The ancient concept of pain and torture was developed to express the state of being single so boys and girls get together and don’t waste time because time waits for nobody
The linguistic cluster *BZ/*ZB is a huge category based on a single word ‘zb’ “penis”. Why so because our ancestors inspected their penises closely and found that piss flows freely from it and another well known type of liquid called ‘manna’ (Arabic) “semen”. Now it is said that “Manna (in the Bible) the substance miraculously supplied as food to the Israelites in the wilderness (Exod. 16)” and “a sweet gum obtained from the manna ash or a similar plant, used as a mild laxative”: Source:
https://www.google.com.mt/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=what%20iw%20manna
We’ll leave it to the reader to make up her/his mind about the possible association, but moving on, our ancestors knew two rivers feeding Tigris (One of two main rivers in Mesopotamia) and they called them ‘The great Zab’ and the ‘Little Zab” because water flows in them like piss. Simple. Milk comes out of a nipple/breast so it is called ‘biz’ from the same cluster *BZ/*ZB.
When they inspected a penis a bit more they found it has a great deal to do with marriage. If a man, or a woman, is single then he is ʻ*ZB and she is ʻ*ZBa. When we looked up the word ʻ*ZB in the most comprehensive Arabic dictionary (121th century AD) we found: “ʻ*ZB: a man with no family; a woman with no husband (like there isn’t a penis to depend on); a leper; absent, destitute”
ʻthb in Arabic is both ‘sweet’ and ‘torture’ but the letter ‘_th_’, as in _th_is, is not ancient so we believe the origin is ‘z’.
First for the sweet: “Sweet drink or food, delicious; ‘the two sweets are food and sex; it is also said ‘wine and saliva’.” However, we used the word ‘saliva’ because English is a bit restrictive compared to “Semitic” languages. The word is ‘reeq’ “a pure liquid’ applied almost always to girls moistened lips, and maybe a bit further in.
The same word (ʻazab) means: “Torture, pain, suffering, agony”, etc.
For contemporaries like us a man or a woman without a wife or a husband is not exactly torture, etc., or maybe it is, but in ancient times it meant a great deal and sometimes survival.
The opposite of ʻ*ZB (bachelor) is ‘zwj’, literary a ‘pair’ but the concept is derived from the legs of ‘wz’ “goose”.
We’ll leave you with a word in Akkadian. It is part of a linguistic category. You may want to test your ability in finding what connects all these words in one concept but also please note the ‘p’ in the word, a letter not used today by Arabs but ancient words with ‘p’ are migrated to either ‘b’ or ‘f’:
zaqāpu : [City → Buildings] 1) to erect, to fix upright statue, stele, door, standard …, to plant , to make a bed , to impale , penis : to be erected / to have a hard on, stative: needle, potsherd, mountain, eyes, hair, breast, vein , penis… : is upright, preterit often asqup / išqup ; 2) to set up, to strengthen the weak; 3) to impale on a stake, to crucify (?); 4) to planter date-grove, trees, fields ; 5) : legal: to pay an indemnity for, to pay a fine ; 6) : intransitive: enemy: to rise up, to attack, to appear, witness : to appear, to show up to testify, snake: to rise up threateningly ; D: : to erect object, to lift up / to make protrude parts of the body, to flex one’s muscles , one’s chest: to fill / to stick out / to puff out / to swell out the chest
Last modified: June 1, 2023
