How to identify Arab groups named after animals without translating thousands of Arabic group names?

What is it about?

When I began my research, I already knew about a handful of Arab groups that are named after mammals (Thawr, “bull”) and plants (Dhuhl, “balsam tree”). I wanted to explain why such groups chose names of this type. But I did not know how many groups were named after natural species. I also did not know how many biological terms in the Arabic lexicon have been selected as names for people. To explain why biological terms have been made into names, I first needed to know exactly which terms are used and which groups use them. I began by examining a list of the kinship groups (tribes, clans, lineages, and families) found in the various Arab countries. I thought that I could simply go through this list and pick out the groups that are named after living things. But I discovered that many Arabic tribal names are very difficult to translate into English. To solve this problem, I re-conceptualized it. Rather than starting with the list of tribes and trying to translate all of their names, I began by compiling a list of all the Arabic terms. This list included terms for natural species (ex. ḫayl, “horses”) plus terms that describe the features of living things (ex. duʿmī. “a horse with a white blaze on its chest”) and their stages in life (ex. filw, “colt”). With these lists in hand, I compared the biological terms with the tribal and family names. Whenever I found a match between a term and a name, I marked that name as a word derived from a biological term. By assembling all of my matches, I created a data base of Arabic kinship group names that come from terms for living things.

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Photo by Masjid Pogung Dalangan on Unsplash

Photo by Masjid Pogung Dalangan on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Compiling a data base was crucial for my overall project; I needed the data for testing the various explanations of Arab naming practices. I knew what the biological terms meant, so matching the terms with the corresponding names made it possible to single out the names that were of interest to me. It also allowed me to discard the names whose meanings were difficult to determine and, for my purposes, not relevant. My main problem lay in making sure that my list of kinship groups was comprehensive and accurate. I compared several reference works about Arab tribes and looked for inconsistencies. I assumed that, if a name appears in the exactly the same form in four different works, the name must be accurate as given. This simple method can be used to create many types of data bases without having to struggle with difficult translation problems.

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