Thread: "Folk" Etymologies of Russian Words like ЛЮБОВЬ(ЛЮДИ БОГА ВЕДАЮТ)- what do you think?

Mark: I know essentially zero about Arabic, but a friend who's "natively bilingual" in English and Arabic once explained to me that Arabic is so overwhelmingly based on "triconsonant roots" that when you encounter an Arabic word-root with more than three consonants (like shawarma, a.k.a. "doner kebab" or "gyros", with the four consonants SH-W-R-M), or only two consonants, it's usually safe to bet money that the word is of non-Arabic origin. (There's only a tiny handful of native Arabic roots in which the number of consonants isn't three.) Since maas, "diamond", has only two consonants, that could support the idea that the word was actually a corruption of a borrowed Greek term. (And the word shawarma, incidentally, was borrowed into Arabic from a Turkish verb meaning "rotate.")

P.S. My Arabic-speaking friend also happened to be an ex-Muslim apostate/atheist, so his short explanation about triconsonant roots related more broadly to the significance of non-Arabic borrowings in the Koran. Suffice to say that some non-Muslim scholars have pointed to such borrowings as evidence that certain passages in the Koran may have been "plagiarized" from Christian or Jewish source texts.

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

Mark: I know essentially zero about Arabic, but a friend who's "natively bilingual" in English and Arabic once explained to me that Arabic is so overwhelmingly based on "triconsonant roots" that when you encounter an Arabic word-root with more than three consonants (like shawarma, a.k.a. "doner kebab" or "gyros", with the four consonants SH-W-R-M), or only two consonants, it's usually safe to bet money that the word is of non-Arabic origin. (There's only a tiny handful of native Arabic roots in which the number of consonants isn't three.) Since maas, "diamond", has only two consonants, that could support the idea that the word was actually a corruption of a borrowed Greek term. (And the word shawarma, incidentally, was borrowed into Arabic from a Turkish verb meaning "rotate.")

P.S. My Arabic-speaking friend also happened to be an ex-Muslim apostate/atheist, so his short explanation about triconsonant roots related more broadly to the significance of non-Arabic borrowings in the Koran. Suffice to say that some non-Muslim scholars have pointed to such borrowings as evidence that certain passages in the Koran may have been "plagiarized" from Christian or Jewish source texts.

Throbert, your knowledge about Arabic sounds very good (while you say you know zero about Arabic)
But i just wanna add a tiny little thing; that the main word "Adamas" was from Greek orgin, Then it came to "Farsi/Persian" with a new form --> "Mas"
And Then it went from Farsi/Persian to Arabic with this form --> "Almas"
However we use 'Almas' mainly in Farsi nowadays, too.