English spelling traces in Algerian placenames

Going east of Algiers along the coast, the names of two little port towns stand out. Their inhabitants know them as جنّات /d͡ʒənnat/ (sometimes جنّاد /d͡ʒənnad/) and دلّس /dalləs/ (or الدّلّس /ddalləs/). Those names would normally be transcribed in French as *Djennat (if not *Djennette) and *Delless. Yet in French - and hence, given the region's colonial history, in most Western languages - they are in fact written as Djinet and Dellys; the latter at least is very often even (mis)pronounced accordingly as /dɛlis/. French i and y are both normally pronounced /i/; why on earth would Frenchmen write the schwa /ə/ of these names in this way, when French has a schwa and normally writes it as e?

The most likely answer is that they didn't. Rather, they adopted or adapted these placenames' spelling from English - specifically, from the widely translated work of Thomas Shaw, an English reverend and Oxford fellow who spent several years in Algeria in the early 1700s, a century before France occupied Algiers. He spelt the two towns' names as Jinnett and Dellys respectively - a spelling which, in English, yields the almost exactly correct pronunciations /d͡ʒɪnɛt/ and /dɛlɪs/.

Shaw's book was translated into French by 1743, and the translator retained the English spellings of both names. In a later edition no doubt prompted by the French invasion (1830), Jinnett got amended to Djinnett - someone had finally got around to noticing that English j is pronounced like French dj, not like French j. The doubled letters, useful for indicating vowel quality in English but serving no purpose in French, were lost within a decade, as seen in Eyriès (1839). But the i of Djinet, and the y of Dellys, remained to testify to a period when French geographers relied on an English traveller to tell them about Algeria - and to confirm most colonists' lack of interest in how the locals pronounced these names.

Ayin-less in Gaza

Gaza, Arabic غزّة ghazzah, is another extremely old city of the eastern Mediterranean, having been in existence for at least three millennia. After a period of Egyptian rule, it became a member of the Philistine Pentapolis. Its name has been recorded in several forms over the years, including:

• Hieroglyphic: q3d3ti, g3d3y, g3d3tw (says Wallis Budge);
  
• Akkadian (Tell el-Amarna): Az-za-ti;
  
• Akkadian (Assyrian): Kha-az-zu-tu;
  
• Biblical Hebrew: `azzah;
  
• Greek (Herodotus): Cadytis (probably Gaza, but some dispute)
  
• Greek (Septuagint): Gaza (Γάζα)
  
• Latin (Pliny): Gaza

Some sources derive the town's Hebrew name, `Azzah, from the root `zz "be strong". However, this is a folk etymology. The two proto-Semitic consonants *` (pharyngeal voiced fricative/approximant) and *gh (uvular voiced fricative) merged to ` in Biblical Hebrew as we know it; but `zz "be strong" had ` in proto-Semitic (compare Arabic عزّ `azza), whereas Gaza clearly had gh (note that Akkadian had no gh, so a null/kh alternation in transcribing it is expected.) As a matter of fact, the Septuagint provides evidence that some dialects of Hebrew retained the `/gh distinction well into the classical period; some instances of written `ayin are left untranscribed in the Septuagint's Greek (eg Yehoshua` = Ἰησοῦς; Bet-`Araba = Βαιθαραβα), while others are transcribed as gamma (`Amora = Γομορρα; `Azza = Γάζα), clearly suggesting that the pronunciation was still distinguished.

The interesting thing is that Arabic has preserved the gh in Gaza, which would be impossible if it had taken the word from 7th-century Aramaic, which has no gh either (Hebrew was almost surely extinct as a spoken language by the time Islam arrived.) Could it have been borrowed from Greek? Maybe; but, given that Herodotus notes that "Arabians" dominated the coast between Gaza and al-Arish even in his time, another obvious possibility is simply that the word Gaza entered Arabic from one Canaanite language or another well before the loss of the `/gh distinction, and didn't change.

As an interesting coda, the name Gaza may apparently be the source of the English word gauze.

Mountains of Lebanon - some etymologies

Lebanon's cities and villages, tragically now in the news, have some interesting etymologies. I always used to wonder about the different names: why is the same city called Tyre in English, but Ṣuur in Arabic? or Byblos in English, and Jubayl in Arabic? The reasons illustrate the sheer length of these towns' history, and the time depth of Greece's contact with them.

Sometime before the characteristic sound shifts of Proto-Canaanite happened - perhaps 1200 BC or so? - Tyre would have been known by a Semitic term meaning something like "peak" or "crag": θ'uur-u. This was borrowed by the early Greeks as tur-os > tyros (when u got fronted to y) > Latin Tyrus > English Tyre. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, that glottalised θ', perhaps unsurprisingly, was among the first sounds to disappear; in Canaanite (that is, Phoenician, Hebrew, and assorted minor languages of the area), it became s' (or ṣ - it's hard to be certain whether the Canaanite emphatics were glottalised or pharyngealised). Case endings also vanished. This gave the Phoenician name: S'uur (or Ṣuur). It was adopted without change into Aramaic, and thence Arabic, as the region's languages shifted over time. The regular cognate of Proto-Semitic θ'uur-u in Arabic would have been ظور đ̣uur; this root is unattested as far as I know. However, in Aramaic *θ' became ṭ, and from this source the root entered pre-Arabic as طور ṭuur "mountain", a rare but well-attested term used in the Quran, notably for Mount Sinai. (In Ugaritic, freakishly enough, *θ' became γ (gh), and γuur- "mountain" is a well-attested Ugaritic word. In Ugaritic, incidentally, Tyre was actually called ṣuur-; so either my etymology here is wrong, which is possible, or Ugaritic borrowed the name after it had already changed *θ' to γ.)

Likewise, Byblos would have started out as gubl-u (attested in Ugaritic and Akkadian), which (judging by possible Arabic cognates) may have meant "mountain" as well. This went into early Greek as gwubl-os > byblos (Mycenaean gw > Greek b, u > y) > English Byblos. In Arabic, the g of course became j; and, for some reason (maybe it was a little town at the time?), it looks like a diminutive got added, turning it from *jubl to jubayl (colloquial žbeyl), which in Arabic just means "little mountain".

Let's hope the day that these towns appear on the news for their history or their beaches, not for the bombs being dropped on them, comes more quickly than looks likely.