Talk:طاغوت

@Fay Freak: See van Putten's blog, wherein he argues for this word being borrowed from Aramaic. Worth a mention? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:38, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge: The paper he refers to dating the merges of the pharyngeal and uvular fricatives recognizes that they weren’t merged in the 3rd century BCE but already confused in the 1st century CE, half a millenium before the Qurʾān, recognizing also that if there was still such a distinction there would have been distinguishing marks in the Babylonian vocalization, so the presence of غ (ḡ) does not at all support borrowing from Aramaic. Also one might wonder whether Geʿez in its early period had a distinction more than its script shows in the ዐ (ʿä) row.

Besides, while there is quite a collection of Aramaisms in Arabic with voiced uvular or voiceless velar fricative, only two of the seven examples of Aramaic borrowings in that blog post are good, only فَخَّار (faḵḵār) and خَطِيئَة (ḵaṭīʔa). صِبْغَة (ṣibḡa, “baptism”) is a semantic loan at best, خَاتَم (ḵātam, “seal”) and خَرْدَل (ḵardal, “mustard”) are etymologically difficult words, خَمْر (ḵamr, “wine, fermented drink or what one drank fermented in antiquity”) may as well be a cognate easily. نُسْخَة (nusḵa, “copy”) does not have an Aramaic form he or I can find, or dares he to argue that the whole root ن س خ (n-s-ḵ) is borrowed from Aramaic, in spite of the root not being terribly widespread in Aramaic? Fay Freak (talk) 12:29, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

And I did not mention that the Geʿez means idol while the Aramaic still means “error”, and apparently is not often a word, so it is easier to derive from Geʿez than to assume that the meaning changed twice. Fay Freak (talk) 15:53, 21 March 2020 (UTC)