Etymon #24
Thrown down DTC
Borrowed from Arabic, the word entered English around 1300. It first appears in the Early South English Legendary, a late thirteenth-century collection of stories about the lives of Christian saints. The Arabic original sense named the place where things were thrown.
The word passed through Italian and Old French before Anglo-Norman brought it to England around 1300. By 1519 William Horman, an English schoolmaster compiling a Latin-English phrase book, used it in an unexpected comparison, likening the layer of flesh between bone and skin to it.
The Arabic verb ṭaraḥa meant 'to throw'. In Arabic, the prefix ma- turns a verb into the place where that action happens. Added to a verb meaning 'to throw', it made a word meaning 'throwing place'.
SOFA came from Arabic ṣuffa, a raised platform or bench, entering English in the seventeenth century. DIVAN came from Persian dīwān, a council chamber lined with low cushioned seats, which gave its name first to the room and then to the furniture inside it. Both words travelled the same eastern Mediterranean route into European languages that this word travelled three centuries earlier.
Norman Sicily was where Arabic and Latin sat together at the royal court. The Norman kings, among them Roger II and Frederick II, ruled an island where Arabic scholars and Latin clerks worked side by side. It was here that Arabic domestic vocabulary passed into the Latin that carried it north. The word describing an Arabic resting object was in Latin documents in England by 1200, nearly a century before it crossed into English.
