ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2319 http://www.s-gabriel.org/2319 ************************************ 5 Jul 2001 From: (Josh Mittleman) Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You asked for help forming an authentic medieval Arabic woman's name, with and a byname meaning "the green-eyed." Here is the information we have found. appears to be a rather poor transliteration of an Arabic name better represented as or , the name of one of Mohammed's wives [1, 2]. (Classical Arabic does not use the sound \v\, so . We have very few examples of descriptive bynames used by Arabic women, but based on the example of "the blue-eyed" [4], a byname meaning "the green-eyed" doesn't seem unreasonable. We haven't found a period example, but we believe that the correct form would be [5, 6]. Here, the represents a with a dot underneath it; it is different from a normal . more emphatic in its pronunciation. Explaining the difference is tricky; we recommend you ask a native Arabic speaker, if possible. The entire byname would have been pronounced roughly \al-khah-draah'\, where the \kh\ is pronounced like the in Scottish or German , the \'\ represents a glottal stop. A glottal stop is the sound in the middle of . We hope that this letter has been useful to you, and that you will not hesitate to write again if any part was unclear or if you have further questions. Research and commentary on this letter were provided by Da'ud ibn Auda, Sion Andreas, Talan Gwynek, and Juliana de Luna. For the Academy, Aryanhwy merch Catmael & Arval Benicoeur 5 Jul 2001 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - References: [1] Hamid, Azieza, _The Book of Muslim Names_ (London: MELS, 1985). [2] Schimmel, Annemarie, _Islamic Names_ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), p.8. [3] Da'ud ibn Auda, "A List of Arabic Women's Names" (WWW: Academy of Saint Gabriel, 1996). http://www.s-gabriel.org/docs/arabicwomen.html [4] Da'ud ibn Auda, "Arabic Naming Practices and Names List," _Compleat Anachronist_ #51, "The Islamic World" (Milpitas: SCA, Inc, Autumn 1990; WWW: J. Mittleman, 1998). http://www.s-gabriel.org/names/daud/arabic-naming/ [5] Wehr, Hans, _A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic_, edited by J. Milton Cowan, 3rd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Spoken Language Services, Inc., 1976). It's worth noting that standard literary Arabic has not changed significantly since the writing of the Quraan. [6] Ja:schke, Richard "English-Arabic Conversational Dictionary" (New York: F. Ungar Publishing Co., 1955), s.vv. zarka, khadra. The word is the feminine form of the adjective that means "blue"; is the feminine form of "green".