On the Origin of Some Plant Names in Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo in Ṭūr ʿAbdīn

Aziz Tezel

1. ʿArkūwo and Ḥaršaf

One of the most important wild plants in Ṭūr ʿAbdīn is termed ʿarkūwo. This is ‘a thorny plant, whose root and stem are edible, when cooked’. It closely resembles ‘cardoon’. The word ʿarkūwo occurs in the village dialects of Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo, while the largest Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo dialect, namely the dialect of Məḏyaḏ, uses the term ḥaršaf for the same plant. In the Spring, this plant is highly sought after, especially during the long fasting before Easter. In the region, the term ʿarkūwo corresponds to Persian kangar, which is also the word used in Turkish and the Kurdish dialect that is spoken in Ṭūr ʿAbdīn. Some Arabic sources render the Persian kangar by a Greek loanword qulqās,1 which is translated by Lane as ‘the root of a certain plant, which is eaten cooked and used medicinally’.2 This word of Greek origin is found also in Jewish Aramaic and Syriac (see below §2). Syriac sources refer to the Persian kangar. The word also constitutes the base of the Syriac kangarzad ‘the juice’ or ‘the gum’ of the artichoke’, which in Syriac is explained as dūʿtā ḏ-laġnā (more on this below §2).3 The Arabic dialects in and around Ṭūr ʿAbdīn use the word ḥaršaf to denote the same plant. The aforementioned Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo term ḥaršaf is, therefore, a borrowing in the dialect of Məḏyaḏ. The Arabic ḥaršaf also occurs in literary Arabic. The Persian kangar, the Greek loanword qulqās and Arabic ḥaršaf are important words for my further discussion of the word ʿarkūwo and of another Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo word, namely qalqo, to which I shall return.

Concerning the origin of Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo ʿarkūwo, it should be noted first of all that, unlike the foreign word ḥaršaf, it ends in the native ending -o. This suggests that we are dealing with an inherited word. It is likely to have its origin in the Syriac word with the form ʿakkūḇā ‘cynara cardunculus’, which can be best translated ‘cardoon’. This is to be compared to Jewish Aramaic ʿakkōḇīṯā ‘a thistle sting’ and Arabic ʿakkūb ‘globe-thistle’.4 For some reason, this important meaning of the Syriac word is lacking in Payne Smith’s Dictionary, where the Syriac ʿakkūḇā is defined as ‘a pock-mark; a wart’.5 In the Thesaurus Syriacus, on which Payne Smith’s Dictionary is founded, however, we note that the Syriac word ʿakkūḇā is equated with Arabic ḥaršaf and ʿakkūb and Persian kangar. Payne Smith significantly gives the Syriac synonym laġnā defined as ‘cynara scolymus, a kind of artichoke’.6 This laġnā seems to be the source of NENA (=North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic) laġna ‘a thorny plant eaten when young, root and stem’, according to Maclean, who is alone in indicating the form laġna.7 Other sources of NENA have lagna, with g.8 In my investigation of NENA I could not find any reflex of the Syriac ʿakkūḇā. Judging by the meaning of the NENA laġna or lagna, it denotes the same plant as that of Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo ʿarkūwo. It seems that Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo has preserved the reflex of the Syriac ʿakkūḇā, while the NENA dialects have retained its synonym laġnā (or lagna). The latter is also found in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, although only in the plural laġnē.

Turning to the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo ʿarkūwo, the r in this word can be explained either as a result of contiguous regressive dissimilation, i.e. *kk > rk, or as a case of epenthesis. The former requires that the change took place when the old gemination was still alive in Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo. If the r is the result of epenthesis, it might have arisen by analogy with Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo ʿarqūwo ‘heel’, with which ʿarkūwo bears close similarities in its phonological shape and form, although their semantic fields are very different.

The next question that arises is how we can be sure that the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo ʿarkūwo is a reflex of the Syriac ʿakkūḇā and not a borrowing from Arabic ʿakkūb. The historical phonology of the word gives us the answer we need, since the historical *b has shifted to w as in inherited words, in accordance with the development of the bgdkpt consonants in Syriac. If it occurs in foreign words, the sound shift in question must have been taken place in Syriac, for example, Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo malḥōwo ‘a winnowing-fork’, via Syriac malḥāḇā, from Arabic milḥāb. Direct borrowings from Arabic into Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo do not, as a rule, undergo such a sound shift. We can, therefore, confidently propose that the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo ʿarkūwo is derived from Syriac ʿakkūḇā, more precisely, from its Western Syriac form. Is it possible that a borrowing process took place between Syriac ʿakkūḇā and Arabic ʿakkūb? The question cannot be answered with certainty. If, however, a borrowing process is involved, there are reasons to assume an Arabic borrowing from Syriac. This is because the Arabic ʿakkūb, referring to the plant in question, is not a word that is widely used across the Arabic dialects. It seems to be common in Levantine Arabic, concerning which both al-Munjid and Barthélemy state that it is a borrowing from the Syriac ʿakkūḇā.9

2. Qalqo

When the plant known as ʿarkūwo grows old, from an edible stage to an inedible one, it not only changes shape but also name. When it is in this condition, it is called qalqo (plural qalqe), at least in the dialect of Mīdən and Bsōrīno. It develops beautiful spiky flowers containing its seeds, which resemble small, tiny grains of sand. Its inner seeds are surrounded by a very hard shell, which must be crushed by a stone in order to extract the edible seeds. The origin of this word, unlike that of ʿarkūwo and ḥaršaf, is not clear. The following observations can be made. Firstly, Syriac possesses a Greek loanword, namely qalqā (Western Syriac qalqō), from Greek κάχληξ ‘pebble’. This resembles Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo qalqo in form, but its semantic connection is problematic, unless one were to hypothesise that the plant in question in this stage of development was called so because of the resemblance of its seeds to ‘pebbles’. Such a semantic development is possible. To be sure, the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo word qalqo in Ritter’s Wörterbuch is translated ‘Kieselstein’, referring to its occurrence in the following passage:

I strongly suspect, however, that Ritter’s translation is based on the Syriac meaning ‘pebbles’, for the informant (in this case Slēmān Ḥanna Maskōbi, originally from Mīdən), in all probability is referring to the plant in question and not to ‘pebbles’. All elderly people in Mīdən know that when qalqo becomes dry, it becomes very light and is blown away by whirlwinds. The people of Mīdən, therefore, have coined a figurative phrase xāyīfō=yo xdū qalqo ‘he is fast like qalqo’. Thus, Ritter’s translation ‘Kieselstein’ of the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo qalqo is not correct.

The next noteworthy word is the other aforementioned Greek loanword qulqās, whose form in Syriac and Jewish Aramaic is qōlqās. The nominal ending -o in the word qalqo, however, indicates that it has been integrated into the native morphological system, which is likely to have taken place at an earlier period. In fact, in Supplement to the Thesaurus Syriacus we find a plural form qelqē, exemplified by the phrase ʾatten qelqē ‘fumigate with colocasia’, which, according to this source, is a plural form for the Syriac qōlqās.11 In Brockelmann’s Lexicon, however, this word is cited with the singular form qalqā and is said to be derived from Latin calx ‘chalk’. Sokoloff, therefore, in his version of Brockelmann’s Lexicon translates the same phrase ʾatten qelqē ‘fumigate with chalk’,12 which does not fit contextually. In the context the fumigation with qelqē was intended to drive away gnats. It is mentioned together with galbanum in the following Syriac passage:

A third possibility is that the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo qalqo reflects an unattested *qalqlo, which by dissimilation could take the form qalqo. Syriac has qalqīnā ‘a low-growing herb’. Akkadian has a plant name qulqulliānu, which refers to an unknown species.14 Ugaritic has a word with the consonantal skeleton qlql ‘herb fed to horses’, related to Hebrew qelōqēl ‘miserable food’.15 Some sources connect these words with Arabic qilqil, which in some sources is translated by ‘cassia’.16 In its borrowed form in Persian, the Arabic word qilqil is described by Steingass (1977, 985b) as ‘a species of plant producing a grain so hard that it cannot be pounded’, which is reminiscent of the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo qalqo. If Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo qalqo is derived from Arabic qilqil, this form would have to exist in Anatolian Arabic and denote the same plant. I have not yet been able to establish whether Anatolian Arabic has a specific word for ḥaršaf when it is growing old. Kurdish in the area uses kärämber when Kurdish kangar is growing old. Thus, a borrowing from Kurdish is out of the question. Evidence against the hypothesis that the word is borrowed from the neighbouring languages is the native ending -o. All borrowed plant names from these languages known to me do not end in -o.

Further evidence against the possible borrowing of Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo qalqo from a neighbouring language is the fact that the form qalqa has been identified by Hezy Mutzafi in the NENA dialect of Mer near Cudi daǧı with the meaning of ‘the seeds of lagna.’17 As has been remarked, the NENA-lagna corresponds in meaning to Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo ʿarkūwo. This may be an important indication that the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo qalqo also originally denoted only the seeds of ʿarkūwo. The situation in NENA, however, is complicated by the fact that some NENA dialects (the Ṭiyāre dialects) use the form qaqna rather than qalqa to denote dried lagna.18 It is not clear from the information I have received whether this qaqna is also used for the seeds of lagna. What is more, in the NENA dialect of Barwar qaqna is described as a ‘thorny plant’. This is yellow in colour and grows in the mountains. When the sap sets it produces a gum known as deṯa, which is softened in water and then chewed.19 We have seen before that the Persian loanword kangarzad ‘the juice or the gum of the artichoke’ is explained in Syriac as dūʿtā ḏ-laġnā. The Barwar deṯa, which is a reflex of the earlier dūʿtā, denotes the ‘gum’ of qaqna and not of lagna.

To sum up the case qalqo so far, I find the Syriac plural form qelqē in The Syriac Book of Medicines to be significant for explaining the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo qalqo (plural qalqe). The shift e > a in a closed syllable is regular in Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo. Thus the change qelqē > qalqe would not present a problem. Whether this is a plural formation for the Syriac qōlqās or a variant plural form of the Syriac qalqē ‘pebbles’ or, as stated by Brockelmann, a borrowing from the Latin calx, is a question for further discussion. Notable is the fact that some versions of Bar ʿAlī’s Syro-Arabic Lexicon have qelqē instead of qalqē ‘pebbles’.20 NENA qalqa is the same word as that of Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo qalqo. NENA qaqna is probably cognate with qalqa.

3. Rašāle, Daḥle and Ḥērafrūfo

The next three words that will be considered are rašāle (fem.), daḥle (fem.) and ḥērafrūfo (masc.). The words rašāle and daḥle are dialectal words denoting an edible wild plant with a sharp taste, which can be identified as ‘cress’. The word ḥērafrūfo denotes ‘Scandix Ausralis L’ (southern chervil), which in some dialects has the form ḥəfrūfo. It is, likewise, edible and has a sharp taste, although milder in taste in comparison with rašāle, daḥle. Both these are, like ʿarkūwo, among those most sought-after plants during the Spring, especially during the long fasting before Easter. The word rašāle occurs in the dialect of Məḏyaḏ and some village dialects around Məḏyaḏ, while daḥle occurs in some dialects in the periphery, for example, in the dialect of Mīdən.

Rašāle is a loanword, which ultimately goes back to Arabic rašād ‘garden peppergrass (Lepidium sativum L)’. This is also the word used to denote this plant in the Kurdish dialect spoken in Ṭūr ʿAbdīn (in the form rašād or rašāl see below). The Arabic rašād has also meanings such as ‘integrity of conducts; good sense, maturity’, which is a derivative of the Arabic root rašada ‘to be on the right way’. Given the meaning of the root, one naturally wonders why the plant ‘garden peppergrass’ was called rašād in Arabic. It seems that the meaning relating to this plant originated in Iraqi Arabic. This can be deduced from Lisān ʾal-ʿarab, where we read:

In other words, the plant in question was known to the Arabs either as ṯuffāʾ or ḥurf. Since ḥurf also has meanings with negative connotations, the people of Iraq came to give it the name rašād, since rašād has, unlike ḥurf, positive connotations. If the meaning rašād ‘garden cress’ really originated in Iraqi Arabic, it must have spread from this dialect to the other Arabic dialects in the region, for all major Arabic dialects in the region use the word with this meaning.

Turning to the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo rašāle, as can be seen, it exhibits two differences from the Arabic word rašād, namely the shift d > l, which is unusual in Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo, and the ending e. If it reflects a direct borrowing from an Arabic dialect, the Arabic form should be *rašāde or *rašāda, with a literary Arabic form rašādatun, which I could not find in this meaning. According to the information I have obtained, some Kurdish villages in Ṭūr ʿAbdīn use the form rašād and others the form rašāl. This suggests that the shift r > l did not take place in Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo. It took place either in Kurdish or Anatolian Arabic. In any case, if it is a borrowing from Kurdish, the -e reflects the Kurdish oblique ending -e. The word in the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo village dialects may have been taken from the dialect of Məḏyaḏ or directly from the local Kurdish.

I shall now consider the word daḥle, which, like rašāle, is a feminine noun ending in -e. The ending -e in almost all feminine singular nouns in Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo is a foreign element. It reflects either dialectal Arabic -e, which is the reflex of original a, or it reflects the Kurdish oblique ending -e. In the case of the word daḥle, however, the matter is complicated. First it should be pointed out that there seem to be in the language two different words with the form daḥle. Some dialects use daḥle with the meaning ‘a thicket; a fruit orchard with water’, while other dialects use daḥle, with the meaning ‘cress’. With regard to daḥle with the meaning of ‘a thicket; a fruit orchard’, it is relevant to note that in Anatolian Arabic we find daḥle, translated into German ‘Wald, Waldstück, Gehölz’.22 The same word occurs in Kurdish, either in the form deḥl or dehl, with the same or similar meanings. Some Arabic sources also have the form dahl, with h (thus at least in Dozy).23 The ultimate origin of this word is probably Arabic daġl ‘abundance of plants or herbs or trees’. This means that in the case of the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo daḥle ‘a thicket; a fruit orchard with water’, we are dealing with a borrowing either from Anatolian Arabic daḥle or from the Kurdish form deḥl.

As for the origin of the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo daḥle ‘cress’, its ultimate source is Syriac taḥlā (plural taḥlē); hence also NENA taxla ‘garden cress’, indicated at least for Christian Urmi; however with unknown gender.24 Most Syriac sources indicate the Syriac taḥlā as feminine. As has been suggested, the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo daḥle displays the shift t > d, which seems to have a considerable time depth, for already in some Syriac sources we find daḥlā for the original taḥlā. That the t in this word is original is also shown by the cognate root of this word in other Semitic languages. Akkadian has šeḫlātu, Ugaritic šḫlt, Rabbinic Hebrew šəḥālīm (plural). The Old Aramaic form of the plural absolute form is also with š, namely šḥlyn, apparently to be read šaḥlīn. The latter corresponds to Jewish Palestinian Aramaic tḥlyn, apparently to be read as taḥlīn. In Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, the corresponding word is contextually attested only in the plural emphatic form taḥlē.25 In Syriac, both the singular form taḥlā and the plural taḥlē are attested contextually, with the plural form taḥlē as the predominant one. The entry in Löw’s Flora has the Syriac word in the plural form taḥlē.26 The question arises as to whether the -e in the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo daḥle reflects the plural morpheme -e, which the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo speakers could have interpreted as the foreign element -e. Even if the root of a feminine singular noun ending in -e is native, the -e is a foreign element, for example, Məḏyaḏ gəḏḏāle ‘braid’, formed under the influence of Anatolian Arabic jəddāle, i.e. the root gḏl is native but not the form of the word. A genuine Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo reflex of the Syriac singular form taḥlā should thus consistently have the form *taḥlo, with a plural *taḥle, and with the shift t > d, the expected singular form would be *daḥlo. In Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo there is no sure case of the plural morpheme -e occurring on a feminine singular noun. Even words with collective meanings end either in the singular ending -o or in the plural ending -e, and they are construed syntactically as singulars or plurals respectively. Thus, we say baqro ‘herd of cattle’ ʾī-baqro (feminine singular), bōqo ‘gnats’, ʾī-bōqo (feminine singular), qanyōne ‘cattle’, ʾaq-qanyōne (masculine plural), but never *ʾī-baqre, *ʾī-bōqe, *ʾī-qanyōne. I am aware of the situation in NENA, where some originally plural nouns are interpreted as feminine singular, for example, kawe ‘a small window’, which is interpreted as a reflex of the Syriac plural form kawwē (the plural of kawṯā), but such an interpretation in Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo is improbable. Thus, if the -e in daḥle reflects the plural morpheme -e, this would mean a unique case in the language. That the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo daḥle is a reflex of the Syriac taḥla is also evident from the NENA taxla, which has preserved the original form, disregarding the shift ḥ > x, which is regular in NENA.

The word ḥērafrūfo (or ḥəfrōfo in some dialects) is of obscure origin. There are three possible ways of reconstructing its background.

Firstly, it might be an augmented form of Syriac ḥūrpā, explained in Syriac as ʿesbā (h)w d-lā ʿḏakkīl qṭar qanyā d-šebblē ‘a grass whose stalk has not hardened’. This is related to Jewish Babylonian Aramaic ḥpwrʾ,27 which is tentatively to be read ḥəp̄ūrā. As the precise species of this word in Syriac as well as in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic is not clear, it is difficult to be sure about its connection with the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo ḥērafrūfo. An addition problem is the etymology of Syriac ḥūrpā, which occurs with three different meanings. These include in addition to the meaning of a type of grass also ḥūrpā ‘sharpness’ or ‘a sharp edge’ or ‘point (of, for example, a sword, nail), and ḥūrpā ‘a yearling sheep’. Ḥūrpā ‘sharpness’ is a well-known derivative of the root ḥrp ‘to be sharp’, while ḥūrpā ‘a yearling sheep’ has an etymological equivalent in Arabic ḫarūf ‘a young sheep, lamb, yearling’. Oddly, the etymological dictionaries of Syriac consider the Syriac ḥūrpā ‘a grass whose stalk has not hardened’ to be the same word as ḥūrpā ‘a yearling sheep’,28 perhaps suggesting that the grass in question is in its early stage of development, as it describes a grass whose stalk has not hardened.

Secondly, I have already mentioned that the word for ‘garden cress’ was originally termed ḥurf in some dialects of Arabic rather than rašād. This ḥurf in Arabic is considered to be derived from the root ḥrf, which in some derivatives has the notion ‘sharp; pungent, acrid (the latter of taste)’. This is cognate with Syriac ḥrp, which also occurs in Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo, where ḥarūfo means ‘sharp; pungent’ (both of cutting edge and taste). The question is whether the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo ḥērafrūfo is an independent augmentative formation of this ḥārūfo.

Thirdly, studies in the neighbouring languages may be of help in identifying this word. A borrowing from the Kurdish used in the area is out of the question for two reasons. The proper Kurdish word used for this plant in the area is termed zūčərk, according to the information I have obtained. The Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo word, moreover, ends in the native ending -o. As has been remarked above, all Kurdish borrowings pertaining to the names of flora are non-integrated ones. There remains the possibility that it has its origin in Anatolian Arabic. The word denoting this plant in Anatolian Arabic dialects is, however, so far unknown to me. Before drawing any conclusions, therefore, the name in Anatolian Arabic needs to be established.

4. ‘Tree’ and ‘Thorn Bramble’

In this section I shall consider the words for ‘a tree’ and for ‘a thorn bramble’. The former has a common word, which is termed dawmo, while the latter has three etymologically quite different words across the various dialects, namely ʿəlto, sālənto and ṭawʿənto.

The word dawmo is interesting in several respects. It can have the specific meaning of ‘oak-tree’ in Ṭūr ʿAbdīn, but it is also used with the general meaning ‘tree’. The Syriac word for ‘tree’, ʾīlānā has the reflex ʾīlōno in Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo. The word ʾīlōno is not common in Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo but speakers still know its meaning. All the forests around the villages in Ṭūr ʿAbdīn contain the dawmo ‘oak-tree’ (plural dawme). Its fruit is termed in Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo bālūṭo, which is a reflex of the Syriac word ballōṭā, hence Arabic ballūṭ, according to several sources. While in Syriac the word ballōṭā denotes both ‘the oak-tree’ and its fruit ‘acorn’, in Ṣūrayṭ/Ṭūrōyo the word bālūṭo does not denote the ‘oak-tree’ but only its fruit ‘acorn’. The ‘oak-tree’ is termed either by the word dawmo alone or by the phrase dawmo dū-bālūṭo. It grows wild. Until fifty years ago, this tree constituted the lifeline in the area. Before modern building techniques were introduced into the area, the timber cut from this tree was used to build ceilings. Its branches were also used as fodder for animals, as also were its fruits, the acorns. Moreover, the wood cut from this tree served as the most important wood fuel during the cold months of the year. During a famine (referred to in Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo by the word ġāla, an Arabic loanword) the ‘acorns’ of this tree were ground into bread flour. The bread baked from this flour served as the most important food for the local people. Nowadays, it is completely forbidden to cut off parts or fell these trees in the forest for the domestic use.

What is the origin of this word dawmo? Although it has the native ending -o, it is a foreign word in the language, coming from Arabic dawmatun, a nomen unitatis of the collective dawm ‘the doom-palm’. The word is also found in English, into which it was introduced via French, from Arabic dawm, according to Colin’s Dictionary. In the Arabic dialects around Ṭūr ʿAbdīn, the word is attested in Qinderib, having both the collective dawm and the nomen unitatis dawme. According to al-Munjid, this tree and its species are growing in Egyptian, Sudan and Saudi Arabia.29

As for the words for ‘a thorn bramble’, among the aforementioned three words, the dialectal word ʿəlto (plural ʿōle) is readily recognizable. It is a clear reflex of Western Syriac ʿōltō (Syriac ʿāltā, plural ʿālē), a feminine form which has presumably been formed as a nomen unitatis from ʿālā (or from its pl. ʿālē). The form ʿālā itself would seem to be a reflex of Syriac ʿaʾlā, whose root ʿʾl is comparable to that of Hebrew ṣʾl in ṣeʾelīm and that of Arabic ḏ̣ʾl in ḏ̣aʾl.30 The occurrence of the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo ʿəlto (plural ʿōle) was until now known only from the dialect of Mīdən, but in my latest research journeys to Ṭūr ʿAbdīn I noted its occurrence also in two other village dialects, namely in the dialect of Bēqusyōno and Zāz. The informants of the dialect of Bēqusyōno stated that for the ‘shrub’ they say ʿəlto (plural ʿōle), but for its thorns they say sālūne (plural).

This brings us to the other word sālənto (plural sālūne), which is used in some dialects, among them the dialect of Məḏyaḏ. In Syriac, only in the supplement of Augin Manna’s Syro-Arabic Lexicon could I find a word with the form selōnā (Western Syriac: selūnō). This is rendered by Arabic ʾumm ġaylān, ʿusaj, with the same or a similar meaning.31 The Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo plural form sālūne is clearly a reflex of this word, which, oddly, is classified in this source as a foreign word, without giving the etymon of the foreign word in question. The supplement is of very late date and is not written by the author of the lexicon. In any case, I think this word has, one way or another, a historical connection with Syriac salwā and Jewish Aramaic silwā ‘thorn’, connected by Koehler and Baumgartner with Hebrew sallōn, Arabic sullāʾ and Akkadian ṣ/sillû, all with the meaning ‘thorn’.32 The Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo sālənte could be a backformation from the plural sālūne. In favour of such an interpretation is the situation in the dialect of Bēqusyōno, where the tree is called ʿəlto (plural ʿōle), but its thorns and fruit are termed sālūne. There is thus no sālənto, according to my informants.

Finally, I shall mention that a group of village dialects, the so-called Rāyīte-dialects, have a word of their own for the ‘thorny bramble’, namely ṭawʿənto (plural ṭawʿūne). According to some of my informants, its fruits are termed ṭawʿūne because of their being like ṭawʿūne (plural) ‘small offerings of bread stamped with a symbol of the cross’, a diminutive of ṭawʿe, the reflex of the Syriac ṭaḇʿē, root ṭbʿ ‘to seal; to sink’. It is difficult to know whether this is a folk-etymology or not. Alternatively it may be proposed that the word has its origin in Syriac ṭʿūntā and ṭʿantā ‘a crop of fruit’, root ṭʿn ‘to bear; to carry’. A reflex of the Syriac word ṭʿūntā is found in NENA, e.g. Barwar ṭunta ‘fruit of a tree’.33 Such an interpretation would mean that the w in the Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo ṭawʿənto is secondary; cf. Ṣūrayt/Ṭūrōyo ʿwōno ‘a sheep’, from *ʿōnō, root ʿʾn.

References

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