{"id":124,"date":"2001-10-29T11:47:49","date_gmt":"2001-10-29T19:47:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2001\/10\/29\/124.html"},"modified":"2001-10-29T11:47:49","modified_gmt":"2001-10-29T19:47:49","slug":"etymology-answer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2001\/10\/29\/etymology-answer\/","title":{"rendered":"Etymology answer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The <cite><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oed.com\/\">OED<\/a><\/cite> reveals, as far as we can tell, that <i>Islam<\/i> is cognate with <i>salaam<\/i> but not actually derived from it; their common ancestor is <i>salama,<\/i> which the <cite>OED<\/cite> defines as meaning \"he was or became safe, secure, or free.\"  <i>Muslim<\/i> also derives from that word.  Thanks for the info, Wendy S.!<\/p>\n<p>As Wendy suggests, I would guess that the range of meanings given for these and related words in Arabic indicates that any sort of statement to the effect that <i>Islam<\/i> is derived from the word for \"peace\" is kinda suspect.<\/p>\n<p>More generally, I think it's important not to fall into the \"language X uses the same word for concepts Y and Z, so speakers of X must think Y and Z are the same thing\" trap.  In English, it's pretty clear (to English speakers) that a given word can have a wide range of meanings.  Goofy example off the top of my head, 'cause I'm in a rush: to <i>cleave<\/i> means both to hold onto and to cut in half; that doesn't mean that English speakers believe those two actions are the same thing.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The OED reveals, as far as we can tell, that Islam is cognate with salaam but not actually derived from&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}