Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ eC7 The word occurs three times in the Qur'an, always meaning ‘sweet-tasting water’, e.g., Q 77:27 wa-ʔasqaynā-kum māʔan furātan ‘and We gave you to drink sweet-tasting water’ (Badawi 2008).

cogn

Akk purattu, purāt, Hbr Syr pᵊrāt are not real cognates since the word is loaned from there.

disc

▪ Jeffery1937: 222-3: »The passages are all Meccan and refer to the sweet river water as opposed to the salt water of the sea, and in the two latter passages the reference is apparently to some cosmological myth. – In any case the word furāt is derived from the river Euphrates (Horovitz, KU, 130), which from the Sum pura-nun ‘great water’, appears in Akk as purattu, or purāt ¹ , and in oPers as Ufrātu,² whence the Grk euphrátēs. From the Akk come the Hbr pᵊrāt and Syr pᵊrāt, whence in all probability the Ar furāt, if indeed this was not an early borrowing from Mesopotamia.«
▪ Pennacchio2014:81 thinks the word is directly from Akk purāt, for phonological reasons. The meaning ‘sweet (water)’, as in the Q, »viendrait de l’une des caractéristique du fleuve«, by semantic extension.

1. Delitzsch, Paradies, 169 ff. 2. Spiegel, Die altpersischen Keilinschriften, p. 211, and cf. Meillet, Grammaire du vieux Perse, p. 164.

west

▪ The Eur names for one of the main rivers in Mesopotamia, e.g. Engl Euphrates, have all come in via Grk euphrátēs. Jeffery1938 thinks the latter is directly from Akk, while OED assumes oPers ufrātu as the more immediate source of borrowing. As this is perhaps from Av huperethuua ‘good to cross over’, composed of hu‑ ‘good’ + peretu‑ ‘ford’, which, however, according to Kent [Old Persian, p.176], probably is »a popular etymologizing in oPers of a local non-Iranian name«, we are back to Akk purattu, purāt, from Sum pura-nun ‘great water’.

deriv

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