Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ LʔM_1 ‘to dress, bandage (a wound); to repair, mend; to solder, weld; to suit, fit together, be adequate, appropriate; peace, harmony’ ↗laʔama
▪ LʔM_2 ‘meanness, baseness, wickedness; niggardliness, miserliness; sordidness; iniquity’ ↗luʔm
▪ LʔM_3 ‘cuirass, chainmail’ ↗laʔmaẗ

Other values, now obsolete, include:

^†LʔM_4 ‘apparatus or gear of a plough, ploughshare’ : luʔ(a)maẗ

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▪ It is not clear whether we are dealing with one or more "roots" here. LʔM_3 ‘cuirass, chainmail’ and ^†LʔM_4 ‘ploughshare’ most probably belong to LʔM_1 (ClassAr meaning: ‘to put s.th. together, fit together, connect, repair; to fit into one another, set on top of one another, esp. the feathers of an arrow’ – WKAS), both showing the overlapping of single elements, put together and/or on top of one another. Opinion differs however with regard to the question of relatedness, or non-relatedness, of LʔM_1 and LʔM_2.
▪ Those who do not exclude some kind of kinship between LʔM_1 and LʔM_2 are divided on the question which of the two may be the basic value from which the other should be derived. BDB1906 implicitly suggests that the value ‘people’ (Hbr, Ug, and as a loan also in Akk) originally was *‘common, vulgar people’, developed from the notion of ‘baseness, meanness, commonness’ of LʔM_2. But there is no further discussion that would try to answer the question how, if at all, the Ar value of ‘putting together, collecting, assembling’ (LʔM_1) that others usually see together with Hbr Ug (Akk) ‘people’, could be related to LʔM_2. As a secondary development, based on ‘people’ (the *‘collective’ body, the *‘assembled ones’)? A derivation of ‘baseness, meanness’ (LʔM_2) from ‘people’ (in its turn from LʔM_1 ‘to put together, collect, assemble’) would correspond to that of Engl vulgar from Lat vulgus ‘common people, crowd’.
▪ The value ‘people’ in Hbr and Ug may also not be the *‘collective’ but rather *‘those who have reached an agreement’ (cf. the notion of ‘to suit, fit, be adequate’ and ‘to make peace’, prominent esp. in the L-stem of LʔM_1). ‘People’ would then be a group who has ‘repaired’ internal conflicts and ‘dressed the wounds’ that had been open after disagreement.
▪ StarLing(Militarev2006) reconstructs Sem *LʔM, *LMM ‘to get together; to unite by common consent; peace treaty’, going back, like also extra-Sem cognates, to AfrAs *liʔam‑ ‘to get together; to be relative, companion’.
▪ For further details, cf. section DISC below.
▪ For other roots containing L and M and expressing a ‘putting together, joining, connecting, assembling, uniting’, cf. ↗lamma ‘to gather, collect’ (√LMː/LMM, also lamlama ‘id.’), ↗laḥama ‘to meld, patch, weld, solder’ (also laḥḥama, √LḤM), ↗lazima ‘to cling, adhere, belong, accompany’ (√LZM). A distant relationship exists perhaps also between the *L-M sequence and the one with the reverse order, *M-L, often expressing a similar notion of ‘company’ (cf., e.g., ↗zumlaẗ ‘party, company of people’, ↗zamīl ‘companion, associate, comrade; colleague; accomplice’, √Z-ML), but also ‘inclusion’ and ‘completeness’ (↗ǧamala ‘to sum up’, ↗ǧumlaẗ ‘totality, sum, whole; group’, √Ǧ-ML; ↗šamila ‘to contain, enclose, include’, √ŠML; ↗kam˅la ‘to be/become whole, entire, integral, perfect, complete’, √K-ML; etc.).

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▪ StarLing (Militarev2006): Akk līmu (*liʔmu) ‘one thousand’, Ug li͗m ‘people, clan’, Hbr lᵊʔōm, lᵊʔūm, pl. lᵊʔummīm ‘people, nation’, Syr lam ‘to collect’, Ar lʔm ‘to gather’, liʔam- ‘accord, harmony (between people); peace, concord’, liʔamaẗ, liʔāmaẗ ‘equal, similar, corresponding counterpart’; laʔīm ‘ignoble, mean; similar, equal, adequate’; līm ‘peace, concord; ressemblance betw. two people’; lumaẗ ‘small group of people (3-10 persons); similar, identical; equal (age, form)’; lām- ‘parenté’; lummaẗ ‘compagnon; compagnons de voyage, qui participent aux provisions de route; troupe d’hommes (3-10 people); troupe de femmes’, lamūm ‘qui réunit dans son sein plusieurs personnes ou choses, et offre un rendez-vous’, LMM ‘ressembler, réunir en ramassant de tous côtés ce qui était dispersé’, Sab lʔm ‘to make a peace settlement’, lmw (*lmm) ‘to come to an agreement with s.o.’, Te läʔamä ‘to be attached, friendly’, Tña cf. läʔamä ‘to be good, patient’.
▪ Tropper2008: Akk liʔmu, līmu, Ug li͗m /liʔmu/, Hbr lᵊʔōm, lᵊʔôm ‘people’.
▪ Klein1987: Akk liʔmu, līmu ‘thousand’, Ug li͗m ‘people, crowd’, Hbr lᵊʔōm, lᵊʔôm ‘nation, people’, Ar laʔama ‘to gather together, assemble’
▪ BDB1906: Ar laʔuma ‘to be low, ignoble’, liʔām (pl.) ‘common ones’, Hbr lᵊʔōm ‘people’

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▪ WehrCowan1979 treats LʔM_1 through LʔM_3 in one lemma, suggesting that they are semantically related. StarLing, too, does not separate the cognates of LʔM_1 and LʔM_2, not without adding, however, that the two values are quite far from each other and it therefore is legitimate to have serious doubts about their belonging together. According to the author (Militarev?), even the relation between Akk līmu (*liʔmu) ‘one thousand’, Hbr lᵊʔōm, lᵊʔôm ‘nation, people’ and Ar laʔama ‘to put together, gather together, assemble’, as put forward by Klein1987 and Tropper2008 (‘thousand’ and ‘people’ as a larger number of things or persons, a *‘collective, assembly’, held together by mutual agreement) cannot be taken for granted.¹
▪ In contrast, BDB1906 speculates that the notion of ‘lowness, commonness’ (LʔM_2), expressed in Ar laʔuma ‘to be low, ignoble’, liʔām (pl.) ‘common ones’, may be the basic value of √LʔM from which Hbr lᵊʔōm ‘people’, »prop. ‘common, vulgar people’«, is derived. – It remains unclear, however, where BDB would place LʔM_1 in this picture.
▪ BadawiHinds1986 keeps EgAr lāʔam (vb. III, tr.) ‘to suit, be compatible with’ (LʔM_1) apart from laʔam u (vb. I, intr.) ‘to behave with deceit or cunning’ (LʔM_2), treating them as two homonymous roots. Interestingly enough, in EgAr, LʔM_2 has variants based on √LʕN (↗laʕana ‘to curse’) in all its forms.² It seems that fuṣḥā terminology is reinterpreted here by the vernacular to make better sense of the abstract moral concept of luʔm for the common people.
▪ Irrespective of due reservations as to the belonging of some values (‘thousand’, ‘wickedness’, etc.) to the same Sem root, StarLing reconstructs Sem *LʔM, *LMM ‘to get together; to unite by common consent; peace treaty’, *liʔa/ām- ‘union, fraternity, people’ and puts this together with Eg rmṯ ‘person’ (< *l˅m-˅k ?, cf. Fay lōm-i ‘id.’), WChad *lilim- ‘assembly for special occasions’ (reconstr. from evid. in 1 lang), CChad *luma (?) ‘market’ (< *‘gathering of people’?), EChad *lam˅m- (based on forms like lùm, lámmà, lũmmè) ‘to gather’ (intr.), pile’; LEC *lamm- ‘companion, relative’ (cf. Som lammaan ‘to be companion’, Or lammii ‘(close) relations’³ ), HEC *lamm- ~ *m˅ll- ‘close relative; person’ (based on moollo ‘close relative’, lámmi ‘person’), SCush *lama(l)- ‘age-set’ (lama ‘serpentine ochre marking on body’ in 1 lang). The common ancestor of all these is reconstructed as AfrAs *liʔam- ‘to get together; to be relative, companion’.

1. Note that there are several līmu in Akk (cf. CAD): While līmu A ‘thousand’ seems to be genuine Akk, there is also līmu C ‘family, clan’, which accord. to CAD is a WSem loanword. 2. Vb. I laʔam ~ laʕan; vn. I luʔm ~ luʕn and n. luʔumiyyaẗ ~ luʕuniyyaẗ ‘cunning’; adj./quasi-PP laʔīm ~ laʕīn ‘cunning, sly’; elat. ʔalʔam ~ ʔalʕan ‘more/most wicked or sly/abominable’; vb. VI ĭtlāʔim ~ ĭtlāʕin ‘to behave deviously or cunningly’; vb. X ĭstalʔim ~ ĭstalʕin ‘1 to consider cunning; 2 to behave cunningly’. 3. Perhaps from Ar.

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