# Arabic etymological dictionary



## Balashon

Is there any Arabic etymological dictionary - either in English or in Hebrew - that can be found in a book or online?


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## cuchuflete

Hi Balashon,
Welcome to the Forums.
We talked about this in another thread recently, and if my
memory is any good, nobody was aware of one.
I'll try to find the thread and post a link here for you.

regards,
Cuchuflete

Edit: My memory was faulty.  There are references to lack of etymology, but just for a single word.

For what little help this may offer:

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=112999


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## cherine

Cuchuflete is right. There are, unfortunately, no etymological dictionaries of the Arabic language. At least not yet : The مجمع اللغة العربية المصرى (Arabic language Academy in Egypt) has recently been discussing the creation of such project (which is considered a huge one, hence would face some difficulties being done). But we're hoping it will see the day in a near future.

What we have for the moment are the monolingual Arabic dictionaries, some of them are online. And they're quite interesting.


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## ifi

The question is what is 'etymology.' The root based Semitic languages do not have an external etymology like the Indo-European languages. The book: "the analytic and synthetic etymology of the Hebrew language" by Prof. I. Fried presents an internal (Hebrew) etymologycal analysis of the Hebrew root system but is applicable to any other Semitic language.


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## MarcB

As everyone has mentioned they do not exist at this time. There are however etymologies for non-Arabic words used in Arabic. I imagine there are probaby some for Hebrew as well.


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## ayed

Balashon said:
			
		

> Is there any Arabic etymological dictionary - either in English or in Hebrew - that can be found in a book or online?


 
Since there is no an Etymological dictionary , then you could post your questions and we'll try to find the correct answer .There are many Arabic dictionaries online as references .


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## ifi

The question is not if an Arabic etymological dictionary exists or not, the question is what does Arabic etymology consist of. The discovery of foreign words in Arabic is a worthy undertaking, but what kind of etymology is applicable to such indigenous words as day and night? In my humble opinion no worthy Arabic etymological dictionary is possible before this issue is clarified.​


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## MarcB

This is a limited one.


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## mansio

Since there must be dictionaries of Semitic Roots around (there are a couple on the Internet), I think it would not be too difficult a task to list the non-Semitic words in Classical Arabic, most of them of Persian or Indian origin.


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## Qcumber

Could you give theirs URLs, please.


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## Qcumber

MarcB said:


> This is a limited one.


A brave effort, but the transcription is a source of confusions.


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## mansio

Qcumber said:


> Could you give theirs URLs, please.



I thought it had already been given. Anyway here they are:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/Sroots.html


http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/query.cgi?flags=eygtnnl&basename
=%5Cdata%5Csemham%5Csemet

I don't know how the latter works. It's a Russian project.


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## Qcumber

Thanks a lot, Mansio. I could open the former, but not the latter.


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## MarcB

Qcumber,you need the whole thing.

http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/query.cgi?flags=eygtnnl&basename=%5Cdata%5Csemham%5Csemet


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## Lugubert

Stringent definitions of "etymology" aside, what I would like to see is primarily how a proposed proto-Semitic root evolves via intermediates into modern languages. Sometimes, dictionaries like Gesenius' Old Testament Hebrew dictionary will give you a nice collection of examples. For example, under _yad_ you will find cognate words for 'hand' from Aramaic, Samarian, Arabic, South Arabic, Ge'ez and Assyrian (_idu_). No Ugaritic there, though (but U. also has the root _yd_).


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## clevermizo

The problem I see with Arabic etymology is that for native words, such as يوم or بيت or أكل, what would the etymology consist of?

We would need very good documentation of forms present in language families like Ancient North Arabian, or other potential predecessors. However, we might have to "guess" about the vowels. Furthermore, we would need documentation about the flow of non-Arabic words into Arabic in ancient times, in pre-"Arabic" times. That seems rather difficult.

For example, if I cite the English etymology of the word "word" - well, we have attested Old English _word_, and then beyond that we have reconstructed Proto-Germanic or Proto-Indo-european etymon. If I cite English "cook", We have attested Old English _coc_, which in turn comes from Latin _coquus_. So not only do we know an older form (with vowels in tact) but also a Latin form from which it stemmed.

Now consider Arabic أكل. This is a native word, obviously, and the verb is pronounced [ʔakala], although in writing we only see the phonemes /ʔ-k-l/ but since it is a living language, we know the vowels.

Suppose we had the same word attested in an Ancient North Arabian inscription. However, for quite a long time, Semitic alphabet systems have not been including vowels. So we would expect to see [ʔ-k-l]. Is this [ʔakala]? [ʔekela]? [ʔakal]? Something altogether different? We can guess the vowels based on related languages like Hebrew, but then we are deriving the hypothetical form. 

I think an Arabic etymological dictionary would be an interesting project, but the etymology of native Arabic words would be a little obscure. I think it should consist of the following:

1) Native Arabic words with corresponding Proto-Semitic forms, and references to cognates in other Semitic languages like Amharic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Akkadian.

2) Origin of non-native words (Persian, Greek, Latin, English, other). Fortunately many of the traditional معاجم list whether a word is of say, Persian origin. 

I think this is a good project, but it will take some work to figure out what needs to be included.

Part of the reason that European languages like English have more "extensive" etymology, is that in Europe, throughout history, various dialects of different language groups have been standardized at different times. As such, there are more changes to observe throughout history, and there has been attention paid to studying those changes. If it was an etymology of _Palestinian_ Arabic, then we might have an analogous situation. We might observe that the word _shu_ derives from something like أي شيء هو which in turn derives from various Proto-Arabic or Proto-Semitic forms. However, in standard Arabic, the word ما is pretty much its own etymon. It has cognates, such as in Hebrew, but it's more or less the top of the food chain so the entry would be pretty short.


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## sahli

There is an extensive online etyomological dictionary for Arabic Language. Here is an example of the etymology of *Peridot *which is in arabic: زبرجد:
موقع العنقاء

Alankaa is an online dictionary for Arabic language, it also includes a dozen of standard dictionaries with images and automatic verbs conjugation and nouns derivation.


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