▪ In the
DRS entry HǦR (#7, = HǦR_7 in ↗HǦR), YemAr
haǧar ‘ruins of an old city’ figures together with SSem words denoting ‘settlement, city’, ‘sedentary’, ‘city-dweller’. Ar
huǧraẗ ~
hiǧraẗ ‘agricultural settlement of the Wahabi Ikhwān in Nejd’ is not mentioned in
DRS but seems to belong to the same complex.
▪ The vb. ↗
haǧara ‘to depart, leave behind, emigrate’ (HǦR_1) may be connected to, if not denominative from, ‘settlement, city, sedentary’, cf. the meaning, given in Hava1899, of vb. III
hāǧara not only in the sense of ‘to emigrate’ but, more specifically, ‘to leave nomadic life’ (Lane: ‘to go forth from the desert to the cities or towns’), and that of
hiǧraẗ not only as ‘estrangement’ but also ‘removal from the desert to a town’; accord. to Lane, »this is the primary acceptation, with the Arabs, of the verb (when intrans.)«.
▪ Does also (
DRS HǦR#5) Syr
hᵉgar,
ʔahgar ‘to become a Muslim’,
mahgᵉrā,
mahgᵉrāyā ‘Muslim’ belong here? What at first may look as if it were derived from Ar
al-Muhāǧirūn ‘the Meccans who emigrated with Mohammed to Medina’ may however be in itself the source of the Ar word: Kerr2014 thinks that the meaning ‘to migrate’ is secondary,
al-Muhāǧirūn being based on Syr
mhaggrāyā (borrowed into Greek as
magaroí) as ‘the Hagarites’, a synonym for ‘Arabs’, the successors of Ismael, son of Abraham and Hagar, and the name Hagar (Hbr Hāgār) may have s.th. to do with ‘settlement, settling in a(nother) city’ (rather than meaning ‘flight’, as is usually assumed).
▪
DRS reports that YemAr
haǧar is perhaps is a
Wanderwort , akin to Sum
agar ‘irrigated territory’, Lat
ager ‘field’, IE *
ag̑ro-s ‘field, field in cultivation’.
1
▪ A relation to ‘hottest time of the day’ (HǦR_2, ↗
hāǧiraẗ) and ‘obscene language; to talk nonsense, talk through one’s hat’ (HǦR_3, ↗
huǧr) does not seem likely.