Re: Islamic Borrowings


Robert wrote:
> I reply to Yusuf B. Gurney 26 Dec.

my last name is not "Gurney".

a symptom ofthe amount of attention you paid to my post.

>
> I asked how extensive were the contacts between Latin speaking
> Romans and the Arabs. The examples that you give are, I believe,
> contacts between the Eastern Romans and the Arabs. These used Greek as
> a lingua franca not Latin.

but they were native latin speakers, and some amount of Latin was
used even in formal contexts, as evidenced from inscriptional
evidence. besides, they that they would on occasion use a latin
word even when speaking greek is a reasonable assumption.

>
> On the one hand you seem to confirm St Clair Tisdall's derivation of
> sirat from the Persian, on the other you seem to confirm that it might
> derive from Latin via Greek. You do not show that the proposed Latin
> original actually was accepted into Greek.

there is no need to rehash what is generally accepted. if you are
curious you could discover them by yourself if you wanted to. and
BTW I don't care if you consider this as "sidelining the discussion"
since I am not that enthusiastic in discussing with you at length
in the first place.

being "accepted" into Greek is irrelevant, and it obvious that Roman
and Byzantine era greek contains a high percentage of latin origin
words.

that the word involves a typicaly Roman activity lends credence. all
things being equal and with no evidence to the contrary its the
simplest and most reasonable explanation.

that being said, Jeffery in "The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur'an",
though otherwise a somewhat dated work, cites a Greek attestation
and its attestation in Aramaic.

there is no contradiction in having seperate origins for the common
noun found in the Qur'an and the proper name found in the Hadith.
as I said, the common noun may have influenced the form of the name
in arabic.

>
> As regards the Koran's being in clear Arabic, I mount no argument
> against this on the grounds that sirat derives from Persian. My

al-Sira:T as a proper noun, which is the one derived from persian, does
not occur in the Qur'an. the noun occuring in the Qur'an derives
ultimately from Latin. see above.

> interest is in the source of the myth. Nevertheless I understand that
> the Arabic of the Koran is often obscure and excessively allusive, and
> does contain foreign words which were obscure to early Muslim scholars.

the "obscure" vocabulary is limited to a handful of words. these are
words that had probably fallen out of common use later and / or
limited to the Hijaz. more radical theories have been discounted as
crackpot.

the rest is non-linguistic, such as the context of a particular
commandment or narrative etc.

>
> Please show where St Clair Tisdall's scholarship is vitiated by a
> polemical intention and please provide references to the up-to-date
> unpolemical sources you mention.

just look at the author's works and you will see that the author
accepts
christian dogma and the critical analysis is limited to what is outside
it or contradicts it. not to mention phrases like "ignorant Jew" or
"ignorant Arab" and in some works there are sections that advocate
christian dogma and reject muslim theology outright.

as for better sources, try first "Enc. of ISlam II". for more recent
developments just go to the periodical section of a good university or
public library and browse through the nuemrous non-theological
journals on history and language. but since your posts are of no
different intention than the sources you quote, I am not motivated to
do your "homework" for you further.


Robert wrote:
> I reply to Abdalla Alothman Dec 25



> As regards your assertion that God sent a messenger to the
> Indo-Europeans, this is just ad hoc dogmatic assertion. You have no
> evidence for it, so it is merely gratuitous.


this is another example of gratuitous usage of scientific jargon
where it doesn't belong in the first place and is wrong to boot.
no one talked about "Indo-Europeans" (properly speakers of
proto-Indo-European) in the first place. but Zoroaster did claim
to be a prophet to the Iranians, "Aryas", speakers of Old Iranian
languages, and advocated a monotheistic religion, and muslims,
certainly "officially" nowadays (acc. to a publication in Iran),
accept him as a prophet.



Robert wrote:
> I reply to Abdalla Alothman Dec 19
>
> Please establish that the Arabic lamguage is older than Farsi; but

another gaffe. in english "Farsi" refers to arabized new persian, so
yes, although it is usually hazardous to speak of the "age" of
languages, arabic is older than farsi. otherwise it would not have
been called so, which is an arabization of "parsi:". although all
this is non-sequitor anyway.



AnonMoos wrote:


> A number of your examples of alleged English loanwords from Arabic
> are very dubious. For example, "cube" most definitely does not
> come from ka`bah. If there's any connection at all (which is by
> no means clear), it would have been that the Greek word kuboi
> influenced the Arabic plural form ku`ub to mean "cubes" (in
> addition to other meanings which it already possessed).
>

the technical geometric meaning probably came later.

these are among the handful of words that have a superficial
resemblance between some or most Semitic and Indo-European (IE)
languages. some may be due to simple coincidence, some may be
ancient borrowings in either direction or from some third,
perhaps extinct language or language family, or some may be
due to a genuine relashinship between Afro-Asiatic (AA) and IE.

I fail to see the relevance to SRI or Islam, other than it
happens to be the name of the shrine.


AnonMoos wrote:


> The theological concept of a razor-edged bridge to the afterlife may
> of may not have been borrowed from Zoroastrianism (I'm not qualified
> to say one way or another), but the particular WORD "Sirat" most
> definitely was not. How can you get "SiraT" from "chinvad"? The
> historical phonology that would be involved doesn't seem to make
> all that much sense.


read my post. middle persian *ch* is usually rendered as S in arabic.
middle persian -wa- may lead to o: , NB *ch*unu:d which may go back to
earleir *ch*uno:d . cf. kurdish xwe$ ($ = *sh*; <e> rouughly like
persian /a/ and cognate to it), persian xu:$ (or [xe$] in some pedantic
readings), NB turkish (lw) ho$ . /a:/ was sometimes ponounced as [A:],
i.e. labailized, near [o:] in Old Hijazi. given orthographic *ch*inwat
and middle persian t frequently rendered as T in Old Arabic one obtains
*Sina:T . given the similarity of the beliefs, and that a bridge is
arguabely a type of "path" (Sira:T) and the not infrequent n ~ r
alterations in arabic, an alteration to (Al-)Sira:T is reasonable.
especially since a scholarly work accepts it.

.

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