Talk:مائدة

Greek

@Fay Freak, like Latin magida, this can be easily derived from μαγίς (magís), no? --Vahag (talk) 14:31, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

@Vahagn Petrosyan: I suppose you don’t want to claim the Ethiopic term, which is often in the Bible, an Arabic borrowing? We would imagine it to have come from the Ancient Hellenes in Ethiopia, whose presence there is documented, but to derive the Gəʿəz from it is not easy formally, especially the geminate (also present in the Təgrəñña, while its absence in Təgre is surely secondary, as in e.g. እም (ʾəm)) is difficult to account for thus. And there is a jump in meaning. You just have shiny object syndrome after dealing with the relations of this Greek word. 😝 Fay Freak (talk) 16:14, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

I don't know anything about the formal correspondence, but the geography is not a problem. Cultural terms could have been borrowed at the periphery of the Empire even without the presence of ethnic Greeks. We have this word in Georgia and Southern Italy. This article from page 119 discusses the Greek word found in Egyptian papyri, and there is something about Socotra. And there is no jump in meaning. The sense "small table" is attested in Greek. Vahag (talk) 16:53, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

@Vahagn Petrosyan: The jump in meaning is that it is a small table, a kneading-trough, and this is a table in the large sense; though it is possible that a table designated by a word became progressively larger. I know that Greek was widely spoken in Egypt—Phoenician-Punic was too, I have already quoted inscriptions in that found in Egypt for some reason.

We need an intermediate form, as neither μαγίς (magís) nor μάκτρα (máktra) fit directly, in so far as we want to avoid the Kunstgriff of assuming an unattested derivation with -άριον (-árion) as in سَنْدَر (sandar) (which is my guess) or مَرِينَة (marīna) (which is not my guess but still an embarrassment). (The Vulgar Latin *magidda suggested for the Sicilian-Calabrese maidda is on second thought also against my Latin Sprachgefühl and the article you just linked instead assumes *magidula, and anyway the language of Rome was really not spoken in Upper Egypt?)

The second-to-worst case scenario is that man needs to go down the Nubian, if not Meroitic rabbithole, as we positively know that some words passed by land even from Sudanese Arabic into Ethiosemitic (e.g. Tigre ምክላት (məkəlat)), not to speak of all these Zanji languages. This has made me angry now since I have tried to find a moderately extensive Nobiin dictionary but found none, and they are hardly more than mentioned in bibliographies, and in particular Gerald Browne’s Old Nubian Dictionary, though he be dead two decades now, is not available on the web nor German market and the links to a القاموس النوبي : نوبي - عربي - انجليزي by a certain Yūsuf Sambāj 1998 shared on the Arab web a decade ago are all dead, so we are at a dead end with seeking particular words, though in a short archaeological wordlist the Nobiin place for table is empty, suggesting—as some 19th-century travelogues relate—that them man there do not even use tables but the other end of the meaning spectrum of سُفْرَة (sufra). I have suspected Nobiin though for its grammatical features like plural suffix -ri, making perhaps a pluraletantum like Proto-Slavic *nъťьvy to explain مَاجُور (mājūr), where the pattern is likely secondary as in كَالُون (kālūn)—but here we are witting more than anybody else without resolving confusions. Fay Freak (talk) 22:29, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

Iranian

On this occasion I express that I have purposefully omitted connections to Persian میز (mēz) which have been obsoleted by the relatively easy Ethiopic etymologization. Fay Freak (talk) 16:14, 5 April 2022 (UTC)