Bibliotheca Polyglotta

The word is one of only 17 words in the Q which, ultimately, are of Grk origin. Cf. EALL (Gutas, “Greek Loanwords”): a loan from Syr yaqūnṭā that goes back to Grk ὑάκινθος hyákinthos ‘hyazinth’.

▪ eC7 Q 55:58 ‘ruby’

DRS 10 (2012)#YQNT: Aram yaqīnton, Syr yaqundā, Gz yākənt, Amh yakənt ‘hyacinthe (pierre précieuse)’

▪ Jeffery1938, 289: »It was very generally recognized as a loan-word from Pers.¹ Some Western scholars such as Freytag² have accepted this at face value, but the matter is not so simple, for the ModPers yāqūt is from the Ar (Vullers, Lex, ii, 1507), and the alternative form yākand, like the Arm yakownd, is from the Syr yaqūndā.³ – The ultimate source of the word is the Grk hyákinthos, used as a flower name as early as the Iliad,⁴ and which passed into the Sem languages, cf. Aram YQYNṬWN ⁵ ; Syr yaqūntā, and into Arm as yakintʽ.⁶ It was from Syr yaqūntā that the word passed into Eth [Gz] as yākənt ⁷ and with dropping of the weak n into Ar.⁸ – It occurs in the old poetry (cf. Geyer, Zwei Gedichte, i, 119), and thus must have been an early borrowing.«

1. al-Jawālīqī, Muʕarrab, 156; al-Ṯaʕālibī, Fiqh, 317; as-Suyūṭī, Itq, 325; Muṭaw, 47, 48; al-Khafāǧī, 216; TA, i, 598. 2. Lexicon, sub voc. 3. Nöldeke in Bessenberger’s Beiträge, iv, 63; Brockelmann, ZDMG, xlvii, 7. 4. Il, xiv, 348. Boissacq, 996, points out that the word is pre-Hellenic. 5. For other forms see Krauss, Griechische Lehnwörter, ii, 212. 6. Hübschmann, Arm. Gramm, i, 366. 7. Nöldeke, Neue Beiträge, 40. 8. Fraenkel, Vocab, 6; Fremdw, 61; Mingana, Syriac Influence, 90; Vollers, ZDMG, li, 305. Note also Parthian y'kwnd (Henning, BSOS, ix, 89).

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