My next step was to search for the taxonomic and non-taxonomic terms for mammals that are found in the Arabic lexicon. The taxonomic terms were easy to identify and define; a standard Arabic biology text (Maʿlūf 1932) provided many of the terms and their Linnaean equivalents. To my surprise, however, I discovered that the non-taxonomic terms for mammals greatly outnumber the taxonomic terms. I found 105 basic taxonomic terms for mammals in my sources but collected 602 non-taxonomic terms. I had not expected this result, since the 246 taxonomic terms that I had gathered for birds were roughly equal in number to the (213) non-taxonomic terms for birds.
Non-taxonomic terms for particular types of mammals attest to the efforts by Arabic speakers to develop accurate and detailed descriptions of the natural world. To illustrate: the mammalian species called mahāt in Arabic is known in English as the Sabre-horned or Arabian oryx. It has the scientific name Oryx leucoryx. However, the Bedouin who hunt it
are very acute in their observations, and … use a more precise vocabulary to describe the animals at different stages of their development. The calf at birth is baḥzaj or barghaz, but if it is completely white, mārī is used. As it grows up to the time of its weaning (fiṭām), it is called fazz, farīr, farqad and jawdhar. A male … calf has the name arkh/irkh/urkhī, and the adult male shāt. … The old bull, qarḥab, is often found living alone (Viré 1986c: 1227).
The author of these remarks was writing about the vocabulary of the Bedouin shortly after the emergence of Islam. Their terms for the developmental stages of the mahāt were recorded by the Arab lexicographer al-Aṣmaʿī in the eighth century AD (al-Ḥuwayṭī 2016: 10, 14, 15). Al-Aṣmaʿī lists many other words that distinguish mammals at various phases of life. When describing donkeys (ḥamīr), he provides the word for the adult female (atān) and distinguishes females at specific points in their reproductive cycles. The female (atān) that has not become pregnant for two or three years, for instance, is called an ʿāʾiṭ, while the female that no longer has milk is called a ǧadūd (al-Ḥuwayṭī 2016: 10, 13). The female (atān) that has reached sexual maturity but has not yet become pregnant is a sarḥah (plural sarḥ) (al-Bustānī 1983: 405; al-Ǧurr 1973: 657).
The Bedouin vocabulary also codifies observations about the habits of animal species and the human methods for managing animals. Accordingly, we find special terms for distinct kinds of herds and flocks. The term aǧal (plural āǧāl) refers to a large herd of wild cattle (baqar al-waḥš) or wild gazelles (ẓibāʾ) that collects around a pool of water. The term rabrab designates a large herd of wild cattle only; it does not imply that the animals have gathered in order to drink. Another term, ṣawār, refers to a large herd composed exclusively of domesticated cattle (baqar). In contrast, the term ḫanṭalah (plural ḫanāṭil) designates a small flock and can apply to more than one species: cattle, ostriches, or gazelles (ẓibāʾ) (al-Ḥuwayṭī 2016: 15, 16).
All of these assemblies of animals are different from a bark, that is, a herd of camels that are couched (mubarrak) on the ground. They also differ from the bāqūr, which is a herd of domesticated cattle (baqar) that is guided by a herder, and from the ǧāmil, a herd of camels (ǧimāl) that are collected (tuǧmal) and watched over by a camel herder (ǧammāl). A large assembly of camels of both sexes differs from the ḏawd, a small group of exclusively female camels ranging in number from three to ten (al-Bustānī 1983: 314; Hava 1970: 232). Herds of large livestock are different from collections of small stock, such as the ḥaylah, or flock of goats, and the ṯallah, a flock of sheep or a flock that includes a mixture of sheep and goats (al-Bustānī 1983: 48, 83, 124; 210; Hava 1970: 30, 71, 153; al-Ǧurr 1973: 366, 375). Herds and flocks are also distinguished by size. A kawr is a huge herd of 150 to 200 camels, while a ǧawl is a large herd of at least thirty to forty camels or horses; it is greater in size than the qaṭīʿ, which in turn is larger than a kalaʿah, that is, a small portion of a large flock of sheep (al-Bustānī 1983: 138, 745, 788; Hava 1970: 105, 615, 663, 796; al-Ǧurr 1973: 414, 958, 1006).
The entire set of terms for herds and flocks establishes contrasts between wild and domesticated species and indicates various degrees of control by humans. It forms an important part of the technology of nomadic pastoralism. Pastoralists need to know which kinds of livestock can be herded together (such as sheep and goats) and which kinds must be herded separately (camels and goats). They encode this knowledge in their vocabulary.
In light of these details, I realized that many of the Arab kinship groups might be named after herds of domestic animals or after particular sub-varieties of a mammalian species: young or old, pregnant or lactating, weak or strong, wild or domestic, and so on. Others might have names that refer to the behaviors of animals (grazing, hunting, moving in groups, resting). Although many Arab kinship groups certainly are named after particular species – for example, Ṯaʿlab, the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and Aws, the black-backed jackal (Thos mesomelas) – a significant number of these groups have names that are not taxonomic in the scientific sense. I decided that it was necessary to include as many non-taxonomic terms for mammals as possible. This meant that I needed to know exactly what such non-taxonomic terms mean. The kinship groups called Ibil, Baʿīr, Bakr, and Qaʿūd, for example, all have names based on non-taxonomic terms; each is named after a camel (Camelus dromedarius) at various stages in its life cycle. The question is: what kinds of camel are they?
1 The Difficulty of Defining Non-taxonomic Terms for Mammals in Modern Standard Arabic
My initial hope was that the standard Arabic-English dictionaries would provide clear definitions of such terms. Unfortunately, as I discovered, these dictionaries often fail to do this. The translations given in one dictionary for ibil, baʿīr, bakr, ǧamal, and qaʿūd are almost indistinguishable: “camels” (Hava 1970: 2); “camel, (male or female)” (Hava 1970: 39); “young (camel)” (Hava 1970: 43); “camel” (Hava 1970: 99); and “young camel fit for riding” (Hava 1970: 618). Although Hava does at least distinguish “young camels” (bakr and qaʿūd) from the others, these dictionary entries leave much to be desired. To be fair, when Hava published the first edition of his dictionary in 1899, his intention was to address the needs of students; he did not pretend that his work would satisfy the more exacting requirements of biology. But this means that Hava’s dictionary is not of much help to me. How can I claim to know what ibil, baʿīr, bakr, ǧamal, and qaʿūd mean if I cannot distinguish each of these Arabic camel terms from the others?
Two detailed studies of how camel terms were used in the classical Arabic sources were published by Charles Pellat. He suggested that ibil (which is grammatically feminine) “indicates the species and the group” i.e., refers to camels collectively and cannot be applied to an individual animal, while baʿīr designates an individual, regardless of sex. According to Pellat, the word ǧamal refers to a male camel “but sometimes is used equally with ibil for the species” (see Pellat 1960, 1986c). It seems to me unlikely, however, that an actual speaker would have any practical use for the term baʿīr if it meant only “camel” and did not specify sex, age, or any other characteristics. Since Pellat’s publications about these terms are based on his reviews of classical Arabic texts that span many centuries and that were produced in many different countries, they amalgamate several different usages. Thus, his examination of these three terms does not provide much clarity.
This problem is not confined to camel terminology. The translations given by Hava for three plural words that refer to animals – 1) bahāʾim, 2) mawāšī, and 3) anʿām – are also almost identical: 1) “beasts, quadrupeds”; 2) “quadrupeds, cattle, flocks”; and 3) “camels, sheep, cattle” (Hava 1970: 50, 723, 783). If I were only to follow this dictionary, I would have to regard these three terms as rough synonyms or, at least, as words having overlapping meanings. However, my experience in learning Arabic and speaking with Arabs in several countries tells me otherwise. Most of the Arabic speakers I have known would agree that pigs are kinds of bahāʾim (a word which has the negative connotation of animal shamelessness) but would not agree that they are mawāšī (which I think are livestock, that is, animals that can be herded or led). It seemed to me necessary, then, to distinguish domesticated quadrupeds such as pigs from most other domesticated beasts, that is, from livestock.
To try to resolve the vagueness of the definitions given in Arabic-English dictionaries, I looked for the corresponding definitions in Arabic-Arabic dictionaries. I chose two dictionaries that are based on modern standard Arabic corpora (al-Ǧurr 1973; Wehr 1976) and two (al-Bustānī 1983; Hava 1970) whose authors compiled them by searching older texts that pre-date 1900 and that contain a more classical vocabulary. The first edition of al-Bustānī’s dictionary was published in Beirut in 1870, while the first edition of Hava appeared in the same city in 1899. Of these four dictionaries, two (Wehr 1976 and Hava 1970) are Arabic-English, while the other two (al-Bustānī 1983 and al-Ǧurr 1973) are Arabic-Arabic. The Arabic-English dictionaries are frequently used by non- Arabic speaking scholars and have become something of a standard for reading and translating Modern Arabic.
The definitions of forty-six terms for various kinds of livestock and riding animals, including camels, appear in Table 4.1. They are listed in Arabic alphabetical order.
Definitions of animal terms found in dictionaries of Modern Standard (al-Ǧurr, Wehr) and Classical (al-Bustānī, Hava) Arabic
The entries in the Arabic-Arabic dictionaries make explicit many of the features that distinguish one term from another. Some of these features are grammatical (ex. collective [non-countable] plural/countable plural; grammatically feminine/grammatically masculine) and some are biological (male/female; weaned/un-weaned; stage of life as determined by the eruption of central incisor teeth or canine teeth). Other features have to do with the value or use of an animal from a human perspective. Thus, the term haǧīn contrasts with ḥiṣān ʿarabī (“Arabian stallion”) along several dimensions: the ḥiṣān ʿarabī is ʿatīq (“excellent; having old, established bloodlines”) while the haǧīn is not. The mother of a ḥiṣān ʿarabī is a faras (“purebred mare”) while the mother of a haǧīn is a birḏawn (“nag”). Kinship group names that are based on such non-taxonomic terms have classificatory significance even though they do not refer to a scientifically identified species.
I was able to organize some of these distinctive features to make paradigms for horse terms and camel terms. Starting with horses, I constructed Table 4.2:
The only inconsistency is the appearance of the terms faras and farasah at the lowest level with the meaning of “mare.” If the paradigm were completely systematic, each term (and its gendered variants) would appear only once. However, the grammatically masculine term faras – which according to most dictionary entries does not specify the sex of the horse – appears both at a higher level and at a lower level. It seems to denote a horse in general without specifying sex but, nevertheless, seems to refer more specifically to the mature female of the species. Both al-Bustānī (1983: 683) and Hava (1970: 555) list the grammatically feminine farasah, so even though it does not fit the logic of the paradigm, some place for it must be found.
A similar paradigm – see Table 4.3 – can be constructed for camels.
This paradigm for camel terms is less systematic than the paradigm for horse terms because of several uncertainties about the terms ǧamal and qaʿūd. The term ǧamal appears in three different cells in the paradigm because of uncertainty about the age of the male animal it designates, while the term qaʿūd appears twice, for the same reason. These uncertainties are due to the inconsistencies in the dictionary entries for these terms, inconsistencies which stem from the reluctance of the Arab lexicographers to discard any contradictory definitions of a term or to try to reconcile them.
For instance, al-Bustānī (1983: 747), defines qaʿūd as “the qalūṣ [young female camel without central incisors] and the bakr [young male camel that has been weaned] until the time when they get their central incisors; or a faṣīl [young camel that has been weaned].” But this contradicts one part of his definition of bakr as “the male offspring of a nāqah [female camel] that is a juvenile; or a camel whose central incisors have erupted and is six years old; or the male offspring of a female camel that has been bred again [and that consequently has no milk], from the time that its mother’s milk has stopped until the time that the male’s central incisors erupt; or a male camel calf that is two years old and whose mother has milk” (al-Bustānī 1983: 49, 86, 807, 841). His identification of a qaʿūd as a bakr only works if his definition of bakr as a male camel that has no (or interrupted) access to mother’s milk is adopted. If the first part of the definition of bakr (“a juvenile whose central incisors have erupted”) is accepted, instead, then a qaʿūd cannot be a kind of bakr because a qaʿūd lacks central incisors while a bakr has them. Furthermore, al-Bustānī associates the term qaʿūd with two types that are definitely male (bakr and faṣīl) and one type that is definitely female (qalūṣ). Which is it: young or juvenile, male or female? Similar contradictions appear in several of the other entries (see the definitions of baʿīr and ǧamal, above) in al-Bustānī’s dictionary.
Unfortunately, all of the standard Arabic dictionaries amalgamate definitions from numerous sources originally written in different regions and time periods. This process of amalgamating inconsistent definitions1 is characteristic of Arabic lexicography.
2 The Impact of Classical and Early Islamic Scholarship on Arabic Biological Terminology
Scholarly writing about the Arabic terms for natural species appears soon after the emergence of Islam. One of the earliest efforts made to systematize the Arabs’ inherited knowledge about animals was made by Abū-ʿUṯmān Baḥr ibn ʿAmr ibn Kinānah al-Ǧāḥiẓ (776–868 AD), who was the author of a voluminous work entitled Kitāb al-Ḥayawān (The Book of Animals). He was influenced by scholarly works such as Aristotle’s book on animals, which was available in Arabic translation (Aarab 2020: 270). It also seems likely that al-Ǧāḥiẓ drew on the accumulated folk traditions of the Bedouin communities of his age. Arabic lexicographers often consulted Bedouin when exploring linguistic material during this period (see Hoyland 2001: 245–46). However, al-Ǧāḥiẓ sometimes ignored data about natural species when he believed that the people who had passed on their empirical observations about living things were not reliable. He refrained from any effort to classify fish, for example, because he depended on early Islamic poetry as his data source and found that the poets had little to say about fish. Unfortunately, he regarded the accounts of sailors – who had direct experience of marine life – as untrustworthy (Pellat 1986a: 312).
Al-Ǧāḥiẓ’s book is not really a zoological work. Rather, it is an extended literary and religious essay, in which he strove to convince himself and his readers that none of God’s creatures – including poisonous snakes, lice, and flies – are completely harmful or useless for human beings. He argues that even dangerous animals “are in fact a trial (miḥnah) imposed on men by God …” (Pellat 1986a: 312; citing al-Ǧāḥiẓ volume III: 300). His devotion to this literary effort unfortunately led him to ignore some of the attempts at zoological classification already achieved by other scholars.
For example, al-Ǧāḥiẓ created a taxonomy of living things that differentiated them according to behavior rather than bodily composition. Thus, he divided the animal kingdom into four sets: creatures that walk, creatures that fly, creatures that swim, and creatures that crawl. He had to admit that this approach was not a rational one, since it forced him to classify the ostrich as a “creature that walks” – that is, not as one of the “creatures that fly,” even though it has the same morphology as birds and other flying things. In the face of such logical inconsistencies, he was forced to abandon his broad taxonomy of the animal kingdom when considering lower orders of living things (Pellat 1986a: 312). For example, he divided the set “creatures that walk” into four sub-categories, based on alimentary, morphological, and ecological criteria rather than on locomotion: people (nās), carnivores (sibāʿ), non-carnivores (bahāʾim), and swarming creatures (ḥašarāt).
Not all of al-Ǧāḥiẓ‘s sub-categories have passed into modern usage. For example, it should be noted that in al-Ǧāḥiẓ’s time the word ḥašarāt, which today means only “insects,” included a great many other creatures such as scorpions, spiders, tarantulas, and snakes. Despite the morphological differences between insects, scorpions, and snakes, they were grouped together as members of a single class because they shared the same behavior and means of locomotion (Kaouthar 2018: 6, 62, 71–72).
Yet al-Ǧāḥiẓ did not entirely ignore morphology. He also sorted animals into categories based on the morphology of their feet. Although this sorting is consistent with al-Ǧāḥiẓ’s focus on locomotion, it extends his high-level categorizations of animals and generates several new categories at the middle level of classification. The name for each category is derived from the name of a kind of foot: ḥāfir (a foot ending in a single hoof, like that of a horse, donkey, mule, or hippopotamus, which in Aristotle was called a “river horse”), ḫuff (a tough, leathery foot like that of a dromedary, Bactrian camel, or ostrich), and ẓilf (the cloven foot of a goat, sheep, cow, antelope, or pig) (Aarab 2020: 271–72). Although these mid-level categories are not entirely free of error (since the hippopotamus should not be grouped with horses, nor should ostriches be grouped with dromedaries, or pigs with sheep), they correspond fairly closely to what we now call the equids, camelids, and bovids.
One unintended consequence of the wide dissemination of al-Ǧāḥiẓ’s book was that it discouraged the empirical study of zoology by other Arab scholars. They concluded that this field of research had been adequately covered by al-Ǧāḥiẓ and that no more work was needed (Pellat 1986a: 312). Although al-Ǧāḥiẓ did contribute some useful taxonomical categories to zoology (such as the three mid-level categories mentioned in the preceding paragraph) and thus left his mark on the Arabic zoological lexicon, on the whole his impact on scientific thought in the Muslim world was negative.
One might ask: how did al-Ǧāḥiẓ’s taxonomical categories affect the intellectual life of non-literate Arabic speakers? Although their impact has not yet been traced by social historians, there is little doubt that the scholarly and non-scholarly communities of the Arabic-speaking world have interacted and influenced each other for centuries. The various folk terms for animals that local communities developed have probably changed over the generations due to the input from scholars. Thus, the current modern standard Arabic lexicon seems to be the result of collisions between various pre-modern scholarly taxonomies, pre-modern and current folk traditions, and the modern scientific taxonomy. This might explain some of the duplications in the lexicon such as bisās, qiṭaṭ, and hirar (all of which mean “cats”) (Wehr 1976: 57, 773, 1025). It could well be that each of these three terms originated in a different folk tradition or dialect. As I noted above, modern scientific taxonomy seems to have affected the high-level category ḥašarāt. Arabic speakers no longer classify scorpions and snakes as members of this category.
As far as I can tell, the main differences between the scientific taxonomy and the modern standard Arabic lexicon involve high-level categories such as “livestock” (mawāšī) and low-level categories such as “juvenile male camel” (bakr). There are no categories that correspond to these higher and lower order categories in the scientific taxonomy. The match between scientific terms and Arabic terms at the lower, species level is good. For example, the Linnaean term for bovine cattle, Bos bos taurus, matches Arabic baqar perfectly. Perhaps this is because the Arabic terms at the species level are based primarily on morphology.
Since the Arabic terms at the species level match the Linnaean terms very well, they pose no problem for me. Whenever I find a kinship group named Ṯaʿlab, for example, I know that the name means the red fox (Vulpes vulpes). Kinship group names that are derived from high-level terms (such as mawāšī) and low-level terms (such as bakr) are more problematic, given that the standard dictionaries provide inconsistent definitions of them. Furthermore, the criteria for defining terms at higher and lower levels do not seem to be morphological. Instead, behavior and mode of locomotion are used to distinguish terms at high levels and low levels, as in al-Ǧāḥiẓ‘s era. The high-level term mawāšī (“livestock”), for instance, is clearly related to the verb mašā “to walk,” and the term for “reptiles,” zawāḥif, is related to the verb zaḥafa “to drag himself (child); to drag the feet while walking (camel); to creep (reptile)” (Hava 1970: 285, 722–23).
3 An Alternative to Standard Dictionaries: Local Tradition
One way to avoid this problem might be to rely on a local tradition to define low-level terms. Some of these folk traditions are well-documented; ethnographers and folklorists have collected the terms for domesticated animals from several modern-day Bedouin societies. For example, a specialist in Arabian dialects, Bruce Ingham, has carried out a detailed study of camel terminology among the Āl Murrah Bedouin of south-central Arabia (see Ingham 1986a: 273; Ingham 1990). Perhaps the Āl Murrah’s folk taxonomy can serve as the source of unambiguous definitions for Arabic camel terms that I need for translating Bedouin kinship group names.
The terms elicited by Ingham fall into several sets. The first set consists of terms that do not specify sex or age and that refer to camels only in the plural: ḥalāl “flocks” (possibly including sheep and goats) and ibil “camels” (only). Ingham’s transcriptions show that the term ibil sometimes changes its form when it follows the definite article /al-/; it can become al-bil “the camels,” losing its initial vowel (Ingham 1986a: 284, 285; 1990: 69, 70, 75).
The second set consists of terms that do not specify sex or age but that do have singular and plural forms: dbišah (plural dibaš or adbāš) “camel/camels” and muṭiyyah (plural muṭāyā) “mount/mounts” (Ingham 1990: 69, 75).
The third set also contains both singular and plural forms but, in addition, vaguely indicates that the animals named are immature: ḥāšī “young camel” and ḥīšān or ḥišwān “young camels.” Ingham explains that “the word ḥāšī would be used if camels were seen from a distance and one could not distinguish them for sex, only for age …” (Ingham 1990: 69).
The fourth set of terms includes both singular and plural forms, specifies the sex of the animals, and divides them into two age categories: “young” and “mature” (Ingham 1990: 69). The terms appear in Table 4.4:
Terms for camels among the Āl Murrah bedouin that distinguish young from mature animals
The fifth set – see Table 4.5 – contains nine terms. Only the first two of these terms have plurals that are commonly used; the other seven are generally applied only to individual animals and are not normally pluralized. Although some terms are grammatically masculine and some are grammatically feminine, they do not differentiate the animals by sex semantically. There is a term for each year in the camel’s earliest stages of life (Ingham 1990: 71). Some terms also specify which teeth have erupted in the animal’s mouth or have fallen out to be replaced by other teeth.
Āl Murrah camel terms that specify age in years
The references to teeth in Ingham’s glosses of these age-related terms are a little puzzling. The word that he glosses as “first molars,” ṯanāya, means “central incisors” in classical Arabic. His glosses of rbāyiʿ as “second molars” and sadāyis as “third molars” are also surprising. According to the standard dictionaries, the rabāʿiyāt are “two teeth between the central incisors and the canine teeth,” while the sudus are the “teeth growing before the teeth of the bāzil [animal whose canines have erupted]” (al-Bustānī 1983: 39, 86, 321, 403; Hava 1970: 73, 238, 314). Either the dental vocabulary of the Āl Murrah has diverged significantly from the classical lexicon or they did not identify these teeth correctly when Ingham questioned them. They also apparently failed to mention that the term ǧḏaʿah also refers to teeth. In classical Arabic, a ǧaḏaʿ is a camel whose central incisors have erupted, in the fifth year of its life (al-Bustānī 1983: 86, 98). In light of this, I have taken the liberty of altering Ingham’s glosses slightly. My changes appear below in bold type.
Comparison of these sets raises the question of how set four is related to set five. For example, if a female camel is four years old and is called a ǧḏaʿah, can it also be called a bakrah “young female camel”? If a female camel is eight years old, has cut its eye-teeth, and is called a šāqq, can it also be called a nāqah “mature female camel”? Comparative evidence suggests that the answer is “yes.” Ǧibrāʾīl Sulaymān Ǧabbūr, a Lebanese scholar who is the author of a book about the Bedouin of the Levant, has suggested that the terms referring to a camel’s age in years or to the development of its teeth correspond to the terms described by Ingham as follows (see Table 4.6):
Relationship of camel terms that specify age in years to terms that describe camels’ fertility or utility as mounts
After Ǧabbūr 1988: 184–85
It is worth recalling that one of the standard Arabic-Arabic dictionaries that I consulted defines a bakrah as “a juvenile female whose ṯanāya [central incisors] have erupted and is six years old” (al-Bustānī 1983: 49, 807, 841). Another Arabic-Arabic dictionary defines a bakrah as “a juvenile female. … When it bazalat [gets its eye teeth/canine teeth] it becomes a nāqah [mature female camel]” (al-Ǧurr 1973: 245). Thus, in classical Arabic the eruption of the central incisors transforms a very young female into a bakrah, while the eruption of the canine teeth transforms a bakrah into a nāqah. There is comparable evidence about the terms for male camels, qiʿūd, “juvenile male” and biʿīr, “mature male.” Among the Ruwālah Bedouin of northern Arabia, a qiʿūd is a “young male camel for the first six years, until … [its] … eye-teeth, nȋbân, become fully developed” (Musil 1928: 150, 264, 334). After that, presumably, it is called a biʿīr (Musil 1928: 76, 155, 161).
Ingham’s sixth set contains two terms: ḫalfah (plural ḫalfāt) “she-camel who gave birth this year” and ʿašarah (plural ʿašāyir) “she-camel who gave birth last year” (Ingham 1990: 71). These terms belong together, not on syntactic or morphological grounds but because of their uses in speech pragmatics and as technical terms in pastoral production. As Ingham observes,
The use of these terms results from the fact that young camels are kept with their mothers in groups by year of birth for two years. This is so that the one-year-olds will not molest the yearlings. These two groups go off to graze separately. … So a herdsman would be said to be either ʿind al-khalfāt ‘with the camels who have foaled this year’ or ʿind al-ʿašāyir ‘with the camels who foaled last year’ (Ingham 1990: 71).
Several of the Āl Murrah’s other terms refer specifically to camels that are old and strong enough to be ridden. One such term is hiǧin, a plural term which Ingham glosses as “well-trained [female] mounts” (Ingham 1990: 70) or simply “riding camels” (Ingham 1990: 75). Ingham notes that no “cognate singular” form of hiǧin exists and says that “the word for ‘one riding camel’” is ḏalūl, which literally means “trained animal” but which is synonymous with the grammatically feminine term waǧnah. (The Āl Murrah’s waǧnah seems to be a colloquial reflex of classical Arabic waǧnāʾ, “strong female camel; female camel with prominent cheeks”; see al-Bustānī 1983: 959; Hava 1970: 853.) The Āl Murrah also implied that a ḏalūl is aṣīl, “purebred.” Thus, ḏalūl seems to mean “a purebred female that is trained to be a riding camel” (Ingham 1990: 75).
It seems possible that the plural of ḏalūl in the Āl Murrah’s dialect is hiǧin, even though each of these two terms is derived from a different radical (√ḏll in the case of ḏalūl and √hǧn in the case of hiǧin). Although this kind of pluralization is rare in Arabic it does occur. For example, the plural of “women” in the central Najdī dialects is nisa (Ingham 1990: 70) even though the singular forms, ḥurmah (cf. Ingham 1986a: 285, 289) or marah (cf. Ingham 1986b: 102), are derived from different radicals. Comparable examples from classical Arabic include nisāʾ, “women” (singular imrāʾah, “woman”) and manāǧiḏ, “field rats, moles” (singular ḫuld) (Hava 1970: 180, 714, 751, 767; Wehr 1976: 254, 902, 944, 963). Ǧabbūr also has made this argument:
The Arab ǧamal [camel] is of two kinds: ordinary and noble. The second kind is distinguished from the first by its aṣālah [noble lineage] and its descent from ancient, well-known lines and its affiliation with well-known places. They are at the same time sought as breeding stock among most of the Bedouin tribes. These niyāq [female camels] are called hiǧin or mahārī; a single one of them is also called ḏalūl (Ǧabbūr 1988: 167).
The term hiǧin “well-trained female mounts” appears in a line of Marrī2 poetry that hints that women do not ride on them. The poetry begins with a counterfactual statement: “If women were to ride female camels (an-niẓā)” and continues: “I would come to you on a well-trained mount (waǧnitin min al-hiǧin).” As Ingham notes, “women normally rode on the large male pack camels” (Ingham 1990: 70). Here the term niẓā seems to be a colloquial reflex of the classical anḍāʾ (feminine singular niḍwah), “jaded, emaciated beasts” (Hava 1970: 778). For my purposes niẓā is of no interest, since for the Āl Murrah it seems to be an obscure word used only in poetry.3 I am interested, however, in the connotations attached by this poem to hiǧin, which here seem to means “well-trained female mounts ridden by men.”4
Ingham also lists another plural term for camels that are old enough to carry burdens: maẓāhīr, “pack camels” (Ingham 1990: 75). As we will see, comparison with other folk taxonomies indicates that this word is the plural form of a singular term, maẓhūr, “pack camel” (cf. Musil 1928: 99). Ingham discusses some of the uncertainties about which types of camels are ridden or used as beasts of burden:
in general, female camels were reserved as riding camels or milch camels, while the larger male camels were used as pack camels. While young, however, both males and females can be trained as riding camels. … In general, however, the mass of the herds are females and young, since the number of males needed for breeding and transport is comparatively few (Ingham 1990: 75).
The implication is that maẓāhīr or “pack camels” are male, but Ingham does not say this explicitly.
The Āl Murrah also use what appears to be a plural term, rkāb (“mounts”? “riders”? see classical Arabic rukkāb, “riders” and rakāʾib, “camels for riding” in Hava 1970: 267), to mean a “herd” (Ingham 1990: 70). In addition, they have a term that is a collective plural and that does not distinguish riding animals by sex: ǧayš, “riding camels” (Ingham 1990: 75). Finally, Ingham lists one other term that describes females at an advanced age: fāṭir (Ingham 1986a: 284, 288; Ingham 1990: 75). He gives no plural. Ingham also provides numerous terms that distinguish camels by “breed” (ḍirābah) (Ingham 1990: 72–75), but these terms do not concern me.
Since the Āl Murrah have so many different sets of camel terms it is not possible to combine them to form a paradigm. Instead, I have made a simple list of the terms, starting with the collective terms that have no singular forms and that do not specify sex, age, or the uses to which camels are put (see Table 4.7). I continue with terms that have singular and plural forms, following with terms for very young animals and juveniles, continuing with terms for mature animals, inserting terms for old animals near the end, and concluding with terms that have more to do with how the animals are used than they have with their ages.
Camel terminology of the Āl Murrah bedouin of South-Central Arabia
The definitions of Marrī camel terms that Ingham provides are much more satisfactory, for my purposes, than the definitions in the classical Arabic dictionaries. Some uncertainties remain. For example, is it true that the only difference between a ḏalūl and a bakrah is that the former is ridden while the latter is not? Or is a ḏalūl a kind of bakrah that is purebred and trained? In general, however, each term has a single, clear meaning.
In theory, if I rely on the Āl Murrah’s camel terms I should be able to spot and clearly define all of the kinship group names in other Arab societies that are derived from camel terms. In practice, however, some caution is necessary. There is dialect variation in this lexical domain, as there is in other lexical domains.
Alois Musil recorded the oral literature and poetry of the Najdī-speaking Ruwālah Bedouin of northern Arabia in the early 1900s (cf. Musil 1928). A shorter set of Ruwaylī5 texts was analyzed later by Bruce Ingham (Ingham 1995). These works show that camel terms among the Ruwālah are much like those of the Āl Murrah (see Ingham 1995: 127, 134; Musil 1908: 256–56; Musil 1928: 12, 81, 89, 90, 97, 116, 142–43, 149, 150–51, 157, 159, 161, 173–74, 186–88, 199, 200, 227–28, 251, 254–59, 262, 264, 268, 273–76, 281, 331, 333–34, 458–59). Some of the definitions of Ruwaylī terms that are found in Musil’s works provide a little more detail but they do not contradict Ingham’s definitions of the Marrī terms.
For example, Ingham says that, among the Āl Murrah, a mafrūd is “one year old” (Ingham 1990: 71) while Musil (1908: 256) adds that, among the Ruwālah, it is weaned. Friedrich Binder, the author of a short article on Arabian camel terms, provides his own interpretation of the term, based on classical Arabic. He says that this weaned camel calf is said to be “singled out” or “set apart” (classical Arabic mafrūd; see Hava 1970: 553–54) that is, separated from its mother, because it can feed itself without depending on its mother’s milk (Binder 1941: 90). Some other differences between the Marrī and Ruwaylī terms concern the sex of the animals. For instance, among the Āl Murrah a maẓhūr “pack camel” seems to be male, while among the Ruwālah it is female.
I have compared these terms with those from another Najdī speech community: the ʿUtaybah tribe of central Najd. It seems that the ʿUtaybah use juvenile males (qiʿdān) as pack animals. One reference, ḏilūl-ih “his riding camel,” implies that their men ride juvenile females. Two other phrases imply that, among the ʿUtaybah, women ride mature male camels: 1) ḥurmah, rāčibtin biʿīr-ha “a woman riding on camel back” and 2) dayyaʿat biʿīr-ha maʿ-ham “she rode her camel and went with them” (Kurpershoek 1993: 54; 55, fn. 87; 56–57; 58–59; 59, fn. 106; 60–61). It appears that the ʿUtaybah use almost the same terms that the Āl Murrah and the Ruwālah use.
Another source of camel terminology is a collection of the folklore, oral history, and poetry of the Rašāyidah tribe of northeastern Sudan that was published by ʿAbdallāh al-Ḥasan in 1974. As I noted in Chapter 1, the Rašāyidah are nomadic pastoralists who migrated to Sudan from the eastern shore of the Red Sea in the nineteenth century (see Ḥasan 1975; al-Ḥasan 1974: 11–13; Young 1997: 76, 82–86). Their dialect seems to be a variety of Najdī Arabic (cf. Ingham 1986a: 271). The Rašāyidah have many camel terms. They can be sorted into several sets.
One set includes terms that are not age-specific. For example, bil is a grammatically masculine plural that is applied to camels collectively without differentiation by sex or age. It is found in al-Ḥasan’s book in the phrase il-bil is-simān, “the fat camels” (cf. al-Ḥasan 1974: 102, fn. 2; 123, fn. 3; 125, fn. 1; 158; 161; 162). Another term, ǧamal (plural ǧimāl) applies only to males but does not specify age. It can be joined to adjectival phrases (ex. ǧamal šāliḫ an-nāb, “a male camel whose canine teeth are erupting”; see al-Ḥasan 1974: 103, 125, 160) to indicate the age of the animal (in this case, eight years old). It can also be joined to modifiers to specify male animals of a particular breed or quality. For example, al-ǧamal aḍ-ḍirābah (plural al-ǧimāl aḍ-ḍawārīb) is a male camel of a fine bloodline that is preferred for breeding (al-Ḥasan 1974: 155, fn. 2; 156). A camel that is used for transporting a married woman with her tent, tent furnishings, and other equipment is called a maẓhūr (“camel with a strong back”; plural maẓāhīr). Al-Ḥasan equates this term with another Arabic word: ẓuʿun, “camels carrying a woman’s litter” (see al-Ḥasan 1974: 125, fn. 6; 163; 178; 191, fn. 5; 249 and Hava 1970: 445).
The Rašāyidah also refer to their camels metaphorically, calling them al-ḥalāl (“what is made lawful by God [to eat]”); al-gūd (a colloquial reflex of classical al-qūd, plural of al-aqwad, “the tractable horses or camels”; see al-Bustānī 1983: 762; al-Ḥasan 1974: 102; 125; 169; 199, fn. 6; Hava 1970: 137, 632–33); and ar-rikāb (“the animals that are ridden”; see al-Ḥasan 1974: 149, 181). In one poem, the author contrasted a tame camel (rāḥil) with a camel that is difficult (ṣaʿb) to control (al-Ḥasan 1974: 12, fn. 1).
Another set of camel terms specifies age very precisely. They appear in Table 4.8. The data are from al-Ḥasan 1974 (abbreviated as al-Ḥ) and Young (1996). Note that I have not transcribed the terms phonetically to show the phonological features of Rašīdī Arabic. Instead, I have changed Rašīdī phonemes – such as /g/ – into the standard Arabic phonemes (ex. /q/), to facilitate comparison of their terms with the terms used by the al-Ruwālah and Āl Murrah.
Age-related camel terminology of the Rašāyidah bedouin of Sudan
I have placed one of the terms in the table – fāṭir, “old female camel” – between square brackets because I could not find it in the Arabic text. Judging from its morphology, however, it is clearly the singular form of fiwāṭir, “old female camels,” which I did find. Both are clearly the colloquial reflexes of classical Arabic fāṭir (plural fawāṭir), “one of the ǧimāl [male camels] whose nāb [canine teeth] have erupted” (al-Bustānī 1983: 695). It appears that their meanings among the Rašāyidah have shifted somewhat (from the classical Arabic “male camel” to “female camel” and from the classical Arabic “camel with canine teeth” to “very old”).
If we compare the singular terms for camels from all three Bedouin societies, we find several close matches and several differences (see Table 4.9).
Camel terms as defined by local tradition among Najdī Arabic speakers
My comparison of camel vocabularies among these three Bedouin societies has resulted in a list of terms with generally similar definitions. Many of the same terms have also been heard in northwestern Arabia among the Fuqarāʾ Bedouin, who live to the southwest of the Ruwālah in the area stretching between the Ḫaybar region of the Hejaz and the town of Taymāʾ (Doughty 1970: 239, 240, 250–52, 254, 256, 264; al-Wāʾilī 2002: 1701).
Of course, a camel term is only one of the many kinds of low-level terms for animals in Arabic. There are also low-level terms for kinds of horses, sheep, and other domesticated animals, just as there are low-level terms for these species (filly, foal, colt, stallion, mare; ram, ewe, lamb; and so on) in English. Although in theory it would be possible to find the local terms for these varieties and elicit consistent and clear definitions of them from local speech communities, this work simply has not been done. Such an effort would be far beyond the scope of this book.
4 The Utility and Limits to the Usefulness of Local Tradition for Defining Animal Terms in Arabic
My review of the local traditions mentioned above certainly has demonstrated their usefulness. Each of the three sets of terms that I examined is an improvement over the standard Arabic dictionaries, since each one provides unambiguous and consistent definitions. Furthermore, this review turned up a camel term that is used as kinship group name and that I would have missed if I had relied only on the standard dictionaries. This is the term hirš “elderly male camel” (Ingham 1990: 75). It appears in plural form as the name of the al-Hiršān lineage of the al-ʿAfārīt clan of the ʿAbdah section of the Šammar tribal confederacy in northern Saudi Arabia (see al-Ǧāsir 1980: 475; al-Wāʾilī 2002: 2510). If I had depended on the standard dictionary definition of hirš – “old, broken down (man)” (see al-Bustānī 1983: 959; 935; Hava 1970: 824) I would not have recognized hirš as an animal term at all.
On the other hand, the slight variations in the meanings of the terms from one set to another make me wonder whether I can rely on a single folk lexicon to define all of the animal terms that I encounter in my research. I also suspect that no single folk lexicon is likely to contain and define all of the camel terms that I am likely to encounter. Even a small venture outside of the realm of Najdī Arabic makes this clear.
The Arabs of the al-Aḥaywāt/al-Uḥaywāt tribe – who live in the center of the Sinai Peninsula in an area due west of the city of ʿAqabah (see de Jong 1996: 4; de Jong 2011: 4) – speak a dialect that closely resembles the Arabic spoken by the Bedouin of the Negev. Although they are not Najdī speakers, many of their camel terms are almost identical to those found in Najd. Frank Stewart transcribes and translates them as follows: ál-bil, “the she-camels”; ál-ǧamal, “the camel”; quʿūd, “young male camel”; ḏilūl, “female riding camel”; bakrah, “young female camel”; nāgah, “she-camel”; rkāb-na, “our riding camels”; zámil-hum, “their riding camels” (Stewart 1987: 52, 53, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67 note 60, 68, 69, 76, 77–81, 88, 89). However, their neighbors, the Tarābīn Bedouin – who live near Gaza and also in southeastern Sinai – have at least one camel term that is not like the Najdī terms. Musil notes that the Tarābīn use the term embāri to refer to a camel that has completed two years of life (Musil 1908: 257). As far as I know, there is no corresponding term in Najd.
Another unique term, ḥayd (plurals ḥuyūd and ḥīdān) is used by Bedouin in southern Jordan to mean “mature male camel that is strong enough to bear heavy burdens” (al-ʿUzayzī 1984: Volume 4, p. 373). Some other residents of southern Jordan also have an extra camel term, maġrūr, which means “camel in the second year of life” (Maḥmūd et al. 1997: 201). In southern Iraq, the term for a camel in its first year of life, when it is dependent on mother’s milk, is maḫlūl; the Najdī term libnī is not used. Another term, ǧālis, is used in Iraq to refer to a camel in its eighth year of life (al-ʿAzzāwī 1937: 387–88) but does not seem to be found elsewhere. Other terms that are not attested among speakers of Najdī Arabic are found among the Awlād ʿAlī Bedouin of northwestern Egypt and northeastern Libya. Although the Awlād ʿAlī have many of the terms for camels which are known in Najd (such as ḥuwār and bakrah), some of their terms (such as ibn ʿašār and labbūn; see ʿAṭiwah 1982: 200) are not known in Najd.
In summary: neither the standard dictionaries nor the folk traditions of Najd provide clear definitions of all of the terms for animals that have been used or are used now in the Arab world. There is no perfect solution for the problem of how to translate kinship group names that are derived from animal terms. My imperfect solution is to construct an hierarchy of animal terms that provides good definitions.
5 An Artificial Hierarchy of Arabic Animal Terms
For this book, the high-level terms such as wuḥūš “wild animals” and low-level terms such as bakr “juvenile male camel” and ḫarūf “young male sheep” (Hava 1970: 43, 164, 856) cannot be ignored, even though they are not part of the scientific taxonomy, because many kinship group names are derived from such terms (see, for example, the al-Wuḥūš tribe of the West Bank, the Banī Bakr branch of the Almaʿ tribe of southwestern Saudi Arabia, and the Awlād Ḫarūf lineage of the ʿAlī al-Abyaḍ clan of the Awlād ʿAlī tribe of the ʿAqqār section of the al-Saʿādī tribal confederacy in eastern Libya and western Egypt; cf. al-Ǧāsir 1980: 41 and al-Wāʾilī 2002: 64, 134, 472, 792–93, 1389, 1423, 2586). Since the standard dictionaries do not provide clear definitions of many high-level and low-level terms, I have to construct an hierarchy of terms (see Figure 4.1).
An artificial taxonomy of Arabic terms for animals
This hierarchy is based on a selection of terms from the standard scientific taxonomy in Arabic (ex. ṯudayyāt, “mammals”), a selection of classical Arabic terms (ex. anʿām), and a selection of terms from several folk traditions in the Arab world (ex. ḥalāl). Since this hierarchy is based on such disparate sources it is . However, I have tried to “naturalize” it, that is, make it harmonious with native speaker intuitions in the countries where I have lived and studied (Egypt, Jordan, Sudan) so that it seems natural for the Arabic reader. To do this I have paid attention to the connotations of each term. For instance, I have translated the term “wild birds” as ṭuyūr barriyah (“birds of the wastelands”) rather than ṭuyūr waḥšiyah (“savage birds”) because “savagery” is not a characteristic that Arabic speakers associate with birds. This hierarchy is only partial, since it covers only a small number of the animal terms in the Arabic lexicon.
I believe that my high-level distinction between wild and domesticated animals reflects the semantic contours of the Arabic lexicon, even though it violates the principles of scientific taxonomy. Zoologically, domesticated cats (qiṭaṭ) and leopards (anmār) are closely related, as are domesticated pigs (ḫanāzīr) and wild boars (ḥalālīf). Culturally, however, they are worlds apart.
There is lexical support for my grouping camels, cattle, horses, sheep, and goats together in the high-level category mawāšī (“livestock”). Many lexical items apply to all of these species indiscriminately. For instance, the standard Arabic word ǧaḏaʿ means “a young male camel, steer, horse, sheep, or goat.” When applied specifically to camels it means a male that has lived four years and has started its fifth year of life. When applied to cattle and horses it means a male that has lived two years and has started its third year of life. In the case of sheep, it indicates a male that is eight months old, while for goats it means a one-year-old male. When applied to humans it means “a young man.” In all of its applications, the word has connotations of vitality and strength (al-Bustānī 1983: 98; al-Ǧurr 1973: 385). The fact that it applies to almost all of the species that I have grouped together as mawāšī provides some evidence that this high-level category has some semantic and cultural reality. My use of mawāšī as a label for this high-level category also corresponds reasonably well to the standard dictionary definition of mawāšī (see al-Bustānī 1983: 853).
Creating two sub-categories of mawāšī (“livestock”) helps to resolve some of the contradictions that are found in the standard Arabic dictionaries and introduces some regularity. These two sub-categories are ḥāfir (“non-edible livestock with single hoofs”) and anʿām/ḥalāl (“edible livestock”). To create a label for the first sub-category I have revived ḥāfir, one of the terms used by al-Ǧāḥiẓ. One of my labels for the second sub-category is anʿām, which is the plural form of naʿam. Using it as a gloss for “edible livestock” can be justified on semantic and lexical grounds. While the standard Arabic dictionaries say nothing about edibility, they also define anʿām as a high-level category that covers several kinds of domesticated animals: al-ibil (camels generically), al-šāh (sheep, goats, and cattle) and all forms of pastoral wealth. “It is said that … the plural form al-anʿām means animals that have al-ḫuff [feet like those of camels] and al-ẓilf [cloven hooves],” that is camels generically, cattle, sheep, and goats (al-Bustānī 1983: 244, 566, 904).
Although al-Bustānī, like most other Arabic lexicographers, amalgamates several inconsistent definitions, in total they all tend to indicate that anʿām designates primarily camels but also includes cattle, sheep, and goats. I have associated the colloquial term ḥalāl with this sub-category because I view it as the colloquial equivalent of the highly literary term anʿām, which rarely is heard in everyday conversation. Ingham regards ḥalāl as one of the Āl Murrah’s terms for “camels” but also glosses it as “legal possessions” (Ingham 1990: 69), while Musil’s translations alternate between “camels” and “property” (Musil 1928: 90, 268). Both writers seem to be influenced by the meaning of the word ḥalāl in Islamic jurisprudence: “permitted by God.” It seems to me that, for nomadic pastoralists, camels, sheep, and goats epitomize the kinds of animals that are permitted as food in Islamic law.
Another reason for glossing anʿām/ḥalāl as “edible livestock” is that, in the Arab world, the animals in this sub-category contrast with beasts of burden and horses. Neither beasts of burden – for example, mules and donkeys – nor horses are eaten. There is, of course, one problem: camels can be beasts of burden and edible livestock and therefore cut across two of the sub-categories that appear in my lexical hierarchy. In Bedouin societies camels are slaughtered to feed large numbers of people at special occasions (such as weddings). In Saudi Arabia, camel calves (ḥawāšī) are particularly prized for their tender meat and are often cooked for wedding celebrations. So, it is difficult to place camels unambiguously in any of the sub-categories that I have created. However, the morphological features of camels, which have tough, leathery feet, tend to separate them from animals with single hooves and animals with cloven hooves.
My next step was to divide the high-level category ḥāfir (“non-edible livestock with single hoofs”) into two sub-categories: dawābb (“beasts of burden”) and ḫayl (“horses”). I have already pointed out that the word for “beast of burden,” dābbah, is derived from a verb meaning “to walk slowly (animal), creep (reptile), crawl (infant).” It seems natural to contrast this sub-category with animals that move quickly, that is, horses. To use dābbah as a label for this sub-category, however, I have had to separate it from a cognate word, dabbāb, which generally means “quadruped.”
The standard definitions of the word dābbah are “beast of burden, hackney, mule; she-ass” and “reptile” (Hava 1970: 194). These dictionary definitions are perplexing. On the face of it, how can any creature be either a beast of burden or a reptile? The related word duwaybbah, which is a diminutive form of dābbah, has the same perplexing denotations; it means both “small beast” and “reptile.” Another related word, dabābb, means both “crawling” and “quadruped.” Finally, another related word, dabīb, means both “reptile” and “insect”; it also serves as an adjective, meaning “creeping.” The radical /d - b- b/ from which all of these words are derived means “to walk slowly (animal), creep (reptile), crawl (infant)” (Hava 1970: 194). Thus, the core meaning of the nouns seems to be “creature that moves slowly on four legs” regardless of whether the creature is a mammal, insect, or a reptile. Semantically, the nouns cut across three major taxonomic categories, “mammal,” “insect,” and “reptile.”
In fact, the polysemy of dābbah is not surprising, given the checkered history of this word. Until the beginning of the ninth century AD it was used as a very general, high-level term to mean “animal.” It was only replaced by the current term for “animal,” ḥayawān, during the reign of al-Maʾmūn, when translations of Greek zoological works into Arabic were made and the multilingual translators developed a preference for ḥayawān over dābbah as a gloss for the Greek (Aarab 2020: 270–71).
To force the two phonologically and morphologically related words dābbah (pl. dawābb) and dabbāb (pl. dabbābāt) into a hierarchy of categories, I have had to separate them. I have placed the first one under “non-edible livestock with single hooves” and have glossed it as “beast of burden” while I have placed the second under “wild animals” and have glossed it as “quadruped.” In this way, I have created a hierarchical scheme at the expense of strict conformity to the dictionary definitions.
Another step was to divide the category anʿām/ḥalāl into ẓilf (“edible livestock with cloven hooves”) and ḫuff (“edible livestock with tough, leathery feet”). I did this by resurrecting al-Ǧāḥiẓ’s distinction between ẓilf and ḫuff (Aarab 2020: 271) and by paying attention to modern usage, such as that of al-Bustānī (1983: 244, 566, 904).
At the lowest level, I have distinguished intact domesticated males such as the tays (Billy goat) and kabš (ram) from castrated males such as the male goat (māʿiz) and the male sheep (ḫarūf). Although the standard dictionaries only distinguish the kabš from the ḫarūf in terms of age – asserting that a ḫarūf is a juvenile male sheep while a kabš is mature (al-Ǧurr 1973: 491, 984) – the cultural connotations of ḫarūf are different. In Egyptian colloquial Arabic, for instance, ḫarūf is a slang word for a man who has no say in the morals of his family (Hinds and Badawi 1986: 247), that is to say, a man who is not manly.
As I have shown, there are many low-level terms for camels. I have reproduced five of them in Figure 4.1. Space considerations prevent me from reproducing them all.
The reader might ask why I have separated snakes from the other reptiles. In Arabic, the word for reptiles (zawāḥif) is derived from the verb zaḥafa, “to drag.” Reptiles are perceived as creatures that drag their bodies along the ground using four legs. Snakes are perceived differently by some Arabic speakers. Among the Rašāyidah, for example, the standard word for “snake” is not used; instead, they say dūdah, “worm.” Although Arab scientists today certainly classify the snake as a kind of reptile, I believe that in pre-modern times Arabic speakers contrasted the legless snakes primarily with wild quadrupeds and winged birds. They did not perceive snakes as a kind of reptile.
Some might say that the animal hierarchy that I have presented here is more a product of my own mind than something inherent in the standard Arabic lexicon. I do not claim that it is absolutely objective. However, it is at least useful, in that it resolves some of the ambiguities of the dictionary definitions and indicates how some Arabic speakers might perceive and mentally organize the animal world. It also provides me with clues about how to translate the names of kinship groups that are derived from mammalian terms.
6 Additional Terms for Mammals below the Species Level of Classification
One might think that, having descended from the most general level of classification for mammals (ḥayawān, “animal”) to terms at the most specific level (qaʿūd, “juvenile male camel”; mafrūd, “male camel that has been isolated from its mother and weaned”), I have collected all of the mammalian terms in Arabic; surely no further distinctions could be possible. Yet, in fact, other sets of terms, even more specific, exist. They are found on an axis that could be described as perpendicular to my artificial hierarchy of mammalian terms. They are used to distinguish some sub-varieties of domesticated animals from others. These terms have been elaborated to separate the various breeds of horses, camels, sheep, and goats that have had important roles in the household economies of the Bedouin for centuries. As Lévi-Strauss points out in his theory of the “totemic operator,” the human communities of the world have all created systems of terms to distinguish, not just one species from another, but the various sub-species and the body parts of each particular species from those of the others. Such terms are the products of both keen observations of the natural facts and a universal intellectual impulse to impose order on these observations (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 37–42, 147–152, 162–75). The Bedouin are no different, in this regard, from the other societies discussed by Lévi-Strauss.
Which mammalian body parts and breeds, specifically, are of interest to the Bedouin? Specialists in horse breeding know that the Bedouin examine the legs, backs, faces, and mouths of their horses to distinguish pure breeds from others. They have special terms for these equine body parts. In addition, they have special terms for the colors of the hair that covers the backs of their camels. Each pure-bred strain is distinguished from the others by color terms that apply only to camel hair, not to other natural objects. There is no reason to assume, a priori, that these very specific terms for the breeds of horses, camels, sheep, and goats are not utilized as names for kinship groups. Consequently, I must include at least some of them in my list of mammalian terms. However, I will exclude terms such as raqabah, “neck,” that apply to both humans and animals. I need only the terms that pertain exclusively to mammals.
There are technical difficulties involved, however, in identifying these terms. Like the terms for camels already collected, terms for the body parts of horses and camel breeds are not uniform across the Arabic-speaking world. The local terms in one region are not necessarily used or even recognized in other regions. Specialists have collected terms in some regions but not in all of them. I cannot pretend, then, that my collection can be complete. Some of the medieval Arabic terms for the body parts of horses have been collected and analyzed by Zsuzsanna Kutasi (2008, 2012) and Janet Watson (1992, 1996). They include ḥārak, “withers”; kāṯibah, “place on the withers in front of the rider”; and marīṭ, “long pastern bone” (Hava 1970: 120, 645, 716; Kutasi 2008). Other scholars, such as Bruce Ingham, have collected terms for the various breeds of camels kept in Saudi Arabia (Ingham 1990), while Amel Salman and Nafla Kharusi have collected terms for the varieties of female camels in Oman. Salman and Kharusi give us terms such as qirwāḥ, “camel with long limbs that resemble spears when she walks”; ʿāʾiḏ, “camel that has just given birth”; and ʿaṣūṣ, “camel that is difficult to milk because of some deformity in its udder” (Hava 1970: 597; Salman and Kharusi 2014). I have included these and many similar terms in my data base.
7 Problems in Comparing Terms for Mammals with Kinship Group Names
It should be clear from the previous discussion that, when I try to identify kinship groups named after mammals, I will have to consider both terms in the classical Arabic lexicon and the modern colloquial reflexes of these terms. As I pointed out, for instance, the classical Arabic ḏalūl means only “tractable” (al-Bustānī 1983: 310; al-Ǧurr 1973: 558) and is not, strictly speaking, a term for a specific kind of animal. It is only the colloquial reflex of this adjective – i.e., ḏalūl in the spoken Arabic of the al-Ruwālah Bedouin – that identifies a particular type of mammal: a “swift female riding camel” (Musil 1928: 149, 159, 173–74, 458–59). In this example, the classical and colloquial forms are identical in pronunciation, so it should be easy to identify the kinship groups named after “swift female riding camels.” This is not the case for many other colloquial terms for mammals. Thus, the colloquial Iraqi term for “wolf (Canis lupus)” is ḏīb (plural ḏiyāb) (Clarity et al. 2008: 177), while the corresponding classical term is ḏiʾb (plural ḏiʾāb) (Hava 1970: 225). When I search for kinship groups that are named “wolf,” therefore, I will have to take the phonological and morphological differences between the classical and colloquial terms into account.
Another problem is the failure of al-Wāʾilī to include short vowels in the entries for his Encyclopedia of Arab Tribes. Although in most cases the tribal names are fairly easy to read, in some cases more than one reading is possible, which can lead to an uncertain understanding of the name. For instance, the name of a branch of the ʿĀmir ibn Ṣaʿṣaʿah lineage of the Muʿāwiyah ibn Bakr clan of the pre-Islamic Hawāzin tribe, which claimed descent from the “northern” (ʿAdnānite) branch of the Arabs, can be read as either “Banī Numayr” or “Banī Namīr” (al-Wāʾilī 2002: 1054, 1199, 2447). If given the former reading, it means “sons of a small panther (Felis pardus).” If read as “Banī Namīr,” however, it means “sons of a pond of water that is salubrious or clean” (Hava 1970: 800; Wehr 1976: 1000). To determine which of the two readings is correct, I had to consult another source of information about the Bedouin tribes of pre-Islamic Arabia: Ibn Ḥazm’s Ǧamharat ansāb al-ʿarab. This source provides the short vowels of the name and confirms the former reading, “Banī Numayr” (Ibn Ḥazm 1948: 263).
Yet another problem is due to the numerous and inconsistent definitions for some terms that are provided by the standard dictionaries and lexicons. For example, the term nawfal is defined by al-Ǧurr (1973: 1230) as (1) the “ibn Āwā” – that is, a kind of jackal (Canis aureus) (see Maʿlūf 1932: 47, 134); (2) a gift; (3) a sea; (4) a handsome young man; (5) a gifted man. Another lexicon (Dar el-Mechreq 2002: 828) gives four of the same definitions (a gifted man; a gift; a sea; a handsome young man) but adds a new definition: “male hyena.” Al-Bustānī (1983: 924) provides a total of eight definitions: a sea; a gift; some of the offspring of predatory animals; a male hyena; a kind of jackal; hardship; a gifted man; and a handsome young man. That is to say, al-Bustānī provides three definitions that link the word to some kind of mammal but also gives contradictory definitions that have nothing to do with mammals. This entry appears to be based on the entry in al-Zabīdī (2008, vol. 31: 19–20), which gives the same definitions and also lists several men in early Islamic times who were named or nicknamed Nawfal. In comparison with the profuse entries in these sources, Ibn Manẓūr (1984, Volume 11: 673) is much more taciturn; he says only that nawfal is “a name.” Another lexicographer, Edward Lane, does not list it at all. Two dictionaries of colloquial Arabic (Clarity et al. 2008; Hinds and Badawi 1986) also fail to list it, while one (Qāsim 1972: 785) repeats two of the classical definitions (“gifted man,” “handsome young man”) and relates them to a colloquial Sudanese expression: umm nōfal, literally “the mother of a handsome young man.” Thus, although nawfal seems to be an element in the Arabic lexicon, it is very difficult to determine exactly what it means.
A second example can be found in the dictionary entries for the word hadibah, which is variously defined as “having long eyelashes,” “having a long forelock (horse),” “having long branches (tree),” “having a long nap (cloth),” and “lion” (Hava 1970: 819; al-Ǧurr 1973: 1244). No doubt the reference to the lion is metonymical, focusing on one of the lion’s attributes (i.e., long lashes) rather than on the features of a lion that distinguish it from other creatures. Yet the plethora of definitions for this word makes me hesitant to select only one of its meanings and assert that it is an Arabic term for a mammalian species. Yet another example is the word ʿurwah, which seems primarily to mean either “handle” or “loop used as a button-hole in clothing” but which also has several secondary meanings: “thicket,” “company of men,” “valuable property,” “evergreen plant,” and “lion” (al-Bustānī 1983: 597; Hava 1970: 468–69). Once again, it would be imprudent to arbitrarily choose one of these definitions when attempting to translate the names of the six kinship groups that are called ʿUrwah (al-Wāʾilī 2002: 1231).
In light of this problem, it will be necessary for me to discard some possible matches between mammalian terms and kinship group names. Some 26 kinship groups bear variants of the name Nawfal (or its plural, Nawāfil) (al-Wāʾilī 2002: 2461–69) but I will not include any of them in my count of kinship group names derived from terms for mammals. The same reservations apply to the names for 35 groups – al-Hadibah, al-Haddāb, al-Hadābīn, al-Hadādibah, al-Hadāyibah, al-Hadbān, Hudayb (al-Wāʾilī 2002: 2494, 2496–97, 2501–03) – which seem to refer, in singular form or plural, to the long lashes of the lion but that could also refer to the long branches of a tree or the long nap of cloth.
In sum: a good deal of care must be taken to correctly identify kinship groups named after mammals. In some cases, the name is based on a classical taxonomic term while in others it is based on the colloquial reflex of that term. Names with taxonomic referents are fairly easy to define, while names based on non-taxonomic terms can often be defined only after diligent reviews of dictionaries and other sources, since dictionaries sometimes fail to provide accurate or clear definitions.
For an illustration of this process, see the entry for baʿīr in William Edward Lane’s Arabic- English dictionary. Lane cites the folk definition (and phonology) of the Banī Tamīm tribe but then discards it. Next, he cites two sources that define a baʿīr as a male camel in its fifth year of life but adds another source that says this animal must be at least nine years old. As for the sex of the baʿīr, the whole entry alternates between claims that its sex is not specified, that the animal is a male, and that the animal is female. Lane’s entries for many of the other terms for camels at various stages of life suffer from similar contradictions, as Binder (1941: 92–96) has demonstrated.
This is the adjectival form for the Āl Murrah; it means “belonging to or pertaining to the Āl Murrah tribe.”
It also appears in the oral poetry of western Najd; see line 1 of poem one in Kurpershoek 2015. Kurpershoek glosses it as “hardy camels.”
According to Kurpershoek (2015), in the oral poetry of western Najd, hijn means “speedy racers.” He does not tell us whether the riders are men or women, but the context of the word in line 8 of poem one implies that the riders are men. The word hijn appears immediately after the imperative masculine singular irkab, “ride!”
This is the adjectival form for Ruwālah; it means “belonging to or pertaining to the Ruwālah.”