Unless just another of the many derivations of ↗šaʕara ‘to know in detail, feel, perveive’ or directly from ↗šaʕr ‘hair’, the name of the Dog Star, widely worshipped in pre-Islamic Arabia, may go back to its Grk counterpart, Seírios. Until recently, this has been a common assumption. But it has been contested by the theory that it is the other way round and the Grk name is a borrowing from the East.
▪ eC7 Q 53:49 wa-ʔanna-hū huwa rabbu ’l-šiʕrà ‘and that He it is Who is the Lord of Sirius’
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▪ Rolland2014: »Peut-être du Grk Seírios, à moins que ce ne soit l’inverse.« 1 ▪ Jeffery1939: »The common explanation of the philologers is that it is from √ŠʕR and means ‘the hairy one’, but there can be little doubt that it is derived from the Grk Seírios,2
whose r, as Hess shows, is regularly rendered by Arab ʕ. The word occurs in the old poetry3
and was doubtless known to the Arabs long before Islam.«