Talk:سئيل

Source for etymology

I don't totally distrust the given etymology, but I'm curious why the word's plural form is سئيلين sa’īlīn — if it was borrowed from ثقيل, I feel it should have also taken a broken plural *سآل si’āl (< ثقال θiqāl, preserved in the direct evolution as تقيل t’īl pl. تقال t’āl) or something. Can the statement be sourced? --67.171.52.243 00:07, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

(Same person!) This popped into my head again, and I realized the answer was pretty obvious: with the singular being a borrowed form from MSA, there's no reason to regard it as native Levantine Arabic vocab, so there's no reason to expect it to take a native-like broken plural and not a more-accessible plural suffix. On top of that, "CaCīC pl. CiCāC" is altogether not a Levantine broken-plural pattern, instead being an MSA pattern whose only Levantine reflex is "CCīC pl. CCāC" -- which sa’īl does not fit into. So I don't have any problem with the proposed etymology now. 67.171.52.243 07:20, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

CCīC is the predominant outcome of CaCīC, but there are exceptions like ḡarīb, šadīd, laṭīf, basīṭ. In some cases, both ways are also possible. I don't think it would be correct to consider all of these borrowings from the standard language. It seems to be true, however, that all those with CCīC have CCāC in the plural. And maybe the loss of the vowel even spread from the plural, because loss of unstressed i is regular in open-syllables, while loss of unstressed a is exceptional. 2.202.159.91 03:16, 9 September 2019 (UTC)