Pali / Sanskrit relationships to Semitic languages

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I think philology is a better bet than the Quran, but to each their own. Certainly, the Quran might preserve all manner of folk etymology for Arabic like the buddhavacana does for Indian languages. Folk etymology is not scientifically linguistic, but it is invaluable on terms of knowledge related to the humanities. It tells us how people thought of the language they were using at the time they were using it. I don’t doubt that sakina (pardon my mispelling, diacritics are harder for me on my new computer) has a meaning of bliss similar to “sukha.” It might even be the normal meaning of the term in the present-day and in the Qurannic form of the language. That was never disputed. It was the etymology that was disputed, not the semantics.

The historical meaning of s-k-n in still retained in Arabic terms like
أَسْكَنَ
تساكن
سكنى
مسكن
The last one, maskan, is cognate with the earlier-mentioned mishkan.

A “sutra” is a “thread.” It is a distant cognate with the English word “suture.” The word sounds like “surah,” but they are not related etymologically. Now, suture and sutra seems like a pretty wild stretch, but languages often aren’t intuitive like surah and sutra as words for scriptures or divisions of scriptures. For instance, I just found out that the swe- in the word “Sweden” is a reflex of the sva- that we find in words like svamaṇḍala, svatāntrika, and svabhāva, and it absolutely blew my mind. We have our own sva- prefix in English, but it is incredibly obscure. It happens in the words “suigenesis” and “suicide.”

On terms of the roots, Sanskrit (and Indo-European roots in general) are quite different from Arabic/Afro-Asiatic triconsonantal roots. Afro-Asiatic roots are often in a C-C-C form, with C standing in for “consonant.” Indo-European roots are based on a root syllable, not three root consonants.

For surah, we have “s-w-r.” For sutra, we have “siv.” Knowing “siv,” the Old English “siwian” for “to sew” becomes more intuitive, v/w being a common form of phonetic drift. The Latin “suō” for “to sow” becomes similarly intuitive, but only after the etymology is known. The “v” in the root “siv” is where “sīvyati” (Sanskrit for “to sew”) gets its “v.”

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Thanks, Sir.
Your knowledge benefits me a lot. It redirects my thought, reshaping it, making me understand better.
I hope that you keep sharing your insights regarding all the similar words i give.

Doesn’t this folk etymology give a hint of old connection between these 2 distant Old Religious cultures? “Mutual affection”?

the question i need your recommendation in is: can i translate Sutra into Surah in Arabic? do you recommend that?
because using “Book كتاب” is somewhat distant from the meaning of Sutra in comparison with Surah.

if I translated Sutra into surah (in my arabic translation), will i be a good translator or a corrupted one?

another example word I want to discuss with you is “Samadhi” word.
we have in Arabic, “Saamid”, which relates into one when getting into a state of mind which in it, he will get awareness regarding what Time-related-matter that is coming towards him -like Death day, Final Day-. one who is Laughing and wondering can’t get into this state of mind.

Can you please give etymological interpretation of Samadhi in Sanskrit, Pali. and if there is any Hebrew-Equiavalent related into S-M-D in Arabic?

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With the “din” point, maybe. If it is fundamentally a Persian loanword, then the evidence is conclusive. The problem is that there is a handy Semitic root that is interfering. If Arabic gets “din” from Persian, where does Aramaic dīnā, Hebrew din, and Ge’ez däyn come from? These are all terms for “religion” that comes from a shared d-V-n Semitic root, and it is far more likely “din” in Arabic is a sister of these words than a Persian loanword. That being said, the Middle Persian word dēn sounds almost identical to the word “din” in Arabic. The word itself might not be a loanword, but that doesn’t mean that human beings speaking the language natively won’t re-analyze the Arabic word as identical to the Persian word. This is what humans do. Not every human being alive historically has had the benefit of an Internet full of linguistic scholarship comparing languages all over the world. To an Arabic speaker in the Middle Ages, it could have been treated as an obvious objective fact that “din” was a Persian loanword, etc. and that isn’t “wrong” per se. We just have a bigger perspective and can see more information.

To be honest? No. I think of that as a word particular to the Quran. Are there any other texts in Arabic that use “surah” for their chapters? Another issue is that a surah is a chapter, but a sutra is not a chapter. A sutra is an entire sermon. Will you be “corrupt?” I don’t know. Maybe some religious Muslims will get offended that you are using “their” word? It’s tricky. Is that “their” word?

Is there a general term for a scripture? In the Quran, when Allah says to the believers that he has sent down books with prophets in the past, what is the term used? You might just call them “books” in that sense. Certainly, calling sutras “threads” in Arabic will make as little sense as it does in English. I would use a word for “sermon” myself, but that is just my opinion.

I can give you the etymological information and show you where I am getting the stuff I am copying and pasting, but I really can’t comment in-depth about the Arabic language. My partner speaks it though and I will have him look at this in a few hours. The roots I’ve been typing here are from a number of dictionaries and philology texts linked at the bottom of Wiktionary entries:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ك_ت_ب#Arabic

See the bottom where it says “References.” If you don’t have some familiarity with linguistics, it can be hard to read, but generally speaking Wiktionary is a wonderful resource in how it groups all this public domain information for us.

Samadhi is a harder one to find. I think its root is dhā and the sam- and -a- are agglutinated preffixes? Maybe someone with better Sanskrit can come and help with this one. Whatever this root is, it is also of “śraddhā.” WisdomLibrary gives the derivation as “saṃ+ā+√dhā” (√ indicates a root – I don’t know if you know) but gives no meaning for the root. Maybe we can tag Ven @sujato and he can tell us what √dhā is or where we can look.

Reading this again, I think I get what you are asking.

Indo-Aryan languages don’t have roots like Semitic languages.

A Semitic root is in the form of C-C-C. Those three C’s are consonants.

An Indo-Aryan root is a one syllable “word” (unless I’m to be corrected).

So if you look above, you’ll notice the root of samadhi is likely √dhā. This has three letters, but it is one “syllable.”

Compare this with a Semitic root, like s-k-n, which we were discussing earlier. This root is not a one syllable “word.” So just because “samadhi” can be written in Arabic as “s-m-d” with implied vowels, that doesn’t mean its root is “s-m-d.” That would be maybe true if Sanskrit were Semitic, but it is not.

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I would seriously consider خُطْبَة for “sutta/sutra.” But that’s just IMO. I don’t speak Arabic myself and don’t come from an Arab culture. In the Unity Mosque in Toronto, the huppa (I know that’s not right, that’s just how people pronounce it their with their accent) is the sermon, the teaching of the hour while everyone is gathered for prayer. It could work, if I don’t have a wrong sense of the word. I only know the word from visiting a few times with a friend. Google Translate however is saying that the word just means “a speech,” so maybe its not the right fit and is too informal.

Also, I appreciate the formality, but you don’t need to “sir” me. It makes it feel awkward if I don’t “sir” you back! :sweat_smile:

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I don’t know Arabic, so watch me embarrass myself.

I used Google Translate to generate this, so my apologies if it is not grammatical

خطبة دوران عجلة الدين
khuṭbat dawarān Cajalat ad-dīn
dhammacakkappavattanasutta

The Arabic is supposed to say, “The Sermon of the Turning of the Wheel of the Religion.”

EDIT: My partner, who took a year of Arabic in university, just corrected Google Translate’s romanization to the Hans Wehr scheme of romanization.

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the relationship with Zoroastrians, Buddhist Persians (Like Pramukkas البرامكة, descendants of Pramuka [real name is not preserved], who was a persian-buddhist authority back then, In Balkh [Named after Bhallika, student of buddha]) with the invading muslims hadn’t been made on the basis of exchanging insights between each-other (in almost, not all cases). Instead, a lot of zoroastrians, and Pramukkas had converted into Islam to keep their social esteem in the new political-related variant of Islam. Pramukka and his descendants at the abbasid caliph Al-mamun time were given a choice, either you enter Islam, or you get killed. but when they joined, regarding their previous Persio-Buddhist-knowledge, they made a lot of influence on Islamic Culture that had it’s effects continued till now. (etc. Translation of the Greek wisdom books into Arabic…among a lot of things. search البرامكة on the internet)

Usually, all arabic texts use words from Quran, even arabic translations of the Bible.
but the term “surah” although came from the feminine variant of “sur” which is a fence, hadn’t been used extensively by first arabic Judeo-christo translators of old and new testament, they used “sifr سِفر”, which is also an Quranic-arabic word also, instead of Surah. But, surprisingly, they used “Ayah آية” which came from Quran instead of the used-now “number عدد” to identify the verses inside of Bible.
Because “Ayah” is used before to refer to non-muslim religious division of text, I think “Surah” use to translate “Sutra” is more near to the meaning, plus with no harm.

The internal textual-evidence from Quran has a claim that “All words of Quran” are Arabic. Even the words thought to be not Arabic (like: Sundus, Istabraq, Ababil) have a 3-letters root in Arabic. This had made some deduce that these words were Arabic Originally=>loaned by Persians then forgotten by Arabs=>when passed to Arabs by Persians, it was identified by Arabs as Persian words=>Re-remembered by Arabs, Re-Identified as Arabic words through Quran.
a near example is arigatou in japanese:
Taken by portugese from the Japanese=>Forgotten by Japanese, considered Portugese=>Re-remembered as Purely Japanese through manyoushuu.
If the Manyoushuu isn’t there, all will think that the word is Portugese.

The difference in this comparison is that Manyoushuu as a book was made before the portugese came to Japan. But Quran, came into existence after the persian invasion of Arabia.

Although being extensively claimed by muslim scholars to make Quran a chaptered book, Surahs are unities, not chapters in a book meant to be read from the first page till the final one. Sura-sura relation is just the same as Sutra-sutra relation in Buddhist canon. there is a lot of connections to be made, logic to make, variants to take into considerations, interpretations need to be corrected or remain. It’s a relation of analysis, not relation between chapters.
Even the names of surahs is changeable, not stable, deducted from inside the sura, have variations even among the first community, not considered divine. The surahs are not named initially, all names are made on assumptions, or on a great theme inside of one surah.

I used “sermon خُطبة” before. but considering that “sutra” is not a sermon itself. a sermon of Buddha can be considered a sutra “because in every sermon he gives, the sermon is woven to be a unit itself”, not because a sermon itself can be considered a Sutra. ex: in Vedas, we see sutras also, although not a sermon book… I found the use of “sermon” to refer to Sutas not very accurate.

the term usually retains only the name of the scripture, not the type of it.
we see “Moses was give Tawratah -Torah-” “Jesus was given the Injiil -Gospel-”. we don’t see “book of Torah” “Book of Gospel”. We see “The Written[Book]” concept, which is referenced as a same type of Knowledge given to a lot of Persons [etc. Prophets, and their Followers].

I will use “Surah” so the Arabic-reader can get the meaning that every Sutra is considered a unity in itself. Presented as a fenced text that doesn’t allow any addition or deletion.

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S-M-D root in Arabic is pronounced “Sa-Ma-Da”

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Thanks, Coemgenu. I will but aside this formality then [after you proposed to].

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This is possible, but it is more likely IMO that loanwords are re-analyzed into triconsonantal forms. That way, other words can be coined based on them and they can be inflected like a normal Arabic word. Take the modern Hebrew word for texting. “MSM” is already a term for text-messaging, to they transformed that into a root: m-s-m. Originally, it was not a triconsonantal root, but it can become one as evidenced by it becoming one in modern Hebrew(!).

Where are you getting the Japanese getting arigato from the Portuguese?

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I know it’s not. But i gave as example, if we don’t have Manyuushuu as an existing book till today. That will lead us to think that Arigatou came from Obrigado. and time will pass without knowing the truth “It’s a Japanese word”
I wrote
“If the Manyoushuu isn’t there, all will think that the word is Portugese.”

fun fact: Arigatou word in japanese came from praise of the Buddha originally, as a rare-qualities Character.

Addition 1: example i want to give
Tenpura “Japanese food” had came from Potugese “Temporal” which refers to food taken by priests who were in the Portugese Missionary into Japan in their “Temporal” Period of fasting.
“Temporal food” being Loved by the Shogun of Japan back then, was given a name “Tenpura -based on Temporal-”, and Kanji also, with “Ten” given the Kanji of Heaven “same as Tian in chinese” to refer that the “heavenly” shogun has loved this food.

being a Japanese person without internet and prior knowledge about “Tenpura origin”, when seeing “Ten” in “Tenpura” had a kanji, and the remaining of the word “Pura” written in Hiragana, Instead of Katakana (Which is used for loanwords), You will think “Tenpura” is Japanese, But it is not (Because we know that from the Portugese food “peixinhos da horta” and the records of the Missionary…etc)

Let’s considerthe same if we found arigatou and Obrigado in portugese without having Manyoushuu book, this will lead us to think that Arigatou came from Obrigado like Tenpura came from “Temporal food of peixinhos da horta”.

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Yes, but the root of samādhi is dhā, not s-m-d. I didn’t do a good enough job of explaining how Semitic and Indo-European roots are different. Give me a bit.

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When we write out “s-m-d” and “dhā” they look like they are both similar roots with three letters. The same can be said of “siv,” a Sanskrit root that came up earlier in the thread. Because “siv” and “dhā” have three letters each, they can look like a Semitic root, but they aren’t. They do look it though if you aren’t used to it.

s-m-d is different from “siv” as a root because s-m-d is three consonants with or without implied vowels. “Siv” and “dhā” are one syllable “words” (really, proto-words). They don’t function like the consonantal roots in Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, etc.

Does that make sense?

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Hi,

Perhaps a kindly mod could split this thread as it has now drifted away completely from the OP…

There’s too much going on here to unpick everything, but I’d add two points:

This is a widely-noted etymology, but there are numerous other plausible derivational pathways for Skt. sūtra- and Pali and Prakrit sutta-.

‘to put, to place’.

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I understood this:
1-the Sanskrit, Pali words had really proto-words as roots.
2-the proto-words roots for the Sanskrit, Pali doesn’t make sense with both Arabic Language words and their roots.
3-we have some words in Quranic Arabic, Old Hebrew that has a similar pronunciation and meaning to words in Sanskrit, Pali [But not their roots].

3 theories can be deduced:
1-This is made out of Coincidence
2- Sanskrit, Pali have their words root from an older proto-Languge. and Arabic, take some of it’s words root from Sanskrit, Persian, Pali…etc. This will make some words in arabic had their root from Sanskrit, Pali
3-Quranic Arabic is an artificial language made from taking a lot of words from a lot of Languges, but depending basically on Pre-Islamic arabic. Just like Pali is an artificial langugae made from the Buddha Langugae, but based on Older Sanskrit (Regarding meters…etc).

Is the theory of coincidence a good one? or we have a better “proposals” to interpret these similar some words

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I’ve heard theories like this, but ones that explain Classical Arabic as a meeting point between a wealth of different dialects of Arabic languages. This is one of the reasons people speculate as to the wealth of various different ways to can pluralize the same word in Arabic – the idea being that these different declension patterns are the remnants of differing pre-Quranic Arabic, but that’s pretty much the extent of my knowledge.

Arabic might get several words as loanwords. Languages do borrow terms, it happens. The problem is when we see these same words in Ge’ez, Tigrinya, Aramaic, etc.

I’m adding this now for the purpose of other people who don’t understand the conversation we just had. This is from the Wikipedia article on Semitic languages:

The Semitic languages are notable for their nonconcatenative morphology. That is, word roots are not themselves syllables or words, but instead are isolated sets of consonants (usually three, making a so-called triliteral root ). Words are composed out of roots not so much by adding prefixes or suffixes, but rather by filling in the vowels between the root consonants (although prefixes and suffixes are often added as well). For example, in Arabic, the root meaning “write” has the form k-t-b . From this root, words are formed by filling in the vowels and sometimes adding additional consonants, e.g. كتاب kitāb “book”, كتب kutub “books”, كاتب kātib “writer”, كتّاب kuttāb “writers”, كتب kataba “he wrote”, يكتب yaktubu “he writes”, etc.

Honestly, this is the easier explanation most times. Languages produce many of what we call “false friends.” A good example is the term ṣaḥārā and sāgara, the deserts and an ocean. If they were related, one could think of the Sahara as an ocean of sand, but they just sound similar and are not related (or at least it can’t be proven). Similarly, why does the Chinese for ‘buddhavacana’ (佛說 fó shuō) sound like AAV English for “For sure” (i.e. fo’ sho’)? It is just a coincidence.

I always like to use this example for how languages are weirdly related. Arabic gets ليمون laymūn from Persian لیمو‎ (limu) via Sanskrit निम्बू nimbū. But look how distant apart these all are. Cognates between distant languages often are correspondingly different, especially if, unlike English and Sanskrit, they do not some from the same “family.”

We speak of these things as if they are directly descended from Sanskrit, but that is not quite true. Persian doesn’t actually necessarily “get” limu from nimbu. They are already related languages and we can see them as a progressive spectrum of related dialects. That being said, it is not blind guessing. We know that the English incorporated the word “chandelier” into their language later than “candle” or “cauldron” because it has a soft C rather than a hard C. This means it is not a Norman loanword and is instead a loanword from mainstream French (the English were ruled for a while by Normans who spoke a dialect of French, hence why English has so many French words in it).

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The linguistics here are going over my head, but so far as samādhi, I wrote a short essay on that:

As for translation idioms, typically we try to avoid using terms that invoke specific religious connotations. For example, we prefer “talk” to “sermon” or “teach” to “preach”. Like all rules of translation, it is just a rough guidleine, for example I use “sabbath” for uposatha.

The reasons for avoiding “churchy” terms are historical and cultural, and may not apply in a different context. The Buddha himself adopted many “religious” terms, often redefining them, but in other cases he developed a new vocabulary.

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What a fascinating thread! I couldn’t follow much of it :smile: but such a joy to read this discussion of language. Thank you all! :pray:

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Thank you for linking this interesting post, Bhante. It might be worth making explicit though, that the noun samādhi- must formally derive from the root dhā ‘to put’ (Proto Indo-European *dheH): -dhi coming from the zero-grade root with the original final laryngeal being vocalised here as -i.

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ṣaḥārā is not an [Quranic] Arabic word. it may entered the Arabic at later times.

fó shuō has Hanzi related to it. 佛 doesn’t have (for) in it’s meanings. 說 doesn’t have (sure) in it’s meanings.
For Chinese, if relation was made between the pronounciation, meaning of a word with another word from another language, we must confirm that the Hanzi is corresponding to the meaning also.

this word is already identified as a loanword. it’s not in [Quranic Arabic vocabulary]. It entered as an arabized form of the persian word limu because it doesn’t have a word to describe it in Quranic Arabic.

Thanks, Ven. Sujato. I’ve read the essay, it’s very good and condensed.
Saamid in Arabic usually is an artificial form of the Plural form. the Plural form [Saamiduun] is the more existent, referring to a mind-state that is shared by a group of people which are located in one place, usually with minds detached from the state, time, location they are in. [a good example is: men standing after the friday talk is over, waiting for the preacher to start the prayers so they can pray. at this moment, they forget their state, dwelling in their minds about various other non-related ideas instead.]

this can be true for English. but for Arabic, the language was stable at the timeline of Quran. and then expanded later, taking words from other languages, but still the words of Quran form a base that can’t be ignored, without these words, we can’t establish dialogue or text in arabic language. even christians and jews, when translating into arabic, they use these words. (الله، الرحمن، الرحيم، الدين)
“Allah” word in arabic had been used by Arabic jews and christians to refer to the creator god they worship, not to refer to the creator god which is worshipped by muslims. in that since, “Allah” word was secular to refer to creator god, not considered Islamic word even through the eyes of Jews and Christians back then.

the quranic words and their roots are secular from the starting point, considered belonging to Arabs, not to the Religion which had grown among Arabs. these words are already used by Muhammad and used by his Rivals at his time. by Arabic Christians and Arabic Jews also. Quran is considered a dictionary full of vocabulary for Arabic language. Christians usually read the quran to be more familiar with Arabic language. so that their thesis be more understandable by Classical Arabic readers.

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I’m not sure what you mean here, sorry. Are you saying that you choose to believe that ṣaḥārā is also a laonword from Sanskrit on the basis that it doesn’t appear in the Quran? I will say that I don’t think that is good methodology. Arabic pre-dates the Quran.

Yes. I’m talking about false friends here. Just like sāgara and ṣaḥārā have nothing in common other than phonetics, fó shuō and for sure have nothing in common other than phonetics or “how they sound.”

Yes. I brought this up to show that it’s not innately out to lunch to be looking for relations between Sanskrit and Arabic, but that you need strong philological evidence, but that you should often expect the words to sound quite different between languages and be wary of false friends which sound alike but have nothing in common other than sound.

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