▪ According to ClassAr lexicographers,
zāra ‘to (pay) visit, call on’ as well as ↗
zūr_1 ‘lie, untruth, falsehood’ (
DRS #ZW/YR-1b) are based on an original meaning of the root of ‘to turn aside’ (
DRS #ZW/YR-1a), represented in MSA in the items treated s.v. ↗
zawar ‘inclination, obliqueness; squint’ (
ĭzwarra, vb. IX., ‘to turn aside’;
ʔazwarᵘ, adj., ‘inclined, slanting, oblique; crooked, curved; squint-eyed, cross-eyed’).
▪ Others would derive it from ↗
zawr ‘upper part of the chest’, interpreting ‘to visit’ as *‘to meet s.o. with one’s
zawr (chest, bosom)’ or as *‘to repair to s.o.’s
zawr ’ (i.e., in a fig. sense, the ‘direction of a person to whom one repairs’ – Lane).
▪ Kogan2015: 552 (#23) thinks that Ar
zāra ‘to visit’ and closely related values in SSem langs
1
perhaps belong together with Akk
zêru ‘to dislike, hate, avoid’ etc. (
DRS #ZW/YR-1d), a semantic complex the basic meaning of which is ‘to be an outsider; to be strange, foreign’ (cf. also SamAram
zr ‘strange, other’).
▪ Dolgopolsky2012#2673/74 thinks (but also has some doubts) that the semantics of Ar
zāra ‘to visit’ may be the result of a flowing together and overlapping of two originally distinct values, namely
(a) a WSem *
-zūr- ‘to visit’ (< AfrAs < Nostr *
z̍UR˹i˺/ ?*
z̍Uŕ˹i˺ ‘to look at, examine’, or *
žUR˹i˺ ‘to watch, to spy’), which gave Ar
zāra in the sense of ‘to visit a holy place (e.g., the tomb of a saint) or a person whom one wants to pay respect to’ (as well as the SSem cognates
2
), and
(b) a Sem *
zar- ‘foreign(er), enemy’ (< AfrAs < Nostr *
z̍oR˅ ‘foreign, hostile’), whence the Sem vb. root *√ZʔR or *√ZWR ‘to be foreign, hostile’
3
that not only gave Akk
zêru ~
zeʔāru ‘to dislike, hate, avoid’,
zāʔiru ~
zēʔiru ~
zêru ‘hostile’ (√ZʔR) etc.,
4
but also Ar
zāʔir ‘visitor, pilgrim’, interpreted as a PA of
zāra ‘to visit’ although deriving from Sem *√ZʔR / *√ZWR and originally meaning ‘foreign, hostile’. – Cf. Kogan’s idea, see preceding paragraph.
▪
DRS mentions that in the MġrAr Jewish dialects a distinction is made between
zwāraẗ ‘visit to a person’ and
zyāraẗ ‘visit to the tomb of a revered person’. The arrangement within the entry and the values given to the Ar forms suggest that the latter value may be the more original one. – If this reflects an earlier, more widespread distinction, it could serve as an argument supporting Dolgopolsky’s idea of the confluence and overlapping, in MSA
zāra, of two originally distinct themes.
▪ Apparently from
zāra ‘to (pay) visit, call on’ is also ↗
zīr_3 ‘ladies’ man, philanderer’, according to Lane iii (1867) so called because of his frequent visits to women.
▪ Perh. also the obsol.
†zawr ‘phantom in sleep’ (
DRS #ZW/YR-1g) should be related to
zāra, as *‘s.th. that visits you while you are asleep, in a dream’.
▪ Etymologies deriving ↗
zār ‘zar ceremony’ from
zāra ‘to visit’ »seem fantastic, although current in Arab milieux« – art. »zār« (A. Rouaud, T. Battain), in
EI². The word seems to have come into Ar, together with the ritual, from EAfrica, via EthSem, ultimately from a Cush milieu.