Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ LʔM_1 ‘to dress, bandage (a wound); to repair, mend; to solder, weld; to suit, fit together, be adequate, appropriate; peace, harmony’ ↗laʔama
▪ LʔM_2 ‘meanness, baseness, wickedness; niggardliness, miserliness; sordidness; iniquity’ ↗luʔm
▪ LʔM_3 ‘cuirass, chainmail’ ↗laʔmaẗ

Other values, now obsolete, include:

^†LʔM_4 ‘apparatus or gear of a plough, ploughshare’ : luʔ(a)maẗ

▪ It is not clear whether we are dealing with one or more "roots" here. LʔM_3 ‘cuirass, chainmail’ and ^†LʔM_4 ‘ploughshare’ most probably belong to LʔM_1 (ClassAr meaning: ‘to put s.th. together, fit together, connect, repair; to fit into one another, set on top of one another, esp. the feathers of an arrow’ – WKAS), both showing the overlapping of single elements, put together and/or on top of one another. Opinion differs however with regard to the question of relatedness, or non-relatedness, of LʔM_1 and LʔM_2.
▪ Those who do not exclude some kind of kinship between LʔM_1 and LʔM_2 are divided on the question which of the two may be the basic value from which the other should be derived. BDB1906 implicitly suggests that the value ‘people’ (Hbr, Ug, and as a loan also in Akk) originally was *‘common, vulgar people’, developed from the notion of ‘baseness, meanness, commonness’ of LʔM_2. But there is no further discussion that would try to answer the question how, if at all, the Ar value of ‘putting together, collecting, assembling’ (LʔM_1) that others usually see together with Hbr Ug (Akk) ‘people’, could be related to LʔM_2. As a secondary development, based on ‘people’ (the *‘collective’ body, the *‘assembled ones’)? A derivation of ‘baseness, meanness’ (LʔM_2) from ‘people’ (in its turn from LʔM_1 ‘to put together, collect, assemble’) would correspond to that of Engl vulgar from Lat vulgus ‘common people, crowd’.
▪ The value ‘people’ in Hbr and Ug may also not be the *‘collective’ but rather *‘those who have reached an agreement’ (cf. the notion of ‘to suit, fit, be adequate’ and ‘to make peace’, prominent esp. in the L-stem of LʔM_1). ‘People’ would then be a group who has ‘repaired’ internal conflicts and ‘dressed the wounds’ that had been open after disagreement.
▪ StarLing(Militarev2006) reconstructs Sem *LʔM, *LMM ‘to get together; to unite by common consent; peace treaty’, going back, like also extra-Sem cognates, to AfrAs *liʔam‑ ‘to get together; to be relative, companion’.
▪ For further details, cf. section DISC below.
▪ For other roots containing L and M and expressing a ‘putting together, joining, connecting, assembling, uniting’, cf. ↗lamma ‘to gather, collect’ (√LMː/LMM, also lamlama ‘id.’), ↗laḥama ‘to meld, patch, weld, solder’ (also laḥḥama, √LḤM), ↗lazima ‘to cling, adhere, belong, accompany’ (√LZM). A distant relationship exists perhaps also between the *L-M sequence and the one with the reverse order, *M-L, often expressing a similar notion of ‘company’ (cf., e.g., ↗zumlaẗ ‘party, company of people’, ↗zamīl ‘companion, associate, comrade; colleague; accomplice’, √Z-ML), but also ‘inclusion’ and ‘completeness’ (↗ǧamala ‘to sum up’, ↗ǧumlaẗ ‘totality, sum, whole; group’, √Ǧ-ML; ↗šamila ‘to contain, enclose, include’, √ŠML; ↗kam˅la ‘to be/become whole, entire, integral, perfect, complete’, √K-ML; etc.).

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▪ StarLing (Militarev2006): Akk līmu (*liʔmu) ‘one thousand’, Ug li͗m ‘people, clan’, Hbr lᵊʔōm, lᵊʔūm, pl. lᵊʔummīm ‘people, nation’, Syr lam ‘to collect’, Ar lʔm ‘to gather’, liʔam- ‘accord, harmony (between people); peace, concord’, liʔamaẗ, liʔāmaẗ ‘equal, similar, corresponding counterpart’; laʔīm ‘ignoble, mean; similar, equal, adequate’; līm ‘peace, concord; ressemblance betw. two people’; lumaẗ ‘small group of people (3-10 persons); similar, identical; equal (age, form)’; lām- ‘parenté’; lummaẗ ‘compagnon; compagnons de voyage, qui participent aux provisions de route; troupe d’hommes (3-10 people); troupe de femmes’, lamūm ‘qui réunit dans son sein plusieurs personnes ou choses, et offre un rendez-vous’, LMM ‘ressembler, réunir en ramassant de tous côtés ce qui était dispersé’, Sab lʔm ‘to make a peace settlement’, lmw (*lmm) ‘to come to an agreement with s.o.’, Te läʔamä ‘to be attached, friendly’, Tña cf. läʔamä ‘to be good, patient’.
▪ Tropper2008: Akk liʔmu, līmu, Ug li͗m /liʔmu/, Hbr lᵊʔōm, lᵊʔôm ‘people’.
▪ Klein1987: Akk liʔmu, līmu ‘thousand’, Ug li͗m ‘people, crowd’, Hbr lᵊʔōm, lᵊʔôm ‘nation, people’, Ar laʔama ‘to gather together, assemble’
▪ BDB1906: Ar laʔuma ‘to be low, ignoble’, liʔām (pl.) ‘common ones’, Hbr lᵊʔōm ‘people’

▪ WehrCowan1979 treats LʔM_1 through LʔM_3 in one lemma, suggesting that they are semantically related. StarLing, too, does not separate the cognates of LʔM_1 and LʔM_2, not without adding, however, that the two values are quite far from each other and it therefore is legitimate to have serious doubts about their belonging together. According to the author (Militarev?), even the relation between Akk līmu (*liʔmu) ‘one thousand’, Hbr lᵊʔōm, lᵊʔôm ‘nation, people’ and Ar laʔama ‘to put together, gather together, assemble’, as put forward by Klein1987 and Tropper2008 (‘thousand’ and ‘people’ as a larger number of things or persons, a *‘collective, assembly’, held together by mutual agreement) cannot be taken for granted.¹
▪ In contrast, BDB1906 speculates that the notion of ‘lowness, commonness’ (LʔM_2), expressed in Ar laʔuma ‘to be low, ignoble’, liʔām (pl.) ‘common ones’, may be the basic value of √LʔM from which Hbr lᵊʔōm ‘people’, »prop. ‘common, vulgar people’«, is derived. – It remains unclear, however, where BDB would place LʔM_1 in this picture.
▪ BadawiHinds1986 keeps EgAr lāʔam (vb. III, tr.) ‘to suit, be compatible with’ (LʔM_1) apart from laʔam u (vb. I, intr.) ‘to behave with deceit or cunning’ (LʔM_2), treating them as two homonymous roots. Interestingly enough, in EgAr, LʔM_2 has variants based on √LʕN (↗laʕana ‘to curse’) in all its forms.² It seems that fuṣḥā terminology is reinterpreted here by the vernacular to make better sense of the abstract moral concept of luʔm for the common people.
▪ Irrespective of due reservations as to the belonging of some values (‘thousand’, ‘wickedness’, etc.) to the same Sem root, StarLing reconstructs Sem *LʔM, *LMM ‘to get together; to unite by common consent; peace treaty’, *liʔa/ām- ‘union, fraternity, people’ and puts this together with Eg rmṯ ‘person’ (< *l˅m-˅k ?, cf. Fay lōm-i ‘id.’), WChad *lilim- ‘assembly for special occasions’ (reconstr. from evid. in 1 lang), CChad *luma (?) ‘market’ (< *‘gathering of people’?), EChad *lam˅m- (based on forms like lùm, lámmà, lũmmè) ‘to gather’ (intr.), pile’; LEC *lamm- ‘companion, relative’ (cf. Som lammaan ‘to be companion’, Or lammii ‘(close) relations’³ ), HEC *lamm- ~ *m˅ll- ‘close relative; person’ (based on moollo ‘close relative’, lámmi ‘person’), SCush *lama(l)- ‘age-set’ (lama ‘serpentine ochre marking on body’ in 1 lang). The common ancestor of all these is reconstructed as AfrAs *liʔam- ‘to get together; to be relative, companion’.

1. Note that there are several līmu in Akk (cf. CAD): While līmu A ‘thousand’ seems to be genuine Akk, there is also līmu C ‘family, clan’, which accord. to CAD is a WSem loanword. 2. Vb. I laʔam ~ laʕan; vn. I luʔm ~ luʕn and n. luʔumiyyaẗ ~ luʕuniyyaẗ ‘cunning’; adj./quasi-PP laʔīm ~ laʕīn ‘cunning, sly’; elat. ʔalʔam ~ ʔalʕan ‘more/most wicked or sly/abominable’; vb. VI ĭtlāʔim ~ ĭtlāʕin ‘to behave deviously or cunningly’; vb. X ĭstalʔim ~ ĭstalʕin ‘1 to consider cunning; 2 to behave cunningly’. 3. Perhaps from Ar.

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laʔam‑ لَأَمَ , a (laʔm)

ID … • Sw – • BP … • APD … • © SG | 15Feb2021

√LʔM

vb., I

1 to dress, bandage (a wound). – 2 to repair, mend (s.th.). – 3 to solder, weld – WehrCowan1979.

▪ The modern meanings of the vb. go back to a basic notion, in ClassAr, of ‘to put s.th. together, fit together, connect, repair; to fit into one another, set on top of one another (feathers of an arrow)’, in its turn perhaps (as suggested by Militarev) from a Sem *LʔM, *LMM ‘to get together; to unite by common consent; peace treaty’, from AfrAs *liʔam‑ ‘to get together; to be relative, companion’.
▪ Via the value ‘people’, not realized in Ar but in Hbr and Ug, which is likely to be from Sem *to get together, unite’, Ar laʔama may also be connected to laʔuma (↗luʔm) ‘to be ignoble, lowly (of character and birth); to be base, mean, vile, evil, wicked’, the development ‘base, mean’ < ‘people’ being similar to that of Engl vulgar from Lat vulgus ‘common people, multitude, crowd, throng’.

▪ ClassAr (as in WKAS): laʔama, vb. I, 1 to put s.th. together, fit together, connect, repair; 2 to fit into one another, set on top of one another (feathers of an arrow). – ^†talaʔʔama, vb. V, to close, heal (wound). – III and VI: as mod. use. – laʔm, 1 vn. I, joining, union, connection; 2 adj., firm, solid, hard, strong; 3 n. (as also laʔmaẗ, n.un., f.), armour made of iron rings, chain-mail; 4 (arrow) with feathers fitted into one another, set on top of one another. – liʔm, n., 1 agreement, concord; 2 fitting, appropriate person, companion.

▪ Militarev2006 (in StarLing): Akk līmu (*liʔmu) ‘one thousand’, Ug li͗m ‘people, clan’, Hbr lᵊʔōm, lᵊʔūm, pl. lᵊʔummīm ‘people, nation’, Syr lam ‘to collect’, Ar lʔm ‘to gather’, liʔam- ‘accord, harmony (between people); peace, concord’, liʔamaẗ, liʔāmaẗ ‘equal, similar, corresponding counterpart’; laʔīm ‘ignoble, mean; similar, equal, adequate’; līm ‘peace, concord; ressemblance betw. two people’; lumaẗ ‘small group of people (3-10 persons); similar, identical; equal (age, form)’; lām- ‘parenté’; lummaẗ ‘compagnon; compagnons de voyage, qui participent aux provisions de route; troupe d’hommes (3-10 people); troupe de femmes’, lamūm ‘qui réunit dans son sein plusieurs personnes ou choses, et offre un rendez-vous’, LMM ‘ressembler, réunir en ramassant de tous côtés ce qui était dispersé’, Sab lʔm ‘to make a peace settlement’, lmw (*lmm) ‘to come to an agreement with s.o.’, Te läʔamä ‘to be attached, friendly’, Tña cf. läʔamä ‘to be good, patient’.
▪ Tropper2008: Akk liʔmu, līmu, Ug li͗m /liʔmu/, Hbr lᵊʔōm, lᵊʔôm ‘people’.
▪ Klein1987: Akk liʔmu, līmu ‘thousand’, Ug li͗m ‘people, crowd’, Hbr lᵊʔōm, lᵊʔôm ‘nation, people’, Ar laʔama ‘to gather together, assemble’
▪ BDB1906: Ar laʔuma ‘to be low, ignoble’, liʔām (pl.) ‘common ones’, Hbr lᵊʔōm ‘people’

▪ Militarev2006 (in StarLing) underlines that his putting together such a large variety of diverging semantic values (‘thousand’, ‘to gather, collect’, ‘companionship, people, clan, nation’, ‘accord, harmony, peace’, ‘ressemblance, similarity’, ‘baseness, meanness’, etc.) may raise severe doubts. Nevertheless, he seems to be convinced that, ultimately, we are dealing with one etymon. Irrespective of the question whether Akk līmu ‘one thousand’ and Ar laʔīm ‘ignoble, mean, base, wicked’ (↗luʔm) rightfully belong here, the prevalence of the notion of companionship and accord/harmony among a group of people seems to have convinced the author that ‘coming/putting together, uniting, assembling’, as in Ar laʔama, is the basic meaning of the root. Accordingly, he reconstructs Sem *LʔM, *LMM ‘to get together; to unite by common consent; peace treaty’, *liʔa/ām- ‘union, fraternity, people’. Given what may be extra-Sem cognates,⁴ the author even suggests to trace all these back to an AfrAs *liʔam- ‘to get together; to be relative, companion’.
▪ Like Militarev2006, also WehrCowan1979 treats all items with the root LʔM in one lemma, suggesting that they are semantically related.

4. Eg rmṯ ‘person’ (<*l˅m-˅k?, cf. Fay lōm-i ‘id.’), WChad *lilim- ‘assembly for special occasions’ (reconstr. from evid. in 1 lang), CChad *luma (?) ‘market’ (< *‘gathering of people’?), EChad *lam˅m- (based on forms like lùm, lámmà, lũmmè) ‘to gather’ (intr.), pile’; LEC *lamm- ‘companion, relative’ (cf. Som lammaan ‘to be companion’, Or lammii ‘(close) relations’; perh. < Ar), HEC *lamm- ~ *m˅ll- ‘close relative; person’ (based on moollo ‘close relative’, lámmi ‘person’), SCush *lama(l)- ‘age-set’ (lama ‘serpentine ochre marking on body’ in 1 lang).

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► lāʔama, vb. III, to agree (DO with s.o.); to suit, fit (garment; s.o.); to be adequate, appropriate (to s.th.), be suitable, fit, proper, convenient, favorable, propitious (for s.th.); to be adapted (DO to), be in harmony with, match (s.th.); to agree (climate, food; with s.o.), be wholesome (climate, air, food; DO for s.o.); to bring about a reconciliation, make peace (bayna between), reconcile (bayna… wa‑ s.o. with); to make consistent or congruous, reconcile, harmonize, bring into harmony (different things): L-stem, assoc.
► talāʔama, vb. VI, 1 to be mended, be repaired, be corrected: tD-stem, quasi-pass. of vb. III. – 2 to go well (maʕa with): intr. – 3 ↗luʔm.
► ĭltaʔama, vb. VIII, 1 to be mended, be repaired, be corrected. – 2 to be joined, be connected, be patched up, be soldered, be welded. – 3 to match, fit together, harmonize, be in harmony, agree, go together, be congruous, conformable, consistent; to be tuned or geared to each other (fig.). – 4 to unite, combine. – 5 to cohere, stick together. – 6 to heal, close (wound). – 7 to gather, assemble, convene (persons); to meet (committee, congress, council, etc.): t-stem, quasi-pass./intr. of I.
► laʔm, n., 1 dressing, bandaging (of a wound). – 2 joining, junction, connection. – 3 repair: vn. I.
► laʔmaẗ, n.f., cuirass, pair of cuirasses: probably called so on account of the interlocking of its chain links, set on top of one another (cf. SEMHIST).
► liʔm, n., 1 peace. – 2 concord, agreement, union, unity, unanimity. – 3 conformity, consistency, harmony: obviously a fig. use of the basic value of ‘binding together, repairing, joining’.¹
► mulāʔamaẗ, n.f., 1 adequacy, appropriateness, properness, suitability, fitness. – 2 peacemaking, (re)conciliation. – 3 concord, union, agreement, harmony: vn. III.
► ^BP#3142mulāʔim, adj., adapted, suited, appropriate (li‑ to), suitable, fit, proper, convenient, favorable, propitious (li‑ for); agreeing, harmonizing, in conformity, consistent (li‑ with): PA III.

1. Cf. Freytag1830 on laʔama : ‘obligavit (vulnus), colligavit (rupturam); inde (!) in gratiam reduxit, pacem composuit’.

luʔm لُؤْم

√LʔM

1 ignoble mind, baseness, meanness, vileness, wickedness. – 2 niggardliness, miserliness. – 3 sordidness. – 4 iniquity – WehrCowan1979.

▪ As also ↗buḫl ‘avarice, niggardliness, miserliness’, luʔm is a major antonym of the key concept of ↗karam.
▪ Of obscure etymology. BDB1906 evidently considers ‘baseness’ as the basic value of the root ↗LʔM to which also Hbr lᵊʔōm ‘people’ belongs, suggesting that the latter properly is *‘common, vulgar people’. But it could well be the other way round, given that ‘baseness’ seems to be peculiar to Ar, while ‘people’ etc. is more widespread in Sem (and possibly also AfrAs), cf. section COGN s.v. ↗LʔM. If ‘baseness, meanness, wickedness’ is from ‘people, crowd’ then we are dealing with an etymology corresponding to that of Engl vulgar from Lat vulgus ‘common people’. In Ar, however, there is no word meaning ‘people, crowd’ that would belong to the root LʔM. Hbr and Ug words for ‘people, crowd’ are often seen as a derivation from yet another value of LʔM, namely ‘to put together, assemble, join’ (people = *‘collective, assembly’), which in its turn is absent from these langs. If luʔm ‘baseness’ is from ‘people’, and the latter from ‘to put together, assemble’, then one will have to compare entry ↗laʔama (and, for the whole picture, ↗LʔM).

▪ ClassAr (as in WKAS): laʔuma 1 to be ignoble, base, mean, dishonourable; 2 to be miserly, avaricious. – luʔm, n., 1 low, base attitude or sentiments, lowness, baseness, vileness, infamy; 2 miserliness. – laʔīm: as mod. use. – Cf. also ^†malʔamaẗ, n.f., baseness, vile, mean attitude or sentiments, vile deed, ignominy. – For attestations, cf. WKAS ii: 63, col. 2 f.; (laʔīm) 67, col. 1 ff.

▪ BDB1906 regards Ar laʔuma ‘to be low, ignoble’, liʔām (pl.) ‘common ones’ as akin to Hbr lᵊʔōm ‘people’.
▪ In contrast, Klein1987 connects Hbr lᵊʔōm, lᵊʔôm ‘nation, people’ (as well as Ug li͗m ‘people, crowd’ and Akk liʔmu, līmu ‘thousand’) with ↗Ar laʔama ‘to gather together, assemble’ (without mentioning luʔm).
▪ Militarev2006 (in StarLing), though with strong reservations and without discussion of internal dependence, presents all the following items in one unit: Akk līmu (*liʔmu) ‘one thousand’, Ug li͗m ‘people, clan’, Hbr lᵊʔōm, lᵊʔūm, pl. lᵊʔummīm ‘people, nation’, Syr lam ‘to collect’, Ar laʔama ‘to gather’, liʔm ‘agreement, harmony (between people); peace, concord’, liʔamaẗ, liʔāmaẗ ‘equal, similar, corresponding counterpart’, laʔīm ‘ignoble, mean; alike, equal, adequate’, liʔm ‘peace, concord; ressemblance betw. two people’; lumaẗ ‘small group of people (3-10 persons); similar, alike; equal (age, form)’; lām ‘similarity’; lummaẗ ‘companion; fellow-traveler who contributes to the travel provision; groupe of men (3-10 people), or women’, lamma ‘to pick up, collect s.th.’; Sab lʔm ‘to make a peace settlement’, lmw (*lmm) ‘to come to an agreement with s.o.’, Te läʔamä ‘to be attached, friendly’, Tña läʔamä ‘to be good, patient’. – He reconstructs Sem *LʔM, *LMM ‘to get together; to unite by common consent; peace treaty’, *liʔa/ām- ‘union, fraternity, people’ (implicitly relating ‘ignoble, mean’ etc. to the position of a derivation from ‘to get together, unite’), from AfrAs *liʔam- ‘to get together; to be relative, companion’.

▪ See CONC above, and for more details ↗LʔM and ↗laʔama.

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► laʔuma u (luʔm, laʔāmaẗ, malʔamaẗ), vb. I, to be ignoble, lowly (of character and birth); to be base, mean, vile, evil, wicked: denom., or the etymon proper?
► ʔalʔama, vb. IV, to act ignobly, behave shabbily: denom.
► talāʔama, vb. VI, 1 ↗laʔama. – 2 to act meanly: tL-stem, recipr.
► laʔīm, pl. liʔām, luʔamāʔᵘ, luʔmān, adj., ignoble, lowly, low, base, mean, evil, vile, wicked, depraved; sordid, filthy, dirty; niggardly, miserly: quasi-PP I, ints.adj.

laʔmaẗ لَأْمَة

√LʔM

n.f.

cuirass, pair of cuirasses – WehrCowan1979.

▪ Together with an obsol. ^†luʔ(a)maẗ ‘ploughshare’, laʔmaẗ ‘cuirass, chainmail’ most probably belongs to ↗laʔama (ClassAr meaning: ‘to put s.th. together, fit together, connect, repair; to fit into one another, set on top of one another, esp. the feathers of an arrow’ – WKAS), both showing the overlapping of single elements, put together and/or on top of one another.

▪ WKAS : in ClassAr also laʔm ‘armour made of iron rings, chainmail’

▪ No direct cognates.
▪ If akin to ↗laʔama, cf. there and, for the general picture, ↗LʔM.

Cf. CONC above.

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