Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ If Kogan2011 is right, the word derives from protSem *ʔalman-at‑ ‘widow’. In this case, indigenous Ar etymology which makes the word dependent on raml ‘sand’ should probably be dismissed. Ar lexicographers regard ‘widow’ as a semantic extension: ‘sand’ > ‘to cleave to the sand’ > ‘to look (so poor and needy) like s.o. who is cleaving to the sand because his traveling provisions are exhausted’ > ‘to be in need of s.o. who provides for o.s.’ >, ‘to be a widow’ (because widows are in need of s.o. to provide for them).
▪ An explanation of this evidence could be that with the gradual mutation, in Ar, of a Sem *ʔalman-at‑ to ʔarmal-aẗ, the original value of *LMN ‘to be without/in need of support’ began to overlap with Ar RML ‘sand’, ‘be covered with sand’, ‘creep in the sand’, ‘look sandy’, etc., so that the explanation of ‘being in need of support’ as derived from ‘being destitute, look poor like s.o. covered with sand’ seemed plausible to the Arab lexicographers.

hist

For the ClassAr dictionaries, the primary value of ʔarmalᵘ (as well as the PA IV, ^†murmil) is (Lane iii-1867) ‘a man whose provisions, or travelling-provisions, have become difficult to obtain, or exhausted, or consumed, and who has become poor’, hence also the more general meaning ‘needy, needing, in want’ and even ‘destitute, indigent’, the pl. ʔarāmilᵘ and ʔarāmilaẗ being applied also to ‘men without women, or women without men, after they have become in need or want’. While the m. does not seem, in ClassAr, to be used (in the sg. at least) with the specific meaning ‘widower’, the f. ʔarmalaẗ can mean ‘woman having no husband’ (in general) and, more specifically, ‘widow’. Wherever ʔarmalᵘ nevertheless means ‘widower’ this is regarded by many authorities to be »cases of deviation from the usual course of speech [▪ …] because the man’s provision does not go in consequence of the death of his wife, since she is not his maintainer, whereas he is her maintainer«.

cogn

Kogan2011: Akk almattu ¹ , Ug ʔalmnt, Hbr ʔalmānā, Syr ʔarmaltā ‘widow’

1. CAD: ‘woman without support, widow’

disc

▪ Classical dictionaries make ʔarmalaẗ depend on ↗raml ‘sand’: for them, the notion of be(com)ing a widow(er) seems to be a secondary value, developed from an earlier ^† ‘to be(come) poor, needy’. For the vb. IV ʔarmala, for example, Lane 3 (1867) gives ‘to become sandy’, hence (!) ‘to become poor’ [as though cleaving to the sand], ‘to become s.o. whose travelling-provisions became difficult to obtain, [… or] exhausted, or consumed’, and hence (!) ‘to become an ʔarmalaẗ (said of a woman), i.e., without a husband’ »because of her being in need of one to expend upon her«.
▪ Kogan2011 reconstructs Sem *ʔalman-at‑ ‘widow’ and thinks that the Syr and Ar forms (that show ‑r‑ instead of *‑l‑) »must be related with a mutation of sonorants.«
▪ Given, on the one hand, the wider Sem dimension and the old age of the meaning ‘woman without support, widow’ proper, and, on the other hand, the abundance of instances in ClassAr where the lack of support is associated with the “creeping in the sand” of those miserable who have come in a situation of need, we may be confronting a case of semantic overlapping and contamination here in which two originally distinct roots, *LMN and *RML, have merged, with *LMN mutating, phonologically, to RML and the sense of ‘lack of support’ intersecting and eventually being integrated into that of ‘sand’.

west

–

deriv

► ʔarmala, vb. IV, to become a widower or a widow: denom. (?).
► tarammala, vb. V, = IV.
► ʔarmalᵘ, pl. ʔarāmilᵘ, n., widower: (secondary?) m. of ʔarmalaẗ.
► tarammul, n., widow(er)hood: vn. V.

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