Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ ǦRṮM_1 ‘to fall down (and gather)’ ↗ǧurṯūm
▪ ǦRṮM_2 ‘a to gather (after falling down), place of collection, heap, ant-hill; b lowest part, root, base; origin; source; root of the tongue, epiglottis; germ; microbe, bacillus’ ↗ǧurṯūm

Other values, now obsolete:

▪ ^†ǦRṮM_3 ‘a (to take) the largest part; b (pl.) grandees, lords’↗ǧurṯūm
▪ ^†ǦRṮM_4 ‘to shrink’↗ǧurṯūm

conc

▪ All values belong somehow together. However, without cognates outside Ar it seems difficult to decide what was first: ǦRṮM_1 ‘to fall down (and gather)’ or ǦRṮM_2 ‘to gather (after falling down)’. DRS #GRṮM gives both Ar ǧurṯūm ‘petit amas de terre, obstacle; souche, noyau’ and taǧarṯama ‘tomber, choir; se pelotonner, se blottir’ as basic values. – For a suggested line of semantic development, see DISC, below.
▪ According to Ehret1995#285, Ar ǧurṯum ‘root, origin; earth round the foot of a tree’ represents an extension in “diffusive” *-ʦ and “noun suffix” *-m from a bi-consonantal “pre-Proto-Semitic” root *GR-‘to go down’ < AfrAs *-GǏR- ‘to sit’. – Other extensions from the same pre-protSem root: ↗ǦRː (ǦRR), ↗ǦRBZ, ↗ǦRǦM, ↗ǦRDL, ↗ǦRFS .
▪ …

hist

▪ Historically, the vb. and the n. seem to have existed alongside each other.
▪ From the root, vb.s I (ǧarṯama), II (taǧarṯama), and III (ĭǧranṯama) are attested, with II being the most frequent and enduring one (preserved even in WehrCowan1979) while I and III are rare and obviously coming out of use gradually by lC19 (Hava1899). In contrast, the n. (ǧurṯūm, -aẗ) is well-preserved until recently, probably due to its having taken on a modern meaning: ‘microbe, bacillus’. While older dictionaries list ‘germ, origin, source, root’ as the primary meaning, al-Mawrid1995 mentions ‘microbe, germ; bacterium, bacillus’ in the first place, before ‘germ, origin, source, root’.

cogn

▪ No obvious cognates outside Arabic.
▪ If a relationship beyond the traditional root system is not excluded, one might perhaps connect √ǦRṮM with the bi-consonantal nucleus ↗ǦM- which has ‘to gather, accumulate, compile’ as one of its basic meanings, cf., e.g., √ǦMD, ↗√ǦMHR, ↗√ǦMʕ, ↗√ǦML.

disc

▪ As a hypothesis, one may perhaps assume a semantic development along the following line:

‘to fall down’ (ǦRṮM_1) > ‘to gather, pile up (where s.th. has fallen down); place of collection, of piling up, heap’ (ǦRṮM_2a, cf., e.g., ^†ǧurṯūmaẗ al-naml ‘ant-hill’ ) (and ‘to shrink’, ^†ǦRṮM_4) > ‘(to take) the largest part’, i.e., what has piled up in one place, condensed portion (^†ǦRṮM_3a), metaphorically used for the elite, ‘grandees, lords’ (ǧarāṯīmᵘ, ^†ǦRṮM_3b) > ‘place on the earth where fallen things landed, lowest part, root, base’ (ǦRṮM_2b, MSA [v1]), hence ‘epiglottis’ (root of the tongue) and ‘origin; source’ [v2] > ‘to take root, come into existence, germinate; germ’ [v3], from eC20 onwards also used for ‘microbe, bacillus, bacterium’ [v4].

west

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deriv

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