original word but, due to dialect variation, زعتر became the more widely-used version.

So, onward to page 478 now, where we find سعتر:

There we have it! سعتر, with the definition we expected: wild thyme.

Oh—but what’s that? The Wehr is telling us that سعتر has another equivalent: صَعْتَر.

Hmm. Is this another pronunciation variant? Apparently not.

If we take Lane’s Lexicon off our shelves and shuffle through to page 1360, we find an explanation:

Lane’s tells us that سعتر (which is the original term) was sometimes spelt as صعتر to avoid confusion with the word شعير (barley) in books of medicine that didn’t use dots when writing the Arabic script.

Both سعتر and شعير would be spelt identically without them: سعىر. So صعتر (i.e. صعىر) was used instead.

And we find a little more information about this herb under صعتر in Lane’s Lexicon, where we read that this wild thyme: “when strewn in a place, it drives away venomous or noxious reptiles and the like, such as serpents and scorpions“. Hmm.

Come on, don’t tell me you’re not at least slightly dazzled by this dictionary find! My eyes are still brimming with wonder.

!إلى اللقاء

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