Talk:drub

drub

Is there any possibilty this English word is related to Danish dræbe, Faroese drepa, Icelandic drepa, Norwegian drepe, Old Norse drepa, Swedish dräpa? Some dictionaries I've looked at say unknown and others say possibly or perhaps from Arabic ضرب (ḍarb, “beating, hitting”) / ضرب (ḍáraba, “to beat, to strike”). — This unsigned comment was added by Hippietrail (talk • contribs) at 07:47, 19 February 2009.

There are serious sources corroborating the Germanic origin. In “drub”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC. the kinship with drepa is explicitly mentioned and a kinship with OE drepen/drepan is listed as probable. In ODS the kinship between OE and ON is undoubted. I am just curious how and since when this Arabic claim was started to be promoted. Can someone check the entry in OED? And præferably, juxatapose an older edition, let's say, before the 1930es, with the most recent one. Bogorm 21:26, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Ernest Klein's 1966 Etymological dictionary of English mentions that the original meaning was "to bastinado", and that the word probably comes from Arabic ضرب (ḍarb), while Germanic origin is not even mentioned.

Old English drepen (“to strike”), Old Norse drepa (“to strike”), Old Saxon (deprecated template usage) ofar-drepan and Old High German treffan (“to strike”) are cognates, stemming ultimately from Proto-Germanic strong verb *(deprecated template usage) đrepanan obviously originally meaning "to strike, hit". That Germanic verb is sometimes postulated to gave Indo-European origin, and compared to Common Slavic *(deprecated template usage) drobiti, tho the formal relationship is a bit problematic from modern IE theories (lack of Winter's law in Slavic requires PIE *dʰrobʰ-, while Germanic form presupposes *dʰreb-)

The real question is whether the English drub is a reflex of Old English drepen. It seems rather not. --Ivan Štambuk 00:21, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

It seems almost impossible that this is from any kind of Old English, since it is not recorded before the 17th century. The OED notes that, ‘all the early instances [...] are from travellers in the Orient, and refer to the bastinado. Hence, in the absence of any other tenable suggestion, it may be conjectured to represent Arabic đaraba [ie ضرب] "to beat, to bastinado".’ Ƿidsiþ 07:05, 27 February 2009 (UTC)