Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ As also ↗buḫl ‘avarice, niggardliness, miserliness’, luʔm is a major antonym of the key concept of ↗karam.
▪ Of obscure etymology. BDB1906 evidently considers ‘baseness’ as the basic value of the root ↗LʔM to which also Hbr lᵊʔōm ‘people’ belongs, suggesting that the latter properly is *‘common, vulgar people’. But it could well be the other way round, given that ‘baseness’ seems to be peculiar to Ar, while ‘people’ etc. is more widespread in Sem (and possibly also AfrAs), cf. section COGN s.v. ↗LʔM. If ‘baseness, meanness, wickedness’ is from ‘people, crowd’ then we are dealing with an etymology corresponding to that of Engl vulgar from Lat vulgus ‘common people’. In Ar, however, there is no word meaning ‘people, crowd’ that would belong to the root LʔM. Hbr and Ug words for ‘people, crowd’ are often seen as a derivation from yet another value of LʔM, namely ‘to put together, assemble, join’ (people = *‘collective, assembly’), which in its turn is absent from these langs. If luʔm ‘baseness’ is from ‘people’, and the latter from ‘to put together, assemble’, then one will have to compare entry ↗laʔama (and, for the whole picture, ↗LʔM).

hist

▪ ClassAr (as in WKAS): laʔuma 1 to be ignoble, base, mean, dishonourable; 2 to be miserly, avaricious. – luʔm, n., 1 low, base attitude or sentiments, lowness, baseness, vileness, infamy; 2 miserliness. – laʔīm: as mod. use. – Cf. also ^†malʔamaẗ, n.f., baseness, vile, mean attitude or sentiments, vile deed, ignominy. – For attestations, cf. WKAS ii: 63, col. 2 f.; (laʔīm) 67, col. 1 ff.

cogn

▪ BDB1906 regards Ar laʔuma ‘to be low, ignoble’, liʔām (pl.) ‘common ones’ as akin to Hbr lᵊʔōm ‘people’.
▪ In contrast, Klein1987 connects Hbr lᵊʔōm, lᵊʔôm ‘nation, people’ (as well as Ug li͗m ‘people, crowd’ and Akk liʔmu, līmu ‘thousand’) with ↗Ar laʔama ‘to gather together, assemble’ (without mentioning luʔm).
▪ Militarev2006 (in StarLing), though with strong reservations and without discussion of internal dependence, presents all the following items in one unit: Akk līmu (*liʔmu) ‘one thousand’, Ug li͗m ‘people, clan’, Hbr lᵊʔōm, lᵊʔūm, pl. lᵊʔummīm ‘people, nation’, Syr lam ‘to collect’, Ar laʔama ‘to gather’, liʔm ‘agreement, harmony (between people); peace, concord’, liʔamaẗ, liʔāmaẗ ‘equal, similar, corresponding counterpart’, laʔīm ‘ignoble, mean; alike, equal, adequate’, liʔm ‘peace, concord; ressemblance betw. two people’; lumaẗ ‘small group of people (3-10 persons); similar, alike; equal (age, form)’; lām ‘similarity’; lummaẗ ‘companion; fellow-traveler who contributes to the travel provision; groupe of men (3-10 people), or women’, lamma ‘to pick up, collect s.th.’; Sab lʔm ‘to make a peace settlement’, lmw (*lmm) ‘to come to an agreement with s.o.’, Te läʔamä ‘to be attached, friendly’, Tña läʔamä ‘to be good, patient’. – He reconstructs Sem *LʔM, *LMM ‘to get together; to unite by common consent; peace treaty’, *liʔa/ām- ‘union, fraternity, people’ (implicitly relating ‘ignoble, mean’ etc. to the position of a derivation from ‘to get together, unite’), from AfrAs *liʔam- ‘to get together; to be relative, companion’.

disc

▪ See CONC above, and for more details ↗LʔM and ↗laʔama.

west

–

deriv

► laʔuma u (luʔm, laʔāmaẗ, malʔamaẗ), vb. I, to be ignoble, lowly (of character and birth); to be base, mean, vile, evil, wicked: denom., or the etymon proper?
► ʔalʔama, vb. IV, to act ignobly, behave shabbily: denom.
► talāʔama, vb. VI, 1 ↗laʔama. – 2 to act meanly: tL-stem, recipr.
► laʔīm, pl. liʔām, luʔamāʔᵘ, luʔmān, adj., ignoble, lowly, low, base, mean, evil, vile, wicked, depraved; sordid, filthy, dirty; niggardly, miserly: quasi-PP I, ints.adj.

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