Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 May 31

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May 31

Where does the 'n' in the Arabic word for pharaoh come from?

In Egyptian there was no 'n' in the word for pharaoh (and neither is there one in Hebrew or English). In French the n of 'pharaon' comes from the Latin accusative (the declension is pharao, pharaonem). But where might the 'n' of the corresponding Arabic word 'firʿawn' (فِرْعَوْن) come from? Contact Basemetal here 12:46, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Classical Arabic contains an 'n' at the end of masculine nouns. 82.35.216.24 (talk) 13:44, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

There are thousands of masculine nouns in Arabic that do not end in 'n'. Are you talking about tanwīn? The 'n' at the end of 'firʿawn' is not tanwīn. Contact Basemetal here 14:20, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Etymonline only has "title of the kings of ancient Egypt, Old English Pharon, from Latin Pharaonem, from Greek Pharao, from Hebrew Par'oh, from Egyptian Pero', literally "great house."" so maybe it comes from French or Latin? KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 15:37, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

The word is already used in the Qur'ān so I'd say French is out.

An early (pre-Islamic) borrowing from Latin? Maybe not impossible even though this would seem a fairly circuitous way to go about it: why Latin instead of Aramaic, or Hebrew, or Coptic, or some other neighboring language? But, leaving that aside, the Latin nominative does not have an 'n'. You'd expect languages borrowing from Latin to borrow the nominative not the accusative. Are there other examples of borrowings from Latin using the accusative as their model? The case of words inherited from Latin by languages descended from Latin is different.

Going back to 82.35.216.24's suggestion, I wonder whether something that could have started as a tanwīn form 'firʿawun' (فِرْعَوٌ) based on 'firʿaw' (فِرْعَو), which as you can see would correspond etymologically to the Hebrew form, could not have given the Arabic form of the Qur'ān: so 'firʿaw' > 'firʿawun' > 'firʿawn'? But how would an indefinite (as the meaning of tanwīn is) eventually become the basic form of the noun? Are there other examples of Arabic words that were originally a tanwīn form where the 'n' of the tanwīn form eventually became part of the basic form of the word?

Contact Basemetal here 17:34, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Joseph Henry Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament says "Φαραων" with an N at the end is a variant spelling in Josephus. That's pretty much exactly the same as the Arabic spelling, so maybe that was a spoken form, and that's how Muhammad picked it up. Adam Bishop (talk) 12:57, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

'How the scribe picked it up' :) Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:02, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Why "the scribe"? Do you imagine Muhammad dictated without the 'n' and the scribe took it upon himself to insert an 'n'?

I'm skeptical of a direct Greek connection: the Greek form has lost the information that there was an ʿayin there and where it was. If borrowed from Greek, where would Arabic have gotten the ʿayin and how did it insert it exactly where it corresponds to that of the Egyptian word? From Greek 'Φαραων' you'd expect, wouldn't you say, Arabic 'faraʾūn' or 'faraʾun' (فَرَؤُون and فَرَؤُن respectively: I hope I got my hamzas right) according as, when the word was borrowed, vowel length was still a feature of the Greek language or not. In the former case I'm assuming that the alphas were all short, which I don't actually know. I also ignored the question of the first vowel which is in fact 'i' in the Arabic word. I don't think that is a serious problem. Arabic short vowels are unstable.

But maybe Adam is getting closer. Indeed, where did Josephus (or the copyist responsible for this variant) pick up his 'n'? If not Hebrew (which does not have the 'n') could it be Aramaic? Can anyone find some Aramaic or Syriac forms of 'pharaoh'?

Not directly connected: Does the Latin nominative of the word really have a short 'o' (as Wiktionary says)? Or in fact a long 'o'? If the word was borrowed from Greek you'd expect a long 'o', plus Latin nominatives in 'o' (imago, leo, etc.) usually end in a long 'o', so analogy would also seem to make the long 'o' more likely. I wonder if, for Latin, Wiktionary makes a distinction between "short vowel" and "vowel of unknown length". It is mostly vowels in closed syllables (not the case here) whose length is unknown (so called "hidden quantity"), for obvious reasons.

Amazingly it turns out that (this is 2015!) there still is no decent etymological dictionary for Arabic in any language? Apparently some people are working on one in Norway. Hard to believe isn't it?

Contact Basemetal here 18:48, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, apparently it's difficult to make an etymological dictionary for Arabic? Maybe it's because Arabic is relatively new as far as classical languages go...but there isn't even a Semitic etymological dictionary in general. There's one for Hebrew though. Anyway, another thought I had was that "fira'un" was constructed as a plural, but there's no precedent for that in the other languages (and that wouldn't work with the actual plural, "fira'ina"). Also, as you mentioned above, the Arabic is (فِرْعَوْن, not فِرَؤُن, so it's actually not the same as the Greek, but I suppose -αων would be pronounced as a diphthong there. As for where the ayin came from if it was borrowed from Greek, are there any other words where something similar happened? I'm sure there are but I can't think of any - the only one I can think of is Constantinople, where the Greek taus became ط and the kappa became ق - قسطنطينية. But those are consonants reinterpreted to a similar sound, not a vowel becoming a new consonant. Are there any other Greek names or words with the sequence -αω- borrowed into Arabic? Adam Bishop (talk) 23:49, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Latin universitas, accusative universitatem, that's how we got "university" in English and universitaet in German. Neither language is descended from Latin. In fact, English seems regularly to get its Latin - derived words from the accusative - "imaginary" and "leonine" have been flagged above and there must be hundreds more - I can think of legal, marginal, ordinal, pontifical, regal, sacerdotal and virgin.

You get some very weird transitions - for example the Babylonian arach - samna became the Hebrew Marcheshvan through perfectly regular rules of lexical change. As for pharaoh, could "pharaonic" have arisen from the same process that turned "a" into "an", or Portuguese "em" + "o" into "no"? 87.81.147.76 (talk) 09:35, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

'An' didn't come from 'a', it was the other way around. 'An' was the Old English word for 'one'. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 12:18, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure about German, but English either gets all those words from French, or from Latin adjectives which slready used the base form, so that's a different process. Adam Bishop (talk) 10:34, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

A language like Sard, which is really Latin with different endings, is already showing the change to noun formation from the accusative/genitive/dative/ablative stem. Why shouldn't a word like "virgin", for example, be directly formed from the Latin virginem? 87.81.147.76 (talk) 11:54, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Etymonline says it's from Anglo-French/Old French "virgine". In other words it is from 'virginem' but not directly from 'virginem'. It's through Old French. And in Old French this is not a borrowing from Latin but a word inherited from Latin. Those words do come from the accusative. I have not checked all of the evidence of course but I was taught that borrowings from Latin into French, English, etc. all use the nominative as their model. The reason could be that to foreigners, and to European scholars who were using Latin as their scholarly language, it was the nominative that "represented" the word. Similarly it is the nominative that we use in Latin dictionaries to represent the word. Not quite the same thing but it may give an idea of the process. I'm not claiming this rule is absolute and that someone may not be able to find a borrowing from Latin that does use the accusative. If you wanna try you can basically limit yourself to those words of the 3rd declension that have a different number of syllables in the nominative and the accusative.

Regarding Adam's question whether Arabic speakers would hear a vowel hiatus in a ancient Greek as an ʿayin or as a hamza: Greek χάος gives Arabic كاوس if you believe Arabic WP. There are at least two possibilities for its pronunciation (couldn't find a vocalization) but at least you can see there's no ʿayin. One example, that's not a lot a lot. Maybe others can come up with other examples. (And please don't forget my request for Aramaic pharaohs if you come across one.)

Contact Basemetal here 14:18, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

There is apparently a letter in Aramaic to a pharaoh, which you can read about on JSTOR, but it doesn't give the Aramaic text...still maybe that help find the original text. Adam Bishop (talk) 16:25, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Here is another, with the Aramaic text - although the word for Pharaoh is the same as in Hebrew, no indication of an N. This is from the 7th century BC though, so that doesn't really help figure out if there was an N there 1000 years later when Arabic borrowed it. Adam Bishop (talk) 16:55, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

OK, outdent to make this easier...it seems that the Peshitta version of the Bible uses the word for pharaoh with an N at the end at Romans 9:17. My search is a bit hampered by my inability to read Aramaic or Syriac and my lack of proper fonts, but this Peshitta New Testament search tool can be used to show the Syriac as well as Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin transliterations (all of which also contain the final N). This might help explain where Arabic got it from...although that still leaves us with the question of where Syriac got it from. (If it's actually a Syriac form then maybe that's where Josephus got his variant Greek spelling.) Adam Bishop (talk) 17:12, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Alan. Lots of stuff. It could turn out it's all from Aramaic/Syriac after all. That would seem to be the more natural, or at least the more expected answer as the source of Biblical stories in the Qurʾān seem to have been Aramaic speaking Christians and Jews. You may remember the story a few years ago about the houris being allegedly not in the least pure virgins but just white grapes. I don't know where that particular story is at, as I haven't been following it, but it would seem only natural if there was a little Aramaic influence hidden in the Qurʾān. But, as you say, that would only beg the question: Where did Aramaic get the 'n'? We'll worry about that another time. "After all, tomorrow is another day". This said I'd love to know what the Akkadian word is for 'pharaoh'. You may know that Akkadian was used through the whole of the Middle East (even in Egypt actually) as a diplomatic language and that could have influenced Aramaic which followed it as the diplomatic lingua franca. Or in Nabatean, an Aramaic dialect spoken by people who were ethnically Arabs and which may have influenced early Arabic. Mutual influences of Semitic languages on one another in the Middle East could give any linguist a serious headache, not to mention us, lowly dilettanti. In the end, if there is one origin it can't very well be anything other than analogy or morphology. It could also be "totally random" but that's just another name for "we haven't figured out the answer yet". But, like I said, tomorrow is another day. Contact Basemetal here 20:16, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

The Akkadian word seems to be "pirhu", obviously a borrowing, although they would also use their own word "lugal" to refer to a pharaoh. Adam Bishop (talk) 00:25, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

Latin had a predilection for putting "n" at the beginning of a suffix - thus Roma>Romanus. Could this be more of the same? 87.81.147.76 (talk) 17:41, 6 June 2015 (UTC)