# Palestinian Arabic: zgurt



## abu l-bisse

I heard a Palestinian peasant say _bass ana bakēt wakitha zgurt_ "but I was in that times a zgurt".  Does anybody know what _zgurt_ means?  I read the explanation that it is derived from Turkish _zügürt_ "broke, bust" and that it means "beggar, poor wretch".  But that doesn't meet the context of his speech.  Does anybody know the word and perhaps another meaning?

Thanks for help
Abu l-bisse


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## CZAREK

Maybe it means like "small one"زغير؟؟؟؟


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## Mahaodeh

It's zgurt as he said and it has a meaning very similar to the EA جدع ; also something like the Syrian قبضاي but in a more positive way. I really don't know how to explain it.

The word is also used in IA, except that it means there an unmarried man with no responsibilities. I also recently found out that it's used in the UAE (Khaliiji Arabic) to mean a young man that dresses well and is sort of "cool".

As you can see, none of them really have the same meaning as the Turkish original.


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## elroy

Mahaodeh said:


> It's zgurt as he said and it has a meaning very similar to the EA جدع ; also something like the Syrian قبضاي but in a more positive way. I really don't know how to explain it.


 It _is_ hard to explain, isn't it?   I hope that abu l-bisse knows what جدع and/or قبضاي means (by the way, both are used in PA).

What's the context, by the way?  That might help us such an English approximation.


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## abu l-bisse

Oh yes,  جدع and  قبضاي (positive like it is used in حلب ) meets the context very well.  Thanks to Mahaodeh!


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## Maj

This colloquial word is also used in Jordan, and indeed it means جدع or قبضاي.  "inta zgurt" therefore means: You're great! or You're quite the guy! or You're a fine fellow!


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## Maj

Looking at my previous reply, I see that I didn't really address the original question:  zgurt does indeed mean "you're great", but it, like the other two words, often implies strength or toughness.  When I refuse to take any novocaine, my dentist, who is Lebanese, calls me قبضاي ('abaDây), which in this case means "you're strong, you're tough enough to withstand the pain".  So the Palestinian peasant was saying that in those days he was a strapping young man.


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## analeeh

A related word (_zgerti _iirc) is actually used in Damascene for قبضاي too (or was historically, at least) though they have slightly different metaphorical meanings at least some of the time - _abaDaay_ can also mean 'capable', 'knows what he's doing' (= كفو) whereas _zgerti_ only means tough. The difference in vowel is predictable from the dialect.

It might well be derived from _zügürt_ - words meaning 'poor' can quite easily turn into words implying 'violent' or 'strong', and in the Middle East in lots of places there is a tradition of neighbourhood toughs with funny names like this (in Iran they are called لوطيs which seems ridiculous if you speak Arabic but supposedly refers to their origins as professional acrobats).


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## Maj

Salamaat, Analeeh.  I will try to reproduce a couple of putative etymologies I found for these words (there may be others).  Popular etymology, of course, is often highly conjectural, and unless historically documented, must be taken with a shake of pepper as well as the grain of salt!  The first one might be supported somewhat by the Syrian word you mention, and comes from a site يا أهل الشام: هل لهذه المصطلحات أصل في اللغة العربية؟ - ملتقى أهل الحديث. It says:
*رجل زْغـِـرْت يعنى شجاع*​*وأصلها من رجال الأمن وهم​**sécurité ال
بالفرنسية

فتحولت إلى سُـكِـرْتية ثم زغرت​* 
*والله اعلم*​
I hope the words are not too scrambled - they were very reluctant to be pasted!  The last line may well be the most reliable!

The second one, from a more scholarly-sounding source, is also highly interesting. Unfortunately it's copiable only as a graphic, and won't paste here.  It says: "the Jordanian word _zgurt_, for instance--meaning strong, dependable, and masculinely so--..." arose in Jordan "under the British Mandate, during which the Anglophone predicate adjective 'is good' was truncated into the Jordanian lexicon as _zgurt_..."

And we could go on...

I have some doubt about the Turkish etymology, also mentioned by abu l-bisse, because such terms, it seems to me, are usually transmitted and transformed orally, and the suggested Turkish word is not actually spelled zügürt, but züğürt, the letter ğ being essentially silent in Turkish, making the pronunciation "züürt".


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## raful

[Moderator's Note: Merged with a previous thread]
Hello to you all
In an interview with a Palestinian film director I heard the word "zagrut" in the following sentence
zagrut هو إجا من عيلة مش قوية, أبوه مش

I heard it a few times and it's definitely "zagrut". I have no idea whether it's زقروط, زجروط, زغروط.
Does anyone know what this word mean (and how you write it)?


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## bamia

I think_زغروط_  means ululation, but let's wait for a native speaker to confirm.


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## Derakhshan

I think its _zgirt_, meaning classy or elegant. I'm not sure how Levantines pronounce it.


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## analeeh

Can you give us a timestamp or a name of the video?

It could be _zgurt_, but _zgurt_ normally means in my experience 'tough' or 'macho'.


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## raful

You can find it on youtube, under the title: سجالات برنامج حواري مع سليم سلامة
The word appears around 18:10


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## analeeh

It's definitely _zgurt. _You gave the context wrong. She says:

يا مرفوضين منبوذين لإنو أبوهم كان مالو إشي أو أبوهم مش زغرت قد حالو أو أبوهم شخصية كتير ضعيفة... هدول الولاد كانو يدورو ع القوة

She's saying more or less that these جنود are generally people who are outcasts for whatever reason. One of the reasons she gives (this one) is because their dad has something wrong with him or isn't a tough guy capable of standing up for himself (i.e. isn't macho enough). So they look for a way to be strong.


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## Derakhshan

What is the origin of this word? In Gulf Arabic it means chic or elegantly dressed, see here: زقرت - Wiktionary

I read that it's from Turkish züğürt, but that means "poor" or "broke".


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## raful

Thank you analeeh
So, it's a verb.... زغر
What about the مش over there? Why مش and not ما?


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## analeeh

It's not a verb. _zgurt _(and note that though I wrote it with a gh it is pronounced _g_) is an adjective or noun (invariable for gender, probably from Turkish) that means 'tough', 'strong', etc. It's in a similar ball park to جدع, قبضاي etc (in fact in Damascus _zgerti _was apparently one of the terms used for the neighbourhood tough guy, i.e. the qabaDaay).


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## Mahaodeh

Maj said:


> I have some doubt about the Turkish etymology, also mentioned by abu l-bisse, because such terms, it seems to me, are usually transmitted and transformed orally, and the suggested Turkish word is not actually spelled zügürt, but züğürt, the letter ğ being essentially silent in Turkish, making the pronunciation "züürt".


I'm not a specialist, but I personally find that the Turkish etymology the most plausible. On the one hand, I doubt that it's a twentieth century borrowing (both the French and the British occupied the respective regions in the early 20th century) because the change in both meaning and pronunciation is a little too much for such a short period of time - and I don't mean 100 years because the word existed at least since the 1940s, giving only a couple of decades for the word to evolve. It also doesn't expline how the same word has a different meaning in Iraq and the Gulf region, also in such a short period of time.

On the other hand, a Turkish borrowing does not have to have been so recent. It could have been borrowed any time since the Ottomans first set foot in the region in the early 16th century, and that is a good 500 years. The pronunciation of the word in Turkish could have been different, and the divergence in Arabic had plenty of time to change meaning and/or pronunciation - not to mention spread as far as the UAE (a remote region at the time). Assuming of course that it was only borrowed after the Turkish occupation (it could have happened earlier, or it could have been borrowed from Seljuk Turkish); and assuming that the meaning was not different at the time to start with (the meaning of poor or broke may have been derived from an earlier meaning in Turkish).

Add to that, I understand the relation between poor and physically strong; and between poor and single - not so much poor and well dressed though. However, it could have spread from Iraq to the UAE (probably through other dialects), and it's easy to understand the relation between single and well dressed.


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## bamia

Maj said:


> I have some doubt about the Turkish etymology, also mentioned by abu l-bisse, because such terms, it seems to me, are usually transmitted and transformed orally, and the suggested Turkish word is not actually spelled zügürt, but züğürt, the letter ğ being essentially silent in Turkish, making the pronunciation "züürt".



But then Turkish words with ğ tend to be transliterated and/or incorporated into colloquial Arabic by replacing ğ with a consonant (غ seems to be common). It would make more sense to leave out ğ altogether (from a Turkish speaker's point of view at least) but it is not very common for Arabic speakers to do so. For example, Turkish doğru (right) was incorporated into Egyptian colloquial Arabic as دوغري with غ being the replacement for ğ.


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## wriight

And that's because ğ was pronounced غ at the time that the word reached Egyptian Arabic (as well as Levantine: دُغري، دِغري). If the word had been borrowed from today's Turkish where ğ no longer represents a consonant sound, then regardless of the spelling with ğ, the word's form in Arabic would be دوري or دورو or something of the sort. So the thing where ğ = غ isn't due to spelling, just historical pronunciation.

And if we go even further back, as Mahaodeh suggests, we find that very early on in Turkish's history (i.e. before Ottoman Turkish, but probably also during early stages of it), the sound that's written ğ today was pronounced as a normal "hard G" sound. So depending on when _zgurt_ reached Arabic it's totally plausible for it to have retained an older Turkish "g".


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## bamia

wriight said:


> And that's because ğ was pronounced غ at the time that the word reached Egyptian Arabic (as well as Levantine: دُغري، دِغري).



I see. I stand corrected then


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## wriight

Derakhshan said:


> In Gulf Arabic it means chic or elegantly dressed, see here: زقرت - Wiktionary


Wait, interesting. The sense of "_(obsolete)_ playboy, womaniser, lady's man, flirt" makes me realize that this word exists in Lebanese Arabic as سكرتي (_skerti, skerte_, but presumably originally _skurti_), a negative term comparable to "punk". Did it undergo devoicing in Lebanese (it probably did) or did it undergo voicing elsewhere?

EDIT: Huh. Wiktionary cites 7achy.com, whose author writes this:


> *أصل الكلمة*
> قيل انها تركية، إلا انني لم أجد لها من الصحة أو من سبورتي، إلى أن القصة الأقرب للتصديق هي المرتبطة بشركة أرامكو السعودية. حراس أمن "سكيورتي" أرامكو اعتادو التدخين إلا إن في ذاك الوقت التدخين يعتبر مصيبة ومخالف للعادات فعمد البعض لقلب سكيورتي إلى زقيرتي ومع الوقت تحولت إلى زقرتي وجمعها زقرت.





> *Etymology*
> It's said to be Turkish, although I don't find that convincing/correct. Or it could be from [the English word] _sporty_, but the most-believable story connects to the Saudi company Aramco. Aramco's _"security"_ would take up smoking as a habit, even though in that time smoking was considered [horrible] and against customs, so some began to change the word "security" into "zgeerti" and over time it turned into _zgirti_ pl. _zgirt_


I like this etymology better than the Turkish one, because I do think it'd be expected to have a غ had it been borrowed during Ottoman occupation. I'm not sure if the connection to smoking is a plausible one, and perhaps it precedes Aramco (to account for its spread throughout the Middle East), but "security" sounds like a really fitting etymon.


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