I was investigating the word gandoura ‘A long, loose gown worn mainly in the Near East and North Africa’ (OED) because its Russian equivalent гандура (or rather гондура, which sounds the same in standard Russian) shows up in the epilogue to Bely’s chef d’oeuvre Petersburg (see this 2010 post); the OED says “< Algerian Arabic gandūra, classical Arabic ḳandūra, and Wikipedia gives the Arabic form as قندورة (although Arabic Wikipedia has كندورة — what’s up with that?).
But when I found it on p. 195 of The Arabic Contributions to the English Language: An Historical Dictionary by Garland Hampton Cannon and Alan S. Kaye (Harrassowitz, 1994) I noticed a more interesting etymology just above it:
gamashes, pl. (1596) Cloth. (Archaic, Scotland) Infrequent var. gamash, sing. + 10 [MF gamaches, pl. < OProv garamacha, galamacha < OSP guadameci colored or embossed leather < Ar ghadāmasi of the Tripoli town of Gadàmes, where this ornate leather was produced] Leggings or gaiters worn by horseback riders.
The OED (entry revised 2013) agrees, adding “The forms gamashoes, gammashoes show alteration by folk-etymological association with shoes, plural of shoe n.” Great stuff; what puzzles me a bit is why the unstressed third syllable in ghadāmasi, with its short -a-, wound up stressed in the Romance forms. (For English, the OED gives British /ɡəˈmaʃ/ guh-MASH, U.S. /ɡəˈmæʃ/ guh-MASH.)
You didn’t drop the other shoe. Cannon and Kaye say “Algerian Ar gandūra < Ar qandūrah ostentatious dress.”
Perhaps there is a confusion with (or an authentic relationship to) غَنْدُور ghandūr which Dozy (here) translates, ‘C’est un jeune homme de basse condition, qui, dans sa mise et dans ses manières, affecte une certaine élégance allant jusqu’à la recherche; ceux qui ne l’aiment pas l’appellent un fat, un muscadin.’
I haven’t gotten far past that. Corominas’s entry for alcandora says the word is originally Arabic. He refers me to Dozy (here and here) who thinks it came to Arabic from Berber, and notes the word appears in Edrisi and in Habicht’s edition of The 1001 Nights. Corominas rejects early suggestions that it’s a Latin loanword.
Modern Hebrew has the verb gndr, in the sense of overdoing one’s external appearance, in dress or in makeup; it is usually applied, in humorous deprecation, toward what in English would be called matrons. It was coined by Ben Yehuda on the basis of the Arabic word, and of a hapax in the Babylonian Talmud. There is an interesting analysis of the latter by Ha’aretz language columnist Elon Gilad (here, Hebrew, paywalled.) The Talmudic story goes as follows (here): a man comes to a miracle maker, saying he doesn’t like his wife; the miracle maker casts a spell to make the wife beautiful. After the spell has taken effect, the man returns, saying qāʾ migandrāʾ ʿălay, ‘she [migandrāʾ, 3 sg. f. reflexive] toward me’, and so the miracle maker returns her to her previous homely appearance.
The root gndr appears elsewhere in Aramaic, in the sense of ‘roll off (tr.)’ as a stone from the mouth of a well. Rashi tried to connect the word in the story with the roots gdl ‘to become big’ or gdr ‘to fence in’, and therefore interpreted the word, with the reflexive verb, as ‘she acts haughty toward me’; this is the common translation nowadays.
Gilad recognizes the problems with this, and notes that the word appears in a number of different versions in different early manuscripts: מיגדרא, מרדא, מרדה, ממדרא/ממדדא. In particular, Münich 140 has מגררא migarǝrāʾ, later altered by a scribe to מגנדרא migandrāʾ. migarǝrāʾ, with a common meaning of the verb, would be ‘arouse’. In other words, the man found his wife had become unacceptably sexy for him.
(BTW, while keeping his focus on the language, Gilad does not hide his disgust at the basic premise of the story.)
I hope somebody pointed out that that is the Talmudic Gndr or Mary-Ann.
Odd that Wikipedia states that the Gandura is like a Djellaba but without the hood; when I lived in Morocco as a child the main difference was that a Gandura was made of lighter material (and indeed didn’t have a hood) and was something you’d only wear at home rather like a nightshirt, while a Djellaba was made of (much) thicker material (and had a hood), but worn only outside. But maybe it’s different in Algeria.
Russian wikipedia says, По сведениям «Словаря иностранных слов, вошедших в состав русского языка» Чудинова А. Н., вышедшего в 1910 году, слово происходит от старофранцузского gambe — современного jambe — в значении нога. Современные словари возводят этимологию (иногда через испанский) к арабскому gaddmasi — «кожа из Гадамеса в Триполитании» (yes, 3 syllables only)
yes, 3 syllables only
Ah, that would explain the Romance words — thanks!
Federico Corriente (2008) Dictionary of Arabic and Allied Loanwords, p. 317f, on guadamecí:
The Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, vol. 19, on the form of gamache:
Brüch’s account in Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 51 (1931) is here. For lagniappe, the family of Spanish guadamecí is also the source of godemichet.
Corriente also has something to say on alcandora (Ar. qandūrah):
I wonder where Corriente got the Persian etymology and the ultimately Iranian etymology from the form reflected in Greek as κάνδυς. It is new to me and I haven’t looked into it yet. The gandūrā ‘round’ that Corriente invokes seems to be Syriac only and known first from the lexicon of Ishoʿ Bar ʿAli of the second half of the 9th century. But the root gndr ‘roll’ is widespread in Aramaic. I haven’t looked into the Persian words that are cited in this regard like کندوره kandūra, which Steingass defines as ‘a large table; a linen or leathern cover for a table, a table-cloth’ (which he simply copies, probably via Vullers’ dictionary, from Persian dictionaries like the Burhan-i Qati). In Indo-Aryan, there are some nouns formed by extensions in -ra- to u-stems in κάνδυς, but I haven’t looked around for such in Iranian yet. Maybe more tomorrow.
Great stuff, and I’m impressed you managed to get it through without falling into the moderation queue!