Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Within the whole ↗ḤWR complex, ḥawar, EgAr ḥūr in the sense of ‘bark-tanned sheepskin, basil’ stands rather isolated in terms of semantics. In MSA, the word can also mean ‘white poplar’ (↗ḥaw(a)r) and ‘marked contrast between the white of the cornea and the black of the iris’ (↗ḥawar), both going back to a word for ‘white’ (treated under ↗ḤWR_1 and ↗ḥawar). The pl.s of the variants mentioned in Lane’s lexicon (ḥūrān, ḥawarān) could, however, point in another direction, but it is not clear which that might be, the main values of ḤWR, besides ‘white’, being ‘black’, ‘to (re)turn’, and perhaps also ‘deep, hollow’.

hist

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cogn

▪ DRS 9 (2010)#ḤWR 13: EgAr ḥūr ‘peau de chevreau’ is listed as distinct item, without direct cognates.
▪ If the word nevertheless should be akin to ‘(marked contrast between black and) white’, one will have to confrom ↗ḥawar. – For the whole picture, see ↗ḤWR.
▪ Lane reports (s.v. ḥawar) that what »in the present day [is] pronounced ḥawr « and applied to ‘sheep-skin leather’, originally meant ‘red skins, with which [baskets of the kind called] silāl are covered; (pl. ḥūrān, ḥawarān) a hide dyed red; red skins […]; skins tanned without qaraẓ, thin white skins of which [receptacles of the kind called] ʔasfāṭ are made; prepared sheep-skins’.

disc

▪ Although DRS lists the‘bark-tanned sheepskin, basil’ as a distinct item and gives the variant ḥūr as a dialectal word belonging to EgAr, the word is also found in fuṣḥà and still forms part of the MSA lexicon (as ḥawar or ḥawr). Lane reports that what »in the present day [is] pronounced ḥawr « and applied to ‘sheep-skin leather’, originally meant ‘red skins, with which [baskets of the kind called] silāl are covered; (pl. ḥūrān, ḥawarān) a hide dyed red; red skins […]; skins tanned without qaraẓ, thin white skins of which [receptacles of the kind called] ʔasfāṭ are made; prepared sheep-skins’. So, we have an oscillation in meaning between ‘(dark) red’ and ‘white’ here. The latter makes a relation of the word to the complex treated under ↗ḥawar ‘(marked contrast between black and) white’ rather likely. The pl. forms and the notion of ‘(dark) red’ however are apt to call such a connection into doubt. DRS may be right, therefore, to treat the word with caution.

west

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deriv

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