ليف

Arabic

Alternative forms

Etymology

From the root ل ف ف‎ (l-f-f) meaning “to fold up or roll up in”, “to wrap or envelop”, “an envelope of a plant, a pericarp or glume”.

Also suspicious of Aramaic substrate however, as Classical Syriac ܠܘܦܐ‎ (lawpā, lūpā) means “parietary” and “arum” or “edder-wort”, deriving well from ܠܴܦ‎ (lāp̄, “to weave together, to conjoin”), and the form لُوف‎ (lūf) is stronger in the dialects with the additional meaning of “arum”, which is mentioned for Syriac already in the 1st-century Dioskurides interpolations 2:167. Compare the Aramaic-borrowed كَافُور‎ (kāfūr, “bract of the inflorescence of the date palm”) and خُوص‎ (ḵūṣ, “frond or leaves of the palm tree”) from similar semantic domain.

Noun

لِيف • (līf) m, collective, singulative لِيفَة‎ f (līfa), plural أَلْيَاف‎ (ʔalyāf)

  1. fibres, spongy interior of a plant
  2. sponge as tool
  3. Luffa gen. et spp.

Declension

Descendants

  • → Turkish: lif

Verb

لَيَّفَ • (layyafa) II, non-past يُلَيِّفُ‎‎ (yulayyifu)

  1. to have much fibre
  2. to rub with fibre or a sponge

Conjugation

References

  • “lwp”, in The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project, Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1986–
  • Freytag, Georg (1837), “ليف”, in Lexicon arabico-latinum praesertim ex Djeuharii Firuzabadiique et aliorum Arabum operibus adhibitis Golii quoque et aliorum libris confectum (in Latin), volume 4, Halle: C. A. Schwetschke, page 141
  • Wehr, Hans; Kropfitsch, Lorenz (1985), “ليف”, in Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart (in German), 5th edition, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, published 2011, →ISBN, page 1177
This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.