زربية

Where it comes from

* William Hoyt Worrell considers it a genuine Arabic word. It is according to him from زِرْب (zirb, “canal”) and originally meant a “rug streaked with canals”, a “striped rug”, formed as فِسْقِيَّة (fisqiyya, “fountain”), شَمْسِيَّة (šamsiyya, “parasol”), حَنَفِيَّة (ḥanafiyya, “faucet, spigot”).

* It could be borrowed from Ge'ez ዘርቤት (zärbet) from ዘረበ (zäräbä, “to trample”), which Theodor Nöldeke and Arthur Jeffery find most appealing, but Wolf Leslau and Siegmund Fraenkel assume that the Ge'ez word is from the Arabic.

* It has been suggested to be from a Middle Persian *hcdl-pdy (/⁠azēr-pay⁠/, literally “under the foot”) by Georg Hoffmann, but this is doubtful for not being attested in any Persian.

* It would rather be a Middle Persian *DHBʾ-pay (/⁠zar-pay⁠/, literally “gold-foot”), as Jeffery corrects, but it is unsensible that this would come to mean a carpet.

* It could be a *DHBʾ-ʾby (/⁠zar-ābī⁠/, literally “goldeny”), a parallel to such a formation being found in Persian سیمابی (simâbi, “silvery”), to which Wilhelm Eilers and Johnny Cheung lean, and when borrowed been treated as a broken plural with the singular back-formed from the plural, but one has to assume for Persian آب (âb) an unusual meaning “splendour, lustre” from Sanskrit आभा (ābhā, “appearance, splendour, lustre”) and the frequency of such a term is doubtful.

* It could, as Nabīl al-Waġlīsiyy reconstructs, reflect the name of the land of Azerbaijan as it is renowned yore and today for opulent rug manufacturing, being a doublet of أَذَرِيّ (ʔaḏariyy, “Azeri”) of a different segmentation including /b/ and lacking the hamzated onset.