Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ As both √ǦRṮM and ǧurṯūm are without obvious cognates outside Ar, and as also the n.s and vb.s seem to have existed alongside each other from early on, it is difficult to decide what was first. 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.

hist

▪ Historically, the values given in DRS – ‘small heap of earth, obstacle; stump, snag, nucleus’ and ‘to fall, fall down; to shrink, contract’ – seem to have existed alongside each other from early on.
▪ al-Mawrid1995 does not have the verbal root any longer but only lists ǧurṯūm, -aẗ.
▪ For the n., the earliest attestation (according to HDAL) is in a verse by the pre-Islamic poet ʿĀmir b. Wahb al-Muḥāribī, dated around 538 CE (as a terminus ante quem): wa-nursī ʾilà ǧurṯūmaẗin ʾadrakat lanā / ḥadīṯan wa-ʿādiyan min-a ’l-maǧdi ḫiḍrimā (ed. M.N. Ṭarīfī 1999), where ǧurṯūmaẗ means ‘anything that falls down and piles up around its root’ (kull šayʾ mā yatarākamu minhu muǧtamiʿan ʿalā ʾaṣlih).
▪ Earlier values encountered in the root, but become obsolete in MSA, are:
– ^†ǦRṮM_3 ‘(to take) the largest part’ (ǧarṯama, taǧarṯama; ǧurṯūm, aẗ); ‘grandees, lords’ (ǧarāṯīmᵘ, pl. of ǧurṯūm, aẗ)
– ^†ǦRṮM_4 ‘to shrink’: taǧarṯama, ĭǧranṯama.
▪ [v4] Monteil1960: 1955 (Académie de langue arabe du Caire, Congrès scientifique arabe) ʕilm al-ǧarāṯīm ‘bacteriology’.

cogn

▪ No obvious cognates outside Ar.
▪ Inside Ar, one may see a relation to the 2-cons. root nucleus √ǦM- which has ‘to gather, accumulate, pile up’ as one of its basic meanings, cf. ↗√ǦMD, ↗√ǦMʕ, ↗√ǦML, ↗√ǦMHR, etc.

disc

▪ As a hypothesis, one may perhaps assume a semantic development along the 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 the things that have fallen down 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

–

deriv

► taḥt al-ǧurṯūm, n., inframicrobe
► ʕilm al-ǧarāṯīm, n., bacteriology; for the latter, al-Mawrid1995 also gives ǧurṯūmiyyāt (n.f.pl.).

► taǧarṯama, vb. II, to take root, come into existence, germinate: denominative?

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