حجل

Where it comes from

The absence of farther cognates suggests a borrowing of the name for the bird from Classical Syriac ܚܰܓܠܴܐ (ḥaḡlā), ܚܰܓܠܬܴܐ (ḥaḡəlṯā, “partridge”), also appearing early, although by itself the term is unsuspicious and cognacy cannot be excluded. Although there is a potential semantic connection to the verb “to hop”, this would require a synonymous verb to exist in a common ancestor of Arabic and Syriac as the latter is, owing to its age, unlikely to be a borrowing from Arabic, so if the words are related, the verb would have to be denominal. In that case, the word for an anklet could also be denominal, naming a thing on the part of the body used to hop; however there is also a connection to ح ج ر (ḥ j r) and its Semitic matches related to detaining and Aramaic חֲגַל (ḥăḡal) / ܚܓܰܠ (ḥgal, “to draw a circle about, to gird”), possibly the source verb of the name of the partridge due to its going around or due to its bulbous body depending on the species, Ge'ez ሐገለ (ḥägälä, “to tie, to bind”), also Ge'ez ሐግል (ḥägl, “shackle, fetter”), and the surrounding meaning is again found for the root ḥ-g-l in Old South Arabian and Soqotri, which implies together with the consideration of workmanship lacking in the Najd that instead, the word for an anklet or shackle was borrowed into Arabic from a more southern Semitic language, from which the word for hopping was then derived, whereas the word for the partridge is to be seen as borrowed from Aramaic to account for its etymology.