The camel…without it the desert could not be conceived of as a habitable place. The camel is the nomad’s nourisher, his vehicle of transportation, and his medium of exchange. The dowry of the bride, the price of blood, the profit of gambling, the wealth of a sheikh, are all computed in terms of camels. It is the Bedouin’s constant companion, his alter ego, his foster parent. The Bedouins of our day take delight in referring to themselves as ahl al-ba’eer, the people of the camel.
-History of the Arabs, Philip Hitti, 1937
It was impossible to study Arabic at Princeton without hearing the name Philip Hitti, who taught there for 30 years and left a deep fingerprint on the Department of Near Eastern Studies when he retired in 1954. Twenty years later, his History of the Arabs- now in its tenth edition- was still considered essential reading despite being an overly fusty epic account.
I just paged through Hitti’s History again and was happy to learn from it a word new to me for camel, ba’eer, a singular noun with more broken plurals than I’ve ever seen a standard form to give- ab’ira, bu’raan, abaa’ir, and ba’aareen. But what I most like is the word Wehr shows as its cognate, ba’r- camel droppings, which brings to mind another fusty epic from my time on the Way of the Forty, but I will leave that off until after you’ve had your dinner.