From: fournet.arnaud
Message: 57295
Date: 2008-04-14
----- Original Message -----
From: "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...>
>>[Patrick Ryan]
>
>> Have you looked for the implications of Arabic qiTTu-n?
>I don't know squat about Arabic philology, but Arabic
><qamiysun> 'shirt' is obviously derived from Latin <cami:s(i)a>, and
>I have seen other examples of the back allophone of Latin/Romance /k/
>borrowed into Arabic as /q/, as well as /t/ borrowed into Arabic as
>the emphatic /T/. Therefore, my guess is that the Arabic for 'cat'
>is borrowed from Latin, probably through some intermediary such as
>Middle Persian. I can't explain the /i/ in <qiTTun>, but again I'm
>neither a Semitist nor an Arabic philologist. I should probably go
>over to sci.lang and pose this as a query, in the hope that Yusuf B.
>Gursey, the resident expert on Arabic, Turkish, and Persian, will see
>fit to respond amidst the current flood of spam.
>Arnaud cited the Arabic word as <qaTu>, and derived it from PAA. I
>have only seen <qiTT->, indef. nom. <qiTTun>, def. nom. <al-qiTTu>
>quoted. I find no reason whatsoever to refer an Arabic word lacking
>demonstrable ancient cognates in other Semitic languages to PAA.
>DGK
========
I misquoted the word. I took shadda for u. (written too small)
qit.t.u is right.
Now you have PAA words like *giraw- "lion, wild cat"
well attested in southern PAA (omotic, chadic)
Cf. Starostin.
They are structurally the same as qit.tu
Velar + Dental with i as main vowel.
We may hypothesize that *k?itaw > *giraw
Hebrew also has a word with that structure : xa:tu:l
The long u: suggests that the w- might be part of the root.
The emphatic t.t. of Arabic could be from t+w.
All these data are fairly coherent.
Dear Douglas
Your suggestion that <cat> is a messapic word is very bold.
I let plead your idea.
Arnaud
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