words and things
69
house, which can be partly roofed as in Upper Egypt: bēt il-fu n (Behnstedt and Woidich). murakkab (Mecca)11, marčab (al-Qahabah in Prochazka 16) “kitchen”, yemeni Tihāmah marakkabu “oven” (M.-C. Simeone-Senelle et al. 221), are related to Sudanese rakkab aš-šāy = wa aʿahu ʿalā n-nār, rakkab al-lūba = abaxahu (sic!) bi-wa ʿihi ʿalā n-nār (Qāsim), rakkab “faire cuire dans l’eau” (Pommerol), rekkeb “cuire”, terkīb “cuisson” (Roth-Laly), Nigerian rakkab, birakkib “to cook” (Kaye). The forms reflect the idea of putting sth. on the fire, but might also be influenced (metathesis?) by karrab “allumer (le feu), s’enflammer” (Pommerol), Landberg 1920-1942: 2564 takarrab “se chauffer au feu”, 2565 karīb, makrīb “feu”; cf. also karab-āb “kitchen” in Sudanese Arabic (Hillelson) which sounds like a loan from Beja; cf. further Chadian Arabic bēt an-nār “kitchen”. Also to “fire” (“flame”) refers milhab in Rijāl Alma in the Saudi ʿAsīr province. The Chadian forms ladāy, bēt al-ladāy originally do not refer to a room, but to an object (*al-adāy = CA al-’adāh “tool, implement”), namely the fireplace made of three stones. ladāy is polysemic. Pommerol gives “foyer, pierres du foyer, cuisine, trois pierres constituant le foyer de la cuisine, trépied qui cale et soutient la marmite”. 4. Baking Oven The problems of interpretation partly result from the ambiguity of Arabic terms and are mainly cartographic. One and the same word might designate “a baking oven, a baking pit, a bakery, a furnace” or according to the form of the oven different terms might be used. A baking oven might be rectangular, bell-shaped, cylindrical or conic. Forms like ṭabūn ~ ṭabūna ~ ṭabōna used in Upper Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Palestine, but also in Tunisia, and sporadically even in Yemen, do not necessarily refer to a certain type as suggest Dalman 74 ff. and the photographs nr. 12, 13 and 14, also Behnstedt and Woidich 417, which show bell-shaped implements in contrast to the very rudimentary drawing in Saada table XI which is conic having at its side a rectangular block for putting the bread on it. As for Egypt, abūna rather appplies to a bell-shaped oven, but this might 11
As for the form cf. mu allan “place of prayer”.