I was reading along in Miri Rubin’s NYRB review of Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism by Magda Teter (archived) when I got to this:
The promotion of “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre)—first legally applied in 1449—introduced distinctions aimed at separating New Christians, or recent converts, from Old Christians in Castile and later across the Hispanic world. The Castilian word raça, meaning a defect in a gem or piece of cloth, came to describe an immutable human quality.
I thought “I never heard that,” and dashed to Wiktionary, where I found “via Middle French race from Italian razza (early 14th century), of uncertain origin.” That sounded familiar; the linked razza page says “The etymology of this word is uncertain, with a large number of controversially discussed suggestions,” and it lists a number of those suggestions, none of which involves Castilian raça.
So I went to the OED, where I found that the entry had been revised as recently as 2008; their etymology says:
< Middle French, French race group of people connected by common descent (c1480 as rasse), offspring, descendants (1496), subdivision of a species represented by a certain number of individuals with hereditary characteristics (c1500), […], subdivision of humankind which is distinguished from others by the relative frequency of certain hereditary traits (1684) < Italian razza kind, species (a1388; earlier as masculine noun razzo (c1300 in sense ‘descent, lineage’, with reference to a horse)), group of individuals of an animal or vegetable species which are differentiated from another group of the same species by one or more characteristics which are constant and hereditary (a1446), offspring, descendants (15th cent.), further etymology uncertain and disputed. Compare Old Occitan rassa gang (late 12th cent.; Occitan raça), plot, conspiracy (13th cent.). Compare also Catalan raça (c1400), Spanish raza (1438), Portuguese raça (1473).
Notes
Various explanations of the origin of Italian razza have been suggested. Two of the most popular of these suggest a Latin origin: one theory suggests a derivation < classical Latin ratiō ratio n., while the other sees the word as being shortened < classical Latin generātiō generation n. An alternative explanation (and one supported by modern dictionaries of Italian: see e.g. M. Cortelazzo and P. Zolli Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana at razza) derives the Italian word < Old French haraz haras [An enclosure or establishment in which horses and mares are kept for breeding; hence, †a stud, breed, or race of horses] n. For a full discussion and summary of these and various other competing theories see Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch at ratiō.
Nobody mentions any raça ‘defect in a gem or piece of cloth,’ though I presume it’s the same as the Real Academia’s raza² ‘Grieta, hendidura’ (‘crack, fissure’), from Latin radius. As always, all thoughts are welcome.
I’m not an expert in the history of sound changes in the various Romance languages, but it seems not implausible that word A from Latin “ratio” and etymologically-separate word B from Latin “radius” might end up as homophones, in a way which in turn could promote interesting folk etymologies by those who assumed they were different senses of the same word and then tried to explain the semantics of one as somehow a development from the semantics of the other. .
From RAE’s Diccionario de Autoridades:
NB the assumption that the Latin origin is Radix.
Diccionario de Autoridades – Tomo V (1737)
RAZA. s. f. Casta o calidad del origen o linage. Hablando de los hombres, se toma mui regularmente en mala parte. Es del Latino Radix. Latín. Genus. Stirps. Etiam generis macula, vel ignominia. DEFINIC. DE CALATR. tit. 6. cap. 1. Ordenamos y mandamos que ninguna persona, de qualquiera calidad y condición que fuere, sea recibida a la dicha Orden, ni se le dé el Hábito, sino fuere Hijodalgo, al fuero de España, de partes de padre y madre, y de avuelos de entrambas partes, y de legítimo matrimónio nacido, y que no le toque raza de Judio, Moro, Herege, ni Villano. MARIAN. Hist. Esp. lib. 22. cap. 1. No de otra manera que los sembrados y animales, la raza de los hombres, y casta, con la propriedad del Cielo y de la tierra, sobre todo con el tiempo se muda y se embastarda.
An additional meaning from the same volume, with reference to fabrics, though not to defects:
RAZA. Se llama tambien el rayo de luz o del Sol. Trahelo Nebrixa en su Vocabulario. Latín. Radius.
RAZA. Por extensión se dice de la calidad de otras cosas, especialmente la que contrahen en su formación, como la del paño: y hablando de este dice Covarr. que se dixo de Aza Toscano que vale hilo, quasi Reaza, porque las razas de los paños se diferencian por las hilazas. Latín. Genus. Qualitas.
DeepL translation-
RACE. By extension it is said of the quality of other things, especially that which they contract in their formation, as that of the cloth: and speaking of this Covarr. says that it was said of Aza Toscano that it is worth thread, quasi Reaza, because the races of the cloths are differentiated by the yarns. Latin. Genus. Qualitas.
“Radix” seems a plausible Latin root semantically for a meaning like “descendants of a supposed common ancestor” but i don’t know if the necessary historical sound changes would work, especially given that Castilian reportedly has “raíz” as the direct descendent of “radix” with the same literal core meaning of “root.”
it lists a number of those suggestions, none of which involves Castilian raça
A plain vanilla text version of the entry raza in Joan Coromines and José Antonio Pascual, Diccionario Crítico Etimológico Castellano e Hispánico (1980–1991), with discussion of crossing with raça, can be found here. LH readers who cannot read Spanish will be able to copy the text or the url and run it through their favorite online translator easily.
From Slavic verb raziti, oh my, they had some wold hypotheses!
The story reminded me of a false-friend trap I fell into while translating beautiful Argentine lyrics
https://letras-de-tango-en-ruso.blogspot.com/2015/09/suavemente.html
In the lines
Suavemente te bordaré mi corazón
En el raso de tu ilusión
Wiktionary explains that raso is cognate with English “razor”, the common theme is smoothness. And specifically with respect to fabrics it’s satin. The problem was that there is exactly the same textile-word in Russian, сатин, which also refers to a satin-weave textile, but almost always more narrowly, as the fabric used for underwear 😀
The more typical weave-pattern for the Spanish or Italian raso is slightly different and it’s known in Russian (or German) as атлас / Atlas, a fancy fabric often used in embroidery.
A plain vanilla text version of the entry raza in Joan Coromines and José Antonio Pascual, Diccionario Crítico Etimológico Castellano e Hispánico (1980–1991), with discussion of crossing with raça, can be found here.
A very interesting discussion, thanks!
Is any of this influenced by Matthew 5:22, raca?
To Stephen Goranson’s question, this link gives you a bunch of Spanish translations of Mateo 5:22 https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/es/Mateo%205%3A22. Note that using the untranslated “Raca” appears to be the exception rather than the rule, although of course the fact that the Aramaic insult was included untranslated in the Greek has struck many translators into many languages as an adequate-to-compelling reason to do the same. But more of these Spanish versions (I don’t know their respective “market shares” of course) go for an insulting Spanish word instead, such as necio or idiota or insensato or imbécil. Of course these translations all postdate the rise of “raza.” The Vulgate has “racha” but I have no idea how that might have been pronounced in Iberia back then or whether it was preserved rather than translated/paraphrased when the local Dominicans or whoever tried to explain the passage to laity in Castillian.
The Spaniards developed a sophisticated racist classification, but was the word raça a part of this system’s terminology back then? I though that specific attachment of (rather different) racists to the word race is a 19th century (and not very Spanish) invention.
@drasvi: The interesting (I read it via google translate) link Xerib provided upthread has some examples of 16th century negative/pejorative usage in Spanish. It is a historical irony that in modern North American discourse the capitalized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Raza has become a positive-valence endonym specifically referring to the proud-to-be-“impure” descendants of the mestizaje disdained by those who claimed to value limpieza de sangre.
@drasv. Better a racial classification, rather than a racist one.
Still better: a racy classification.
We’re still far from erase culture.
It. razzo looks to me as a fairly regular outcome of Lat. ratus “fixed, set; (hence) proportion”, so a doublet of rate. I have no idea if the Occitan etc. forms are borrowed from Italian or influenced by the related ratio or whatever.
(Sorry, that looks confused. I was in a hurry and shortened the argument.)
a racy classification
cf Irish racy of the soil
What a great phrase — thanks for that!
Trond: “It. razzo looks to me as a fairly regular outcome of Lat. ratus “fixed, set; (hence) proportion”, so a doublet of rate.”
Fairly regular? You’d need palatalization appearing out of nowhere (Modern Italian does have a noun razzo ‘rocket’, which (Wiktionary says) is inherited from Latin radius). Rather simpler to just start from ratio (noun formed from ratus) to get to razzo.
And since when is ratus (masculine form of participle) a noun meaning ‘proportion’? Rate developed from medieval Latin rata ‘proportion’, abbreviation of the specific phrase prō ratā parte (feminine form of participle).
I mean, it sounds like you’re popping in with “o hai, I discovered a Latin source that Coromines overlooked”, and that would be silly.
Trying to sort out the argument: By “fairly regular” i didn’t mean fairly regular in Standard Italian, but regular in some dialect or other. What I find attractive is that the relationship between razzo and razza would be the same as that between ratus and Late Latin rata, the form that gave Fr. and Eng. rate. But writing this, I realize that even if *rato was the word that first took the meaning “ancestry proportion”, it would have been contaminated with the regular outcome of the related ratio and the unrelated radius. so it’s pretty unnecessary.
Edit: Yes, silly indeed. No “O hai, I’m smarter than Coromines”, but “O, hai, what if it took this strange turn?”. But I really should have let it rest until I was back and had time to finish the thought.
Abbas, that was intended, because the classification in question is not a classification of human races.
My theory of intellect holds that everyone evaluates others based on the side of intellect which she values the most and thus has developed the most in herself.
So everyone is smarter than Coromines, and Coromines is smarter than everyone.
…Not even High German. 🙂
I think that’s pretty much the case.
Epimenides the Cretan said all Cretans are liars…
“o hai, I discovered a Latin source that Coromines overlooked”
Hai
Is IPA still with us here ?
(off-topic)
I complained once that I confuse some Arabic (or Tunisian?) f-s with θ-s.
A specimen of such an /f/ in the first (and frequently repeated) word here:
https://youtu.be/bFq5pg5LqDw
(a song about love for Tunisia, as a woman: “even though you betrayed me….”.
This song has been tormenting to me several months. The problem is that this performance reminds me some Russian song or two – and I can’t remember which ones. One of commenters on youtube (not in this subtitled link, though) calls the tune Russian or Slavic (in French). Which is technically not exactly true as the tune is from a Catalan song, but…
There is an earlier (and well known) performance by Mathlouthi where it sounds as Russian something else, but in that case everything is simple: she sings it as if it were a Gypsy song..)
What is the origin of the English word rake as in A Rake’s Progress or The Rake’s Progress (the title of a series of eight paintings by William Hogarth)?
It’s short for rakehell ‘An immoral or dissolute person; a scoundrel; a rake.’ (OED: “In common use from the latter part of the 16th cent. into the 18th cent.”)
Which is from to rake (out) hell ‘(usually in the context of describing a person as villainous or immoral) to search through hell’ (1542 “Suche a feloe as a manne should rake helle for” N. Udall, translation of Erasmus, Apophthegmes f. 116ᵛ).
@M: It’s a clipping of rakehell, which is itself a cutpurse-type compound. It started, as is natural for such a form, as a verb phrase; rake hell meant “collect [or search for] forms [or products] of wickedness.”
(I thought we might have discussed the word rake itself when we talked about “The Cowboy’s Lament”/”The Unfortunate Rake” family of songs. However, it appears not.)
@drasvi: I see what you mean, the song sounds like something from a 60s/70s Soviet singer-songwriter like Okudzhava.
A different origin for rakehell is given in AHD: “Possibly by folk etymology from obsolete rackle, headstrong, from Middle English rakel, perhaps from raken, to go.” This origin goes back to Skeat (1882), and has been repeated in later etymology books — even though Skeat himself changed his mind in his 4th edition (1910), saying of the rakel etymology that “the examples in the N. E. D. show that this is unfounded. And in fact rake-hell is really compounded of rake and hell.”
I find it easier to credit rakehell as a cutthroat-type noun (it’s first recorded in the mid-1500s, when cutthroat names were on an upswing, especially to describe bad people), than as an adjective converted into a noun. The difference in pronunciation between rackle and rakehell would need to be explained, too. But somebody at AHD thought otherwise, and it’s not an oversight; they changed the etymology from rake+hell to rackle between the 1969 and 1992 editions, so it was on purpose.
Very interesting, and it would certainly be nice to learn more. (Calling Xerîb…)
“Calling Xerîb”
история человечества / была бы не так крива
если бы они догадались позвать / человека из Кемерова…*
_______
*From a song by Аквариум. It’s based on the construction “a man from [insert the name of an intelligence service or anything to that effect here]” – the man the hero of the story you’re reading is going to meet tomorrow in Bawku, and it’s going to be an important meeting. But what is inserted instead is “Kemerovo”, an industrial city in a coal-mining region (far from the singer).
The man is solver of all problems, and the hero of the song is going to drink with him, because he has problems.
As for the /f/ articulated so that I hear [θ], I think, it’s achieved by sticking your lip deeper (is there a letter for the labial interdental? [fᶿ]?) but I’m not sure. My local freind and informant knows that some f-s sound almost as θ-s, the grammars I read do not, even though they do speak about the shift [θ] to [f] in certain words: famma~θamma.
(some context)
@Hans, I wonder if this style is the singer’s invention or belongs to a large group, and to what extent its “Russian” elements are due to convergence and to what we both have borrowed them. I’m used to the fact that Tunisians are frequently influenced by European culture in the very same ways as we are but with different timing, and my first thought was “they’re exploring the six-stringed guitar as we did”. But most people with guitars sound differently, Tunisians too.
The way they voice the song and play the guitar is typical for 60s/70s singer-songwriters all over Europe; it’s the melody that sounds Russian / Soviet, but I can’t remember of which song it reminds me.
Dave Wilton did a Big List entry on “race”, giving context for an early Italian appearance:
(In this derivation the loss of the ha‑ is explained as a misinterpretation of the article — l’haras heard as la ras — with I guess an ‑a tacked on phonotactically.)
However, Dave seems to have mixed up the dates: c1300 is not the date of this quotation, it’s the earliest appearance of the masculine razzo mentioned by the OED and Coromines (un destrier di grande razzo, rhyming with Durazzo). What he’s quoting is not the *earliest* but rather the *best* evidence for the horse-breeding derivation, and it’s from sometime in the 1300s. Actually there are a lot of manuscripts of this text with a lot of variations; the FEW entry at ratio (cited by the OED) mentions in arazo, in un suo arazzo, in suo araçço, in sua raza.
Dave also links to a post by Anatoly Liberman on the history of hypotheses about razza, worth reading for explanation of why some of the older ones can be rejected. Liberman enthusiastically endorses the horse-breeding origin, whereas Coromines doesn’t even consider it worth mentioning, I wonder why?
The haras origin is also given by AHD5 (“probably”), followed by a discussion of two possible origins for haras; this was changed from the previous edition, which stopped at Italian razza.
With very interesting fossils from the Early Cretaceous. 🙂
somebody at AHD thought otherwise, and it’s not an oversight; they changed the etymology from rake+hell to rackle between the 1969 and 1992
I find it easier to credit rakehell as a cutthroat-type noun (it’s first recorded in the mid-1500s, when cutthroat names were on an upswing, especially to describe bad people), than as an adjective converted into a noun.
Leaving aside the our own opinions of which etymology is correct… Perhaps the editors of 3ʳᵈ edition were persuaded by Ernest Weekly, who even after the publication of the R volume of the NED in 1914 and Skeat’s reversal, continued to advocate folk-etymology from rakel, with arguments laid forth in More Words Ancient and Modern, pp. 126–128. Weekly has the following comment: ‘It may be noted that in the first quotation for rake-hell the compound is also adjectival: “ The rakehell lyfe that longes to loves disporte ” (Surrey, c. 1547)’. This is the last line of the second quatrain here. Udall’s use of the verb rake hell (p. 130 here) is found in Udall’s own commentary on his translation (Erasmus’ version (here).
Continuity from Middle English may have appealed to the AHD editors at that time, several of whom had previously worked on the Middle English Dictionary at the University of Michigan.
The difference in pronunciation between rackle and rakehell would need to be explained, too.
On this point, note that the MED does not settle the length of the vowel in the adjective rā̆kel.
@Hans, the tune is that of L’Estaca, a well-known song (which I didn’t know…), sung in many European languages. But the Tunisian lyrics have nothign to do with the Catalan text.
It’s the third Tunisian performer known to me, the first being the guy who composed the lyrics, the second is Emel Mathlouthi. Both times it doesn’t sound so Russian… unless when I listen specifically to the most Russian parts and concentrate a bit.
If we combine your theory with this, it is the combination of the way of singing with the tune that makes us think of Russian music. I don’t know. I’d place this way of singing and playing within a narrow genre (known in Russia), such that I’d place Vysotsky or Brassens outside of it. I don’t know whether it is also known in Western Europe, and I’m not a musician, so it is difficult to tell tune from chords from interpretation for me:(
I googled for человек из Кемерова and found that Russians are not sure if its “из кемерово” or (homophonous) “из кемерова“… Strange. It’s a neuter possesive adjective and not much more…
DM, that too. But mostly it is known in the western part of Russia for that not many people are sure where exactly it is:) Because not many people in the western part of Russia know someone from there and because the part of Russia to which this region belongs is poorly known here. (I’ll link it. The words “человек из Кемерова” are, for example, between 1:26 and 1:30).
We’ve previously mentioned the phenomenon that place names in -ово are increasingly treated as indeclinable. (Why – I have no idea.)
Maybe because they sound like genitive singulars in -ого?
From Terence Wade, A Comprehensive Russian Grammar:
War as the father of all things… the second casualty of war is grammar…
DM, wow.
If all subtleties of Russian grammar have already been spoken about here, it’s the time for subtleties of Berber and Arabic…I have many stupid questions about those:)
We’ve previously mentioned the phenomenon that place names in -ово are increasingly treated as indeclinable. (Why – I have no idea.)
Interesting. Cognate Czech possessive endings -ův, -ov[a/o] are being analogously treated as indeclinable -ovo in some dialects (and I have a disturbing feeling that it is spreading) despite no vowel reduction. Supposing that this may trace all the way back to common Slavic seems too crazy though.
If I can go so off-topic as to return to the Spanish word “raza,” it has come to my attention via internet serendipity that we are less than five years away from the centennial of the construction/dedication of the “Monumento a la Raza” in Seville. So, at least assuming it bore that name from that year rather than being renamed more recently, that’s a datapoint as to the timeline of “raza” shifting from pejorative to positive-valence even in Iberia itself.
Interestingly enough (well, I thought so …), the quotation from the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario (1867-1916) that adorns the monument uses the word in the plural rather than singular: “Inclitas razas uberrimas / Sangre de Hispania fecunda” etc. etc. And, hey, there’s “sangre,” but in context it’s not the kind with “limpieza” because by the early 20th century it was presumably clear to relevant elites in Spain that retaining any sort of cultural influence over the formal colonies would require at least some amount of rhetorically embracing mestizaje rather than deprecating it.
(I assume that using “Hispania” rather than “España” is a poetic conceit akin to saying “Hail Britannia” rather than “Hail Britain,” but that’s just a guess and I may be assuming incorrectly.)
prase, do you mean that neuter possessive adjectives are used with m. and f. nouns?
Supposing that this may trace all the way back to common Slavic seems too crazy though.
It’s a 20th-century development in Russian.
“…the recommended norm” – not by Rosenthal.
also, speaking about norms (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Русская_грамматика_(1980) ):
https://rusgram.narod.ru/1216-1231.html
§ 1220, 1221-9
And if Wade uses “norm” differently (the norm he recommends), that’s misleading. Usually foreign scholars don’t intervene and that’s not how readers will understand it.
I mean, in Russian “the literary norm” is that, deviations from what make peevers suffer.
§ 1220-1 is interesting: an exception for what Wade refers to by “especially where the names derive from a proper name”. If that’s what Wade means, his wording is confusing.
I remember that Giovanni Semerano linked (book: L’infinito: un equivoco millennario) the etymology of english “race” and english “horse” and italian “razza” to some neo-assirian “harsa”
do you mean that neuter possessive adjectives are used with m. and f. nouns?
Yes, apart from the gender part – it is masculine possessor and all genders of the possessed argument. Some Czech speakers replace all case, number and gender variants (theoretically 7 x 2 x 4 = 56 combinations but there are only 11 distinct endings if I am counting correctly) by a single universal -ovo. Analogously, for the feminine possessor all forms are replaced by an indeclinable -ino. Both these are coming from the standard language’s nominative singular neuter form.
I think in Russian the endings -ов, -ова, -ово no longer produce possesive adjectives and are mostly preserved in proper names, even though the (originally feminine possessor) variants -ин, -ина, -ино are still productive in some extent, but is no longer restricted to feminine possessors. Is that right?
@prase, everything’s as you said.
Ninina čaška, vanina čaška is how people (almost always) say “Nina’s cup, Vanya’s cup”. “Nina” is a female name, “Vanya” is a male name.
I think about koškina miska “Cat’s bowl” (koška “(female) cat”) as the neutral way of speaking about stuff owned by a specific cat and take my ex-wife’s košačja miska “cat bowl”, when used the same way, as a joke (if you were one of very few humans around, each “human hand” would at the same time be “the Human’s hand”).
I undertand ovečja šerst’ as wool of sheep (and not camels) and košačja miska as some bowl made for use by cats (and not by… etc.).
But I don’t know how other Russians use these. What if it is not a joke at all and all Russians (other than me) now use košačij in the sense of koškin?
People are much less (if at all?) willing to say kotova miska (kot “(male) cat”).
But I won’t be surprised if they say, for example, agzamova čaška. Agzam is the name of my ex-wife’s friend. The name is foreign and used both in the contexts where you say “Ivan” and where you say “Vanya”.
Otherwise they say čaška Aleksandra and sašina čaška (not aleksandrova čaška or čaška Saši) where Sáša to Aleksándr is same as Bill to William. Such short names systematically are the 1st declension, that’s why I used a foreign name “Agzam” for my example.
košačiy
It’s not just you; in my experience that means “pertaining to cats in general”, not “belonging to a specific cat”. It’s my experience as well that if you can’t use a 1st declension variant of a name, people rather use the genitive than forming a possessive adjective in -ov-.
@Hans, the question is what they use where they would have used Саша (not Александр) and сашин when speaking of a Hans (Ганс) who they know very well.
I think pragmatics and (or) register plays a role here. There are not many people around me without such a split as for Саша and Александр. If we don’t count Нина, basically only a guy named Агзам.
And… “агзамов” does not sound odd to my ear. I’m not sure whether I actually hear it.
But if I do, that’s an interesting fact. Even if people say “чашка Агзама” more often.
The hypothesis then is:
– сашин, машин, нинин, ванин (also кошкин etc.) are supported by use of Саша, Маша, Ваня.
– александров (also котов etc.) are not supported by use of Александр because the register where “Александр” is used is poorly compatible with possessive adjectives.
– as result, (a) “котов” is weakened, (b) “александров” is not in use because of register (c) nevertheless for certain names (Агзам) people do use possessive adjectives.
Also I don’t know whether I would have preferred мишелин or мишелев if I knew a Мишель (Michelle) and really wanted to use a possessive adjective.
The problem with мишелин is that it would have made me think of *Мишеля.
The problem with мишелин is that it would have made me think of *Мишеля.
This wouldn’t bother me much; maybe I am too used to people forming variants in -a of Kazakh female names ending in a consonant (Asel’ -> Aselya -> Aselin; Sholpan -> Sholpana -> Sholpanin). IME, that isn’t done with male Kazakh names, and nobody I know in Almaty would use *Baurzhanin or *Baurzhanov.
@Hans, yes. Мишеля sounds rather funny – not as something no one would ever have said.
But that’s not what I do in my idiolect and I was speaking of a hypothetical Мишель who isn’t habitually called so by anyone around me. Of course, IF I called this hypothetical Мишель “Мишеля”, “мишелин” would be fine.
My point is that for me the choice depends on the stem, while for prase it is about gender of the possessor.
P.S. Baurzhan is a long nane. I (based on how it souds to me, rather than actual data) predict that in my circle friends of a Davíd will sometimes (no more) say davidov [noun] alongside with [noun] Davída. But I wouldn’t predict same for something as long as Baurzhan.
Among all Arabic speakers I know the one who I speak about in Russian most often is a woman named Rim. I did think about using Rima (Rim meaning “Rome (the city)” in Russian). One problem is that there is already a Russian name Rimma (which I don’t really like), and because of this name Rima sounds as replacement rather than adaptation. Funnily, a Rim will be sometimes called Rima in local Arabic as well, but as it is neither hypocoristic nor her name as is, I’m not tempted to use it in Arabic.
P.S. technically one perverse option would be *Римь:)
And thinking of this. On my very first day, when I decided I want to learn Arabic I choose for practice names of my friends. And the question that arose was whether Russian “Táta” and “Nína” are تاتا , نينا or تاتة and نينة (Niina, Niin(a)t-). (I did not think about طاطا or طاطة:))
Both ا /ā/ and ة /a(t-)/ occur in female names in Arabic. Eventually I decided that four sticks (تاتا) are funnier. What do I know today? Today I know that ى /ā/ also occurs in female names in Arabic.
And about sticks (not sure where else to post this). Arabic is mad shorthand. Yes, everyone knows it, but.
1. Sticks:
Short sticks: ـنـتـثـبـيـ (n t th b y) and groups: ـسـشـ (s, sh)
Longer sticks: ـاـ (a) ـلـك (l (k*))
Bent sticks: ـدـذ (d, dh) ـحـخـجـ (ḥ, x, j) ـرـزـ (r, z) and a broken stick ـكـ (k)
2. Loops: ـمـفـقـوـ (m q f w) ـعـغـ (ʕ, gh) and a double loop: ـهـ (h)
3. Weird letters: ـصـضـطـظـ (emphatic s d t dh)
* everything here is medial except ك (k) which I give because it’s the l-stick ـلـ with diacritic medial ـكـ (k).
Without diacritics they’re: ـىـسـاـلـدـرـحـكـمـڡـوـعـهـصـطـ
Or: “a stick”, “triple stick”, “a loop”, “double loop”, “weird letters”. It’s the movement of one’s hand (and the way a letter is connected to another: ـالـ (al)) that makes sticks (or loops) different. (Yes, everything is “a movement of one’s hand”, but H and N are different in some more ways)
Not sure if ـصـ counts as a “loop” or “weird letter”. ـطـ is “a loop and stick”, which is definitely more than “a stick” or “a loop” (but not than a “double loop” and “triple stick”). If ـصـ is more than “a loop”, that means it’s precisely the emphatic sounds for which “a stick” or “a loop” is not enough (alongside with s, sh and h :-/).
“The promotion of “purity of blood” ”
By the way. How frequent cross-linguistically this metaphorical meaning of blood? If it is a Mediterranean thing, then what about its first attestation?
Wiktionary does list such a meaning for the Babylonian word*, but this doesn’t mean it’s not a borrowed meaning there.
* but not for Arabic dam(m) other than Maltese demm, even though it is used metaphorically in Arabic as well. Which too means nothing, given that Arabic is the language fo the southeastern Roman empire:)
(dam(m) – literary m, vernacular mm, don’t know why)