▪ The meaning ‘to lacerate the skin (with a whip)’ seems to go back to an original sense of ‘to loosen\peel off the flesh from the bones’, well attested in ClassAr.
▪ Accord. to Ehret1989 #21, ¹
salaqa ‘to loosen the flesh from the bones’ may be analyzed as an extension in *
Ḳ (»intensive (effect)«) from pre-protSem *√SL
1
‘to draw out or off’; so also ↗
salaḫa (< *SL + »extendative fortative« *
Ḫ) ‘to skin, flay, throw off the slough’.
▪ Leslau2006 thinks that Ar ¹
salaqa ‘to peel off (flesh) from (the bone)’ has cognates in Akk (
šalāqu ‘to cut open, split’) and EthSem (e.g., Gz
śalaqa~
salaqa ‘to grind fine, crush, peel, husk’); if this is valid, one may reconstruct protSem *ŠLḲ ‘to cut, crush, peel off’, which, however, would be homonymous with protSem *
ŠLḲ ‘to boil, cook’, rather reliably reconstructed on the basis of wider attestation (Kogan2011) (cf. ↗³
salaqa) – rather unlikely, esp. so in light of the semantic distance between ‘cutting, splitting’ and ‘scraping, peeling’. Therefore, it would probably make more sense to see the Akk and EthSem items together with Ar ↗
šalaqa (
u,
šalq) ‘to split lengthwise’ (< protSem *ŚLḲ?) rather than with ¹
salaqa ‘to lacerate, flay, etc.’.
▪ Or is ‘to lacerate the skin’ a development from ‘to remove (hair, etc.) with boiling water’ (↗²
salaqa), in its turn perh. the result of semantic extension from ‘to boil, cook in boiling water’ (↗³
salaqa), perh. under the influence of ↗
salaḫa ‘to skin, flay, etc.’?
▪ The basic meanings attached to ¹
salaqa, i.e., ‘to loosen\peel off (the flesh from the bones)’, ‘to lacerate, skin, scrape off’ etc., seem to have given rise to a number of semantic extensions building on them either literally or figuratively – see below, section DISC.
▪ …