Bibliotheca Polyglotta

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.«

1. Dans son «Nomenclature stellaire internationale et divinités arabes antiques», in Bulletin de la SELEFA no 17: 11-26, Roland Laffitte conteste en effet cette étymologie. Il voit dans ce nom propre un simple dérivé du verbe šaʕara ‘sentir, percevoir’. 2. Hess, ZS, ii: 221, thinks we have formal proof of the foreign origin of the word in the fact that the Bedouin know only the name mirzam for this star. LA, ii: 116, and vi: 84, gives mirzam as a synonym for šiʕrà, and this word is found again in the Bishari Mirdim. 3. See Hommel, ZDMG, xlv: 597, and Horovitz, KU, 119.

▪ Perhaps the Ar name is not loaned from Grk, but Grk Seírios is from an eastern source, perhaps Ar šiʕrà.

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