One of my long-term goals is to learn a little Arabic and Persian, not necessarily to speak them, but just to understand how these languages fit in as building blocks for modern Turkish. As a side effect, this helps to understand some pronunciation and context in world news. Recent case in point: Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
al-Shifa
is the English name for the hospital known in Arabic as مستشفى الشفاء
. That Wikipedia link gives an Arabic pronunciation of Mustašfā š-Šifāʾ
[musˈtaʃ.fa‿ʃ.ʃiˈfaːʔ] which indeed seems to match the pronunciation of this local nurse (first at normal speed, then at 0.5x):1
See how in Arabic it’s not “al-she-FAA”, but “ash-she-FAA”. The shift in pronunciation of the Arabic definite article al-
to match up with certain subsequent consonants is called assimilation. Consonants like ش (šin)
that assimilate the article like this are called “sun letters”, versus the “moon letters” where the al-
stays as al-
. From this we can tell that the English name al-Shifa
came from the Arabic written word, i.e. through English speakers who had only seen it written down and never heard it pronounced. This is even more obvious from the common pronunciation of “al SHE-fa” (with the accent on the penultimate syllable) as heard here from Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh:2
How does modern Turkish refer to Al-Shifa Hospital? Dropping the definite article (and with it the pronunciation issue), but retaining the long ā
vowel, it’s simply Şifa Hastanesi
.
The key here is that şifa
was already a familiar Turkish word, retaining the same meaning (“healing”) from the original Arabic. As I noted in the last post, şifa
is commonly used in Turkish feminine personal names (see picture). It also features in sayings like Şifa olsun!
(“may it be healing”), which you might say when you serve food to someone who is ill. Note that the everyday expression Afiyet olsun!
(usually translated as “enjoy your meal”) already has some of the same sentiment; the word afiyet
literally means “health” or “wellbeing”.
The Ottoman Turks first learned their Arabic loanwords from spoken language such as recitals of the Qur’an. In addition to the syllable emphasis, Ottoman Turkish also imported some of the Arabic grammatical structure. If you’ve ever wondered why the vowels are different between the Turkish words kitap
(“book”) and kütüphane
(“library”), this is the reason; kütüp
is the obsolete Arabic-derived plural form of kitap
.
Words having three consonants that remain unchanged while the vowels in between move around is a basic feature of Arabic languages. In the kitap
example the consonants ك ت ب
(k-t-p
) are the 3-letter verbal root to do with writing, from which different verb forms and verbal nouns are built up by adding in the vowels, further consonants, and syllable emphasis.
Even though the modern Turkish language reforms removed a lot of this structure, these traces of Arabic-derived declension are still visible in the remaining loanwords. One Arabic root that comes up a lot in the Turkish historical dramas that I watch is ظ ل م
(ẓ-l-m) which forms words to do with injustice; Turkish features zalim
(“cruel”), zulüm
(“tyranny”) and mazlum
(adjective: “having suffered cruelty”).
That prefix ma-
is a dead giveaway that you’re looking at a loanword, since Turkish only employs suffixes. M-
prefixes are used in various ways in Arabic, from forming active and passive participles (mazlum
), to making nouns-of-place (mustašfā
). You’ll see examples everywhere now that you know what to look for; here’s a couple from TV:
From the Arabic root
ح ف ظ (ḥ-f-ẓ)
to do with preserving, protecting and remembering, Turkish inherits the nounHafiz
(the name for a Muslim who has memorised the entire Qur’an), and the activemuhafız
(“guardian; protector”). We saw this in the title of the Netflix series Hakan: Muhafız (2018-2020) starring Çağatay Ulusoy as the titular Protector.3From the Arabic root
ح ك م
(ḥ-k-m) to do with judgement and ruling, Turkish getshakem
(“judge; referee”), the noun-of-placemahkeme
(“court”) and the passivemahkûm
(“convicted prisoner”). The latter was the title of an award-winning TV series on Fox: Mahkum (2021-2022).
Moving back to Mustašfā š-Šifāʾ
. Now, Šifāʾ
comes from the Arabic root ش ف ي (š-f-y)
to do with healing.4 If you need help remembering that first word mustašfā
, look at the last three letters and you’ll notice it too comes from the same š-f-y
root.5
The modern Turkish word for “hospital”, or hastane
, has a different etymology; it still retains the same meaning it had in the original Persian - “house for sick people”. Look carefully at some of the other archaic “hospital” synonyms and you can see how intertwined the three languages have been. The pre-Ottoman Selcuk Empire apparently used both dârülâfiye
(“house of wellness”; there’s that âfiye(t)
word again) and dârüşşifâ
(“house of healing”). The latter actually corresponds to the full formal name of Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, and many other Islamic medical centres. Note though the difference in romanisation between Turkish and English; whereas English borrows the Arabic spelling (Dar al-Shifa
), Turkish romanisation copies the Arabic pronunciation (aš-šifā
—> dârüşşifâ
).
Şifa
has one more declension that is commonly used in historical dizis, that you won’t find easily in Wiktionary. That word is şafi
(“healer”).
Şafi
is usually seen, as in the screenshot, as a prayer uttered before attempting to heal someone. The phrase Ya Şafi!
is a call to Allah in his healer aspect; it’s not in the standard list of the 99 names of God that I can see, but it crops up in some of the Hadiths, e.g. Sahih al-Bukhari 5742:
اللَّهُمَّ رَبَّ النَّاسِ مُذْهِبَ الْبَاسِ اشْفِ أَنْتَ الشَّافِي لاَ شَافِيَ إِلاَّ أَنْتَ، شِفَاءً لاَ يُغَادِرُ سَقَمًا
O Allah! The Lord of the people, the Remover of trouble! (Please) cure (Heal) (this patient), for You are the Healer. None brings about healing but You; a healing that will leave behind no ailment.
You may see that name الشَّافِي
(“The Healer”) romanised as al-Shafi
, but remember that if you’re speaking in Arabic it’s pronounced “ash-SHA-fi”.
Taken from al-Quds News, via this Xitter link; timestamp 1:13. I’ve no idea which particular Arabic language/dialect this person is speaking.
Taken from PBS News, via this Xitter link; timestamp 0:26.
Hakan: Muhafız review: worth a look, my wife and I watched the first two-and-a-bit seasons before losing interest.
Or more specifically, “bringing back from the brink”.
Technically, “hospital” by itself is mustašfān
which has the literal meaning “place for seeking a cure”. Both the passive “-ing” and the noun-of-place are expressed by the m-
prefix; the word-final n
is dropped when you make a compound noun like “Al-Shifa Hospital”.