The Concept of nicknames in Arabic for people and horses

There was a thread in the Game related chit chat, where the words Abu, Ibn and Bint were mention by Calichrome due to her experience with horses were she recognized that these were Arabic words, and I though to open this thread to share some thoughts about the names in Arabic, so I will try to give a small introduction, so there is three types of names used in the Arabic language, they are : Original Arabic names, adopted names, and nicknames.

Original Arabic names all have meanings, mostly they are adjectives, or animal names, or objects, for the names that are adjectives you can find names such as Jameel (man) and Jameela (lady), Saleem, Salim (safe, unharmed) and so many other names.

and the second type you can see a lot of names like Assad and Laith (both means lion), Nimer (Tiger), Fahad (leopard), Saquer (Hawk), Deeb (Wolf) and Maha for girls (Antelope) because of their beautiful eyes, and many others.

The third type, you can find names like Saif (sword), Jabal (mountain), Shams and Qamar, that is the sun and moon as ladies names.

The adopted names are originally names taken from other languages becoming popular these days, but there is many influences by other countries.

The concept of nicknames is different in Arabic than other cultures, it is not about making the names short or easier to call, it turned to be more official, so when you want to address a man or woman it is not preferable to call them by their names, the pride of Arabs are the Family and the sons specially the elder son so they use prefixes added to make a nickname, I will give my farm name as example it is Abu Badia, my friends used to call me that, it is modified here (abubadi66) I removed the last letter because when it is written with the A which is a replacement for an Arabic letter that does not exist in other languages(ع) because it is hard to produce it makes a woman name, it means extremely good (from creativity) so it is a male name (adjective) and when we add the letter A it becomes a female name and the prefix Abu here means father of ... Badia which suppose to be my older son, even I am not married and does not have children yet but they use it anticipating that some time I am going to have a son and call him Badia which is my fathers name, it is the culture and my duty is to carry on my fathers name through my son, and for the ladies the prefix Umm is used and means mother of ..., but the ladies are not obligated to carry their father names, in some cases they use the prefix ibn which means son, followed by the father name or the family name if it is distinguished name.
In the history you can find some famous Arab who carries such names with prefixes like (Ibn Sina (in medicines), Ibn Khaldoon (Sociologist), Ibn Rushd (in philosophy), Ibn batootah the famous traveler who made it from Morocco to India (our equal to Marco Polo) in the twelfth century, and more.

The Arabs in the middle ages used to be one of the advanced civilizations, they expanded until they reached Spain in Europe, china and India in Asia, and all is lost due to the wars, crusades and invasions later until they were reduced to be what they call the Third World, or Developing countries, but still they carry their pride specially in their language and The horses, the Arabic breed of horses is one of the most expensive now a days and some horses carry a genealogy tree that shows the horse fathers and grandfathers, and they call them names just like persons so you will find a lot of Abu, Ibn, and Bint attached to the names , Bint means girl but it is used to give the meaning of daughter like the name Bint al Sultan which means daughter of the Sultan (ruler, equivalent to king), there is a lot of names for horses in Arabic that carries the meanings of son of the thunder or daughter of the wind in special cases to signify the speed and power of the horse.

I hope I did not bore you with this long passage.

 

Abubadi, I was not bored by your post at all. You have shared some wonderful insights into your home, family and culture in other threads as well and I for one really do appreciate them. Thank you very much

 

Abubadi, that was wonderful!! Thank you for sharing that. Arabian horses have always been my very favorite! They are truly 'horse Royalty' in every way.....so beautiful, and with such Heart and personality, and intelligence and grace and stamina.
I have wondered about the structure of the Arabic prefixes, and appreciate all your information. It is all very interesting, and I hope you will share much more with us!!

 

Not boring at all. I do appreciate your taking time to give us some insight into the Arab culture. It sounds like "Ibn" is more of an honorific than a designation of familial relationship like "abu" or "bint". Is that correct? Something that is given to denote great accomplishment(s)? I also would like to know if "rih" means wind as I was told by someone many years ago. I am curious.

(Edit: Rereading, I see that ibn does mean son. I really need to read thoroughly.)

 

Thank you for sharing this with us. Very interesting and much appreciated.

 

Interesting reading! Thank you for the insight!

 

Thank you Abubadi It's not boring at all, I really enjoy learning about different cultures.

 

You are well informed

Rih or reah is wind (the force in the wind), and reyah is winds, for the other question, you may be wright, but it denotes shame in the same way, when someone is addressed by ibn then family name or father name that also means those names have did something and you are stuck with it, the tree follow the roots and bad roots can't make a healthy tree, but it is not common, my family name is Abu Ghazalah, when my uncles tried to trace the origin of our family name, they found an old story about one of our grandfathers who happened to have a very beautiful daughter, and in our culture they used the word Ghazalah (from Ghazal) which is the reindeer to describe how beautiful the girl is and the good figure and the light movement, while it is not the habit to use Abu with a girl name, but for family names it is ok, now they start to use it with girl names if there is no boys, it is a recent change, long time ago I met an American pastor who works as a missionary in our country his name was George Chelsi, he lived there for a long time, and he have a son his name Billy, so the people called him Abu Billy, I think he is retired now or passed away, but he liked the name and he kept it, to me it sounded funny to use a name like this part Arabic and part American, this name brought smiles on many faces .
And now you can find many names like this such as Abu John and Abu Jack, people started to get used to such names.

For the comparison you make between Abu and Ibn, while ibn is more formal, Abu turned to be common and popular, in the language it comes as Abu, Aba, or Abi, it depends on the sentence and the grammar, but now the people forgot the grammar and Abu is used in the common language (not the standard), and there is other words like that but they are not used now, like Akhou or Okht which means brother and sister, the kh here is a replacement for another Arabic letter (خ) which sounds like ch in German language or Dutch(Holland) as in the name Bach.

 

I'm guessing that Ghazal is the basis for our word Gazelle? (Member of the antelope family and favorite food of cheetahs.)

(According to Wikipedia, I got that right. )

 

I noticed there is a player going under an Arabic name (Farhana01), so I f you see this I wanted to ask, how did you get that name and do you know what it means?

 

thanks for posting this, being in Qatar I understand a little behind the names, for example the current Emir is Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the previous Emir his father being Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and his mother Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned. I believe Tamim means strong
Al Thani being the royal house name, traced back Ishmael son of Ibrahim.

There are also many things in Qatar named Hamad in honour of the Father Emir, including the medical corporation and the new airport.

 

Thank you Jools, Tamim is from perfection, or it is the thing or person added to get to perfection, Thani may have 3 meanings, first meaning is the second, the other meaning might be the bender (who bends things) and the last meaning can be from compliment (thanks), it is hard to define which one is the required meaning, it had to be traced back to when the name was chosen, as for the claim that the royal house can be traced to Ismael son of Ibrahim, no body can prove that, and there is a geographical mistake here since Ishmael and his descendants lived in a different location which is very very far away from Qatar, they existed in the desert in the south of Jordan, anyway, many Arab royalties have similar claims just to add a justification for them being the rulers.