Motke: The case of the Semitic ش sheen becoming Arabic س seen! How did this happen?

Submitted by dhimmi no more, Feb 10, 2019 at 09:46

Hi Motke,

The Arabic alphabet was supposed to be 22 letters just like Syriac alphabet. We have very few pre-Qur'an Arabic inscriptions but they lack the dots, hamza (case in point the Quranic word المليكة v the 3rd century reading by al-mufasereen as الملاءكة) , shadda or double consonants and short vowels. So we don't know what the Arabic language sounded like prior to Islam. More likely that not pre-Islam Arabs would have been speaking Arabic that has many loan words and grammar from Syro-Aramaic. Case in point: The Quranic word al-Tur which is not an Arabic word. It is a Syro-Aramaic word for mountain. Muhammad must have understood the meaning of such word. Modern Arabs have no clue what al-Tur means! Also check Q69:47 and as was pointed out by Noldeke that this is not Arabic grammar. This is Syriac grammar but it would have been understood by Muhammad and his followers, but it was a linguistic puzzle to al-Mufasereen 300 years later

Now take the case of the word "Sun"

1. In Syriac it is ܫܡܫܐ or Shimsha

2. In Hebrew: Shemesh

3. In Akkadian: Shamash

4. In Ugaritic: Shpsh

5. In Arabic it is: شمس or Shams so the last letter becomes seen

http://www.assyrianlanguages.org/akkadian/dosearch.php?searchkey=%C5%A1am%C5%A1u&language=rawakkadian

How did this happen? We do not know what would the word "sun" have been prior to Islam Shamsh or Shams

Remember that most of al-Mufasereen were Persians and not Arabs but the word in Persian does not help that much as it is: Aftab

2. The word "five" in Syriac is ܚܡܫ or Khamish (Khamesh in Hebrew) and it becomes خمسة in Arabic or Khamsa. I believe that this could very well be a misreading of the word in Syriac because the Syriac letter ܚ is similar to the Arabic letter ح. However, it is vocalized as Kh or Arabic خ and the last letter in the Arabic version of the word could very well have been in pre-Islamic Arabic as a sheen not a seen. So the word five in Arabic could very well have been حمشة or Hamsha

BTW: the above about the word Khamsa is only work in progress

Again, the real tragedy of Islam is:those that wrote the earliest book of Islam were Persians and not Arabs!

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%AE%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%A9

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