ID … • Sw – • BP … • APD … • © SG | 15Feb2021
√ʕŠW/Y
haphazard communities, informal settlements, ‘mushroom city’, slums – ar/en.wikipedia
▪ ʕašwāʔiyyāt is not yet lexicalized in WehrCowan1979 as an item in its own right, as it is a term that evolved only towards the end of C20.
▪ Grammatically speaking, it is the nominalization of the f.pl. of ↗ʕašwāʔī ‘random, happening at random, without plan’ and thus means *‘the haphazard(ly built) ones (sc., settlements)’, short for al-manāṭiq (or al-mudun) al-ʕašwāʔiyyaẗ ‘the haphazard(ly built) areas (or towns)’. The adj. ʕašwāʔī is a nisba formation from ʕašwāʔᵘ ‘darkness, dark, gloom’, itself the f. form of the ʔafʕalᵘ adj. ʔaʕšà ‘1 dim-sighted; night-blind, nyctalopic; (hence also) 2 blind, aimless, haphazard, desultory, senseless’.
▪ For the wider context see ↗ʕišāʔ (= the item whose semantic value comes closest to the hypothetical etymon’s value *‘the time of nightfall, i. e. the first, or beginnng, of the darkness of night’).
http://www2.hf.uio.no/common/apps/permlink/permlink.php?app=polyglotta&context=ctext&uid=d9876f43-06ff-11ee-937a-005056a97067