Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Pennacchio2011: Akk simmiltu ‘ladder, stair; rack’, Ug slm ‘stairs’, Hbr sullām, Aram swlmʔ, Ar sullam , Syr sebbeltā, nSyr sīmeltā ‘ladder’.
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▪ Jeffery1938, 177: »The word is clearly an Aram borrowing, for it has no root in Ar and can only be explained from Aram סולםא, as Schwally has noticed (ZDMG, liii, 197). The word does not occur in Syr, but its currency in NArabia is evidenced by a Palm inscription - ועבד בסלםא דנה עםודין שבעא ‘and he has made along with this stairway seven columns’ (De Vogue, No. 11, line 3). ¹ It would probably have been a fairly early borrowing, and as the word seems to be originally Akk,² one cannot lose sight of the possibility of the Ar word having been an early borrowing from Mesopotamia.«
▪ Pennacchio2011, 7: »Some of Jeffery’s demonstrations are incomplete, as it is the case for sullam ‘ladder’. The scholar devotes only a few lines to it and fails to connect this word to Jacob’s ladder, which must have a common origin with the Qur’ānic verse in which the word appears. Jeffery doesn’t mention Zuhayr’s Muʕallaqa or the Akk sources either. Nowhere does he highlight the phonological variations of the word: sullām in Hbr, sullam in Ar, and swlmʔ in Aram, on the one hand; and simmiltu in Akk, sebbeltā in Syr, and sīmeltā in Neo-Syr on the other hand. Jeffery believes that the Ar word was either borrowed from the Aram sulamaʔ or was an older borrowing from Akk. Phonologically, the latter hypothesis seems unlikely. The Ar word sullam may be a common Sem word; the existence of the Ug word slm ‘stairs’ could prove this proposition.«
▪ Klein1987: Hbr sullām ‘ladder’ (hapax leg. in the Bible) is formed from √SLL ‘to lift up’. Syr säbbaltā and sämmaltā are borrowed from Hbr.
▪ Obviously not connected to other items of ↗√SLM.

1. There is some doubt, however, as to whether the reading should be סלםא or צלםא, though in the facsimile it certainly looks like s and not ṣ. 2. See Schwally, ZDMG, liii, 197; Horovitz, JPN, 210.

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deriv

► sullam mutaḥarrik, n., escalator.

► sullamaẗ, n.f., step, stair: n.un. (?).

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