▪ Jeffery1938, 156-57: »The word has no verbal root in Arabic, [the verb]
zāta ‘to give oil’ being obviously denominative, as was clear even to the native Lexicographers (
LA, ii, 340, etc.). – Guidi,
Della Sede, 600, had noted the word as a foreign borrowing, and Fraenkel,
Fremdw, 147, points out that the olive was not indigenous among the Arabs.
1
We may suspect that the word belongs to the old pre-Semitic stratum of the population of the Syrian area. In Hbr, zayit means both ‘olive tree’ and ‘olive’,
2
but Lagarde,
Mittheilungen, iii: 215, showed that primitively it meant ‘oil’. In Aram we have
zayṯā and Syr
zēṯā, which (along with the Hbr) Gesenius tried unsuccessfully to derive from ZHH ‘to be bright, fresh, luxuriant’. The word is also found in Copt
čōit beside
čeeit and
čoeit, where it is clearly a loan-word, and in Phlv ????
3
and Arm
cēt’ ‘oil’,
cit’eni ‘olive tree’, which are usually taken as borrowings from Aram
4
but which the presence of the word in Ossetian
zet’i, and Georgian
zethi would at least suggest the possibility of being independent borrowings from the original population.
5
– The Ar word may have come directly from this primitive source, but more likely it is from the Syr
zēṯā, which also is the source of the Eth [Gz]
zayt (Nöldeke,
Neue Beiträge, 42).
6
It was an early borrowing in any case, for it occurs in the old poetry, e.g.
Divan Hudh, lxxii: 6;
Aġānī, viii: 49, etc.«
▪ Nişanyan_20Aug2015: mPers
zayt and Arm
tsét are from Aram.
▪ Outside Sem: nEg
ḏytw */zētu/, Copt
ǧoeit,
ǧōit,
ǧaeit ‘olive tree, olive’ is regarded to be a borrowing from Sem – Hoch1994.