Semitic *mgn and Its Supposed Sanskrit Origin

Bibliographic Data

ID5158359
AuthorsM O''Connor, M O'Connor, Michael P O’Connor (0009-0009-8462-0648, corresponding author)
Year1989
Volume109
Issue1
Pages25
Publication date1989-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the American Oriental Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0279 • E-ISSN: 2169-2289
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/604334
OpenAlexW2333493162
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited11

IN THE COMPARATIVE-HISTORICAL study of the Semitic languages, what relative priorities are to be assigned to comparative and historical data? In various guises this fundamental question has exercised Semitists for well over a century. I wish here to observe that this is not a question which applies only to major problems, and further to rearray and inspect one small-scale problem. The Semitic root mgn 'to give' is relatively rare, but not so rare that its sense and usage are not without intrinsic interest, for it is the source of both ordinary idioms and specialized literary vocabulary. Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Wolfram von Soden, in his paper Vedisch magham 'Geschenk' neuarabisch maggdnTja 'Gebiihrenfreiheit': Der Weg einen Wortsippe (1965), made the root relevant to the question outlined here. With the republication of that paper in von Soden's Opera biblica minora, Bibel und Alter Orient: Altorientalische Beitrdge zum Alten Testament (1985), the time has come to apply his arguments explicitly to the comparative-historical question, for, as H.-P. Muller remarks in his preface to the volume, Einige der hier wieder vorgelegten Aufsatze haben in der alttestamentliche Wissenschaft und der hebraische Philologie bereits eine tiefe Spur hinterlassen (von Soden 1985, v). The root mgn, von Soden argues, was extracted from a Vedic loan manifest first in Hurrian and later in Semitic. Historical evidence from second-millennium sources is used to ground the argument for the root's status as a loan. I will argue that various features of the root in Semitic make it unlikely to have been a loan. In advance of reviewing the data, three points can be made. The first concerns the kind of loan in view. Semitic languages borrow words often, and such borrowings are frequently morphologized to a slight degree. Modern Arabic examples such as taksT, plural takasiydt 'taxi' or kas's'aya (II) 'to cash (a check)' illustrate such Semitization in general. The degree of Semitization proposed by von Soden is broader: he imagines a noun borrowed and so completely morphologized that the root becomes more or less natively productive. There are no comparable examples of total root borrowings in classical Semitic; the few examples that might come close are to be found in modern tongues, where processes of interlingual contact often display distinctive dynamics. A second general point is related: loanwords are overwhelmingly nouns in all languages which recognize a discrete class of nouns.' Other parts of speech are borrowed rarely.3 Both these features of loans reflect the reasons

Arabic · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Root (linguistics) · Sanskrit · Semitic languages · Ancient Near East History · History · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy

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