Bibliotheca Polyglotta

While [v1] ‘sea’ is a loan from Hbr or Syr (< NWSem *yamm ‘sea’, in itself loanword, perh. from Eg ym), [v2] ‘side’ could be a dialectal form of Ar ↗ǧanb.

hist

▪ [v1] : eC7 Q 7:136, 20:39, 20:81, 20:97, 28:7, 28:40, 51:40 ‘sea, flood, river’

cogn

[v1] ‘sea’ :
▪ Kogan2015: No genuine cognates but related are Ug ym, Hbr yām, Syr yammā ‘sea’.

[v2] ‘side’ :
▪ Cf. perhaps Ar ↗ǧanb ?

disc

[v1] ‘sea’:
▪ Jeffery1938, 293: »It is used only in the Moses story, and refers sometimes to the Nile, sometimes to the sea. It was early recognized as foreign (Siddiqi, Studien, 13),¹ though the early authorities were uncertain of its origin. al-Jawālīqī, Muʕarrab, 156, says it is Syr, which was also the opinion of Ibn Qutayba,² according to as-Suyūṭī, Itq, 326. as-Suyūṭī, however, also tells us that Ibn al-Jawzī said it was Hebrew and Shaidala that it was Coptic.³ – It apparently came to Ar from Syr yamā, as Fraenkel, Vocab, 21, saw,⁴ though it may possibly have come into Ar from some primitive non-Sem source. The word clearly is not Sem, for Hbr yām; Phn ym; Aram YMā; and Ras Shamra ym cannot be explained from Sem material, and the word is a loan-word in Eg ym; Copt iam, iom, or eiom, and in Akk yamu. As the word occurs in the old poetry and was an early borrowing we cannot be absolutely sure that it was not primitive, having come into Ar, as into the other Sem languages, from some autochthonous source.«
▪ Kogan2015: Ar yamm is almost certainly borrowed from Hbr or Aram (cf. Jeffery 1938), which have a cognate only in Ug ym, but not farther outside NWSem. The pNWSem *yamm - obviously has gradually ousted *tihām (‑at)‑, perhaps the main designation of ‘sea’ in Sem (cf. Ar ↗tihāmaẗ).
▪ Youssef2003 suggests that the word is from Eg ym, Copt iom ‘sea’.
▪ Cf. also ↗ YMː (YMM).

[v2] (syr.) ‘side’:
▪ Wellnhofer thinks this may be a dialectal loan *yamm ~ *yamb from Ar ↗ǧanb ‘side’, which could be loaned from the Gulf to Iraq and Syria (an option still to be checked) – personal communication, 02Feb2016.

1. Cf. as-Suyūṭī, Muzhir, i, 130, and LA, xvi, 134. 2. Adab al-Kātib, 527. 3. Mutaw, 55, 57. 4. So Fraenkel, Fremdw, 231, quoting Nöldeke, and cf. Guidi, Delle Sede, 573.

west

–

deriv

► min yammī, adv., from my side, on my part: belonging to [v2].

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