▪ Jeffery1938: Ar
zūr »is linked with idolatry in Q 22:30, but in the other passages is quite colourless. – The usual theory of the philologers is that it is derived from
zawwara though this is clearly a denominative, and that the authorities felt some difficulty with the word is clear from
LA, v: 426. – Fraenkel,
Fremdw, 273, suggested that it was from [Hbr]
zr.
1
There is a Hbr word
zārâ ‘loathsome thing’ from √ZWR ‘to be loathsome’, but it seems hardly possible to derive the Ar from this. It would seem rather to be of Iranian origin. Pers
zūr is ‘lie, falsehood’, which Vullers,
Lex, ii: 158, gives, it is true, as a loan-word from Ar. He is certainly wrong, however, for not only does the word occur in mPers both simply as
zūr, a ‘lie, falsehood, fiction’,
2
and in compounds as
zūr-gukāsīh ‘false evidence, perjury’
3
and in the Pazend
zur ‘a lie’,
4
but also in the oPers of the Behistun inscription (where we read (iv: 63-4)
naiy draužana āham, naiy zārakara āham ‘I was no liar, nor was I an evil-doer’, and further (iv: 65)
naiy… zūra akunavam ‘I did no wrong’),
5
and in the Av
zūrōžata.
6
From mPers the word was borrowed into Arm, where we find
zowr ‘false, wrong’,
7
which enters into several compounds, e.g.
zraban ‘caluminator’,
zrkankʽ ‘injustice’, etc., so that it was probably directly from mPers that it came into Arabic.«
▪ Rolland2014a: from mPers
zūr ‘lie, falsehood, fiction’, akin to Av
zūrah ‘to deceive, cheat, lie, betray’.
▪ While Jeffery1938 and Rolland2014a regard
zūr ‘lie, untruth, falsehood’ as a borrowing from mPers (see preceding paragraphs), another tradition (cf.
DRS) sees it (as also the vb. ↗
zāra ‘to visit’) as development from an original ‘to incline, turn aside, etc.’, represented in MSA ↗
zawar ‘inclination, obliqueness; squint’,
ĭzwarra ‘to turn aside’,
ʔazwarᵘ ‘inclined, slanting, oblique; crooked, curved; squint-eyed, cross-eyed’ (≙
DRS #ZW/YR-1b).
▪ In MSA,
zūr and derivatives show an exclusively negative meaning (e.g.,
zawwara, vb. II, ‘to forge, falsify, counterfeit; to fake, simulate’), while in earlier times it was often used with a positive connotation;
zawwara could then also mean
†‘to set right; to improve; to embellish’.