The etymology of the name Barack is from the ancient African ontological notion which combines the Ba + Ra + the Ka which becomes "Baraka" and means "Blessing" in the Mdu Ntr.
This word later was contracted to Barak; it was also borrowed by other languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Swahili, etc.
This contraction is not uncommon in the Mdu Ntr: for example, an original term for an "Egyptian" in the Mdu Ntr was "Rome.t n Kem.t" or "Man of Black" which becomes contracted in modern Coptic as "Rmnk".
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Don't know the specificities of the etymology of Barack, as used in the Kenyan proper noun lexicon, or specifically where "Barack" is attested to in Mdu Ntr text, but aside from its attestation in "Arabic, Hebrew, Swahili, etc", I've come across a few more examples, namely:
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^ I agree. Such a name or word can be found in various languages with various meanings. Obama's first name comes from Kenyan, not Mdu-neter. But an interesting correlation nontheless.
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posted
Actually, I believe it is most likely that baraka, meaning "present" in the Mdw ntr is a borrowing from Semitic, since it is only attested from the New Kingdom and written with group writing, that is usually used to transcribe foreign names.
Notice that the root is also found in the name of President Mubarak, singer Shakira (born Mebarak), meaning "the blessed one".
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^ Interesting finding. So you believe other variants in East Africa also have Semitic origins like in Arabic?..
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^ Interesting finding. So you believe other variants in East Africa also have Semitic origins like in Arabic?..
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posted
Barack himself says that his name is a Swahili term, as alluded to, meaning "one who is blessed". Given that, it is obviously associated with the Semitic loan word, Baruch [hebrew]/al-Baraka [Arabic] (brk), meaning the samething.
Given that Mdu Ntr is an older language category than is Semitic, I'll take heed but reserve judgment on Agluzinha's opinion that its usage in AE is derived from Semitic roots. Such an explanation isn't necessary. It actually seems unlikely given the independent meaning of each component part of the term [Ba, Ra, and the Ka]..
It seems that Wally however, may be correct:
quote:Ba-ra-ka – a transferable quality of personal blessedness and spiritual force (almost a physical force). [For more information, read Egyptian Mystics: Seekers of the Way, by Moustafa Gadalla.]
^I'm not sure why ancient Egyptians, as nationalistic as they were, would even attribute blessedness to "foreigners", especially at the expense of themselves.
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Djehuti: Not much of a "finding", since I only had to open my Hannig Egyptian Handwörterbuch to read it was written with group writing, attested from the New Kingdom, and "foreign".
Sundjata:
I hear your point about Egyptians not being likely to borrow some items from foreigners, especially Asiatics but we have to take into account that New Kingdom Egypt was *mostly* dealing diplomatically with Levantines, and that the lingua franca of these exchanges was Semitic; that although blatantly hating on Hyksos, Egyptians borrowed items that were introduced by them in Egypt, such as the Khepresh or the Horse as a military weapon, etc.
One can see that from the New Kingdom, an array of somehow "un-Egyptian" words, that had never appeared before the New Kingdom, and that were written in an unconventional way that could be called New Kingdom's specific group writing, such as "Baal" (Semitic Deity), "cognates of Hebrew Shalom, Arabic Salaam, etc. (meaning peace)", with graphemes regularly corresponding to Semitic cognates, and even sometimes found in Egyptian texts in transcriptions of Asiatic individuals' speeches. Scholars managed to figure out those words were borrowings from Semitic languages that heavily came into contact with Egyptian at this point of history.
Do you know Gadalla's position on the Egyptian word's etymology? I don't know if he is referring to the Arabic or to the Egyptic word, but my dictionary says it means, depending of the writing and/or context: "to pray", "to serve", "to sacrifice", "to knee" (sic), "to offer", "present, gift".
The writing of the word would suggest b3 ("ba")+ r3 (mouth) + k3 ("ka"), likely meaning "the b3" is the mouth of the "k3". Note however that this kind of juxtapositions of nouns (substantive+substantive+substantive) without grammatical elements in-between is quite rare in Egyptian and that I have a hard time figuring out the semantic motivation of the word, rather than assuming it is a borrowing from Semitic, where it is widely attested as you pointed out.
Furthermore, the word is not always written with the biliteral usually used to transcribe "k3", but sometimes with the uniliteral symbol k and the uniliteral symbol 3, which doesn't happen tmk for the ontological notion; the r of "baraka" is not always rendered in Egyptian by the same grapheme <r>, but also by <n>, which would indicate that the sound in question was not perfectly known to the scribes who transcribed it.
There is a great Etymological Dictionary by James Hoch written on this issue I can have access to, and that I will be able to post some abstracts of in the future if anyone is interested in it.
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I have taken a look at Cohen & Cantineau's «Dictionnaire des racines sémitiques » (Dictionary of Semitic roots ) and it seems that the root was attested with the meaning « bless », that was derived from the primary meaning « knee », which seems to be the most widespread root of the two in Semitic, and reconstructable for Proto Semitic.
So the meaning of the word above « to knee » of the same word also meaning « blessing » would not be that surprising as I previously thought (I'm guessing it is a reference to the action of kneeing to honor somebody, but perhaps some Semitic speaker could tell us if there is another cultural link between the knee and blessings in his culture).
Interestingly, the root was also preserved in the Amharic word bäräkä meaning « 2nd or 3rd coffee ».
The authors also say that the Hebrew word 'abrek « Bow down! » is most likely not derived from this root, but borrowed from Egyptic 'br.k, meaning « Be careful! »
I've also looked at James E. Hoch's « Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period » mentioned above, and the words derived from the root brk seems to be much more numerous than those attested in the Hannig Dictionary.
Here is also an explanation of the different types of group writing depending of the era, from the same book (syllabic writing = group writing):
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