منجل

Limetoka wapi

It is difficult to deem this word a tool noun genuinely belonging to the root ن ج ل (n j l) only because it might cut the grass نَجِيل (najīl), as the verb نَجَلَ (najala) is barely witnessed and not with the right meanings (discounting those derived from the present noun). If the noun is not simply borrowed from Aramaic מַגְּלָא / ܡܰܓܠܳܐ (maggǝlā), as has consistently been opined since Fraenkel, it was formed in the Central Semitic ancestor of Arabic from the verb and the verb had broader meaning between the “remove the skin of” recorded for نَجَلَ (najala) and Ge'ez ነገለ (nägälä, “to uproot”). But even the Ethiopic is considered by Corriente to hail from an Old Egyptian agricultural formation, borrowed by the West Semitic nomads and the Greeks as μάκελλα (mákella); however, the reasoning that “one wonders why should established farmers like the Egyptians borrow the name of an agricultural tool from abroad” is probably fallacious, based on so late a term as Coptic ⲙⲁⲛϭⲁⲗⲉ (mančale, “sickle”).