# ديدن



## Ali Smith

مرحبا

والحقُّ أن المتنبِّي كان ديدنه أن يوقع قُرَّاءه في الحَيرة بمثل هذه العبارات المتعدِّدة الدلالات

What does ديدنه أن يوقع mean?

The truth is that the false prophet was...his readers in astonishment with expressions that had many different meanings.

شكرا


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## djara

المتنبِّي   is the nickname of a famous poet.
The truth is that the poet Al Mutanabbi regularly/frequently plunged/threw his readers into a tangle/perplexity with expressions that had more than one meaning.


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## Tilmeedh

Ali Smith said:


> مرحبا
> 
> والحقُّ أن المتنبِّي كان ديدنه أن يوقع قُرَّاءه في الحَيرة بمثل هذه العبارات المتعدِّدة الدلالات
> 
> What does ديدنه أن يوقع mean?
> 
> The truth is that the false prophet was...his readers in astonishment with expressions that had many different meanings.
> 
> شكرا



I found a page here on

(ديدن)

at Almaany. I'll quote it in full in case the link doesn't work because of the non-Latin letters in the URL.



> - Particular established way of behaving
> - Custom (especially having a legal force)
> - Moral strength or very distinguishing quality
> - Special quality or feature of something
> - Accepted behaviour among members of a society
> - A distinctive or characteristic part of a thing
> - mark; peculiarity; property; quality; skill; characteristic; custom; character



Unsurprisingly, Almaany has a page here on

(وقع),

which includes this entry:



> *وَقَعَ* ( فعل ): - عَلِقَ بِـ
> 
> - Get caught in
> - Get stuck in
> - catch in



I wonder if the verb in your sentence is supposed to be pronounced 'yuwqi3' or 'yuwaqqi3', making it a causative form of (potentially) the above term.

Given this data, I would tentatively propose this translation, based on your work:

'The truth is that the distinguishing characteristic/special skill of the false prophet was to entrap his readers by befuddling them with such phraseology as this which can be interpreted in multiple and conflicting ways.'


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## Ali Smith

Thanks! What does ديدن mean though? Is it a borrowing from Persian? I know it means "to see" in Persian. It doesn't sound like an Arabic word at all.


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## djara

ديدن is a habit (الدَّيْدَنُ :عادَةٌ ودَأْبٌ, al Maany), maybe also something you will insist on doing again and again.


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## elroy

You could say "was *wont* to...".


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## cherine

Tilmeedh said:


> I wonder if the verb in your sentence is supposed to be pronounced 'yuwqi3' or 'yuwaqqi3', making it a causative form of (potentially) the above term.


yuqi3 is from the verb أَوْقَعَ-يُوقِعُ-إيقاعًا (to make someone fall).  The expression يُوقِع في الحيرة means to confuse, to cause confusion, to befuddle...


> the false prophet


Why do you repeat this false prophet thing?  المتنبي is a famous poet, and even if he wasn't, we don't translate people names, right?


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## Tilmeedh

cherine said:


> yuqi3 is from the verb أَوْقَعَ-يُوقِعُ-إيقاعًا (to make someone fall).  The expression يُوقِع في الحيرة means to confuse, to cause confusion, to befuddle...



What I had in mind was that this phrase could be translated literally as 'to cause to fall into confusion/befuddlement'.



> Why do you repeat this false prophet thing?  المتنبي is a famous poet, and even if he wasn't, we don't translate people names, right?



I jumped right away to the phrase that the OP was asking about. Thanks for catching my very silly mistake. 

How should we understand the phrase

(هذه العبارات المتعدِّدة الدلالات)?


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## elroy

these/such polysemous expressions/phrases


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## Ali Smith

djara said:


> ديدن is a habit (الدَّيْدَنُ :عادَةٌ ودَأْبٌ, al Maany), maybe also something you will insist on doing again and again.


Thanks! It doesn't sound like an Arabic word though. I mean, I have never seen an Arabic word whose first two radicals are the same. Sure, there are tons whose last two are the same, e.g. خفّ, مرّ, and ردّ. I bet ديدن is a borrowing from Persian or some other language.


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## Tilmeedh

For what it's worth, the Wiktionary page on this term says it originates in a three-consonant base of 'daal-daal-nuun'--but, of course, the link given leads to a blank page.

I share your sentiment that (ديدن) sounds very un-Arabic. I can think of one other case of a noun with the same first and second consonants: (بابور). Wiktionary does not classify it as a loanword, but the relevant page also lacks an 'Etymology' section.


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## djara

Ali Smith said:


> I bet ديدن is a borrowing from Persian or some other language.


I really have no idea about its etymology, but you're right-- it doesn't sound typically Arabic.



Tilmeedh said:


> I can think of one other case of a noun with the same first and second consonants: (بابور)


بابور is a borrowing from French 'vapeur'. Other borrowings: بابونج, شاش زيزفون
But there are also Arabic words such as: باب (door) خوخ (the fruit and the door)  دودة (worm) نون (the letter) ليل (night)


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## Derakhshan

This paper [PDF] derives it from Persian _dīde dāne_ ("seen and learnt").


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## WadiH

It sounds as Arabic as any other. Those who think it sounds un-Arabic maybe need to broaden their reading of classic Arabic texts.  Unless someone can find positive evidence that it was borrowed there is no reason to presume that it was borrowed.


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## Derakhshan

I don't say for sure that it's a foreign borrowing, its wazn is nothing strange for Arabic. But it could *possibly* be from a foreign word whose form was Arabized. c.f. Middle Persian _payādag _"foot soldier"_ > _Arabic بيادق "pawns" (and the back-formed singular بيدق). 

If we can't find any other d-d-n words with a related meaning, then this becomes more likely.


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## Derakhshan

Derakhshan said:


> This paper [PDF] derives it from Persian _dīde dāne_ ("seen and learnt").


The link is dead, here's another one


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## WadiH

Derakhshan said:


> I don't say for sure that it's a foreign borrowing, its wazn is nothing strange for Arabic. But it could *possibly* be from a foreign word whose form was Arabized. c.f. Middle Persian _payādag _"foot soldier"_ > _Arabic بيادق "pawns" (and the back-formed singular بيدق).



Everything is possible, but we have to have reasons to think it probable.  As a wise member here once said, there has to be some incongruity that leads us to suspect that a word might be a borrowing.  There is no incongruity here, except perhaps for those who have not gained a full exposure to the older texts and are mainly familiar with what they call "MSA".



Derakhshan said:


> If we can't find any other d-d-n words with a related meaning, then this becomes more likely.



This doesn't really say much.  There are plenty of roots that are used with multiple unrelated meanings, and there are roots that did not in practice produce many words.  Most importantly, we need to identify the word in a source language, which no one has convincingly done.



Derakhshan said:


> The link is dead, here's another one



I honestly don't see any connection with that Persian phrase. It doesn't sound like the Arabic word and its meaning is unrelated.


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## Derakhshan

I was already familiar with this word before posting in this thread, and I don't see the relevance of "being broadly read" in determining etymologies of words. A word like ميدان doesn't look like a loan at first glance, yet it is. That wouldn't be obvious even to a person well-read in Arabic.

We can perhaps get hints by looking at the word's variants. There is ديدان and even ديداء according to one dictionary.


*ديداء*
1-عدو سريع.و ديدان. دأب، عادة
*المعجم: *الرائد

So maybe the root is actually d-y-d and not d-d-n.

Do we know the oldest attestation of the word, does it occur in pre-Islamic times?


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## WadiH

Derakhshan said:


> I was already familiar with this word before posting in this thread, and I don't see the relevance of "being broadly read" in determining etymologies of words. A word like ميدان doesn't look like a loan at first glance, yet it is. That wouldn't be obvious even to a person well-read in Arabic.



That wasn't about you.  A couple of people on the thread thought it must be a loan simply because "it didn't sound Arabic" to their ears. To my ears, it sounds perfectly Arabic, though, and of course the more Arabic you've read the less unusual a word is likely to sound.  Obviously, a word can still be a loanword even though it doesn't "sound" like it (like your maydan example), but that's because we have other evidence.  I'm open to ديدن being a loan - but not because it sounds foreign (because it doesn't).



Derakhshan said:


> Do we know the oldest attestation of the word, does it occur in pre-Islamic times?



I haven't looked.


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## HoopoeOfHope

I don't know the etymology and it could be loaned, but I don't find the word to sound unarabic. Now, it is true that native Arabic roots cannot begin with two identical consonants. There are no roots like r-r-t or s-s-w for example, however, I don't think the word ديدن is formed with two د as d-d-n but with a ي in the middle and the root has four consonants d-y-d-n. perhaps this is an extension of the root d-y-d. This means that the word could be of Arabic origin but it doesn't confirm it.

For what it's worth, we have the word ديدحان in my dialect that means "poppy" and at least it begins with the same consonants and the letter ح makes me think it's not a word of Persian origins. I don't know what the origin of ديدحان is though and I don't think it's related to the word ديدن.


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