skār ‘water-channel blocker’
skār and its singular sukra is a term used by Baḥarna farmers to refer to any piece of material, often a ball of rags, which is used as a stopper to block and thereby redirect the sweet water which is pumped around seed- and growing-beds in order to irrigate them. The associated verb sakkar has the technical meaning of ‘to stop up a water channel’, as well as the more general sense of ‘close, shut’. Landberg notes the same verb for Dathina in southern Yemen18 which in his opinion is ‘without doubt an Aramaic borrowing’. Ultimately the word seems to have entered Aramaic, Syriac and Mandaic from Akkadian sekēru ‘to block, close off’ where it was also associated with the blocking or damming of rivers, canals, and water-channels.19 In Classical Arabic, however, the main meaning of the verb sakira is ‘to become intoxicated’. Although the Classical lexica also note a subsidiary sense of the verb ‘to stop up, dam, a rivulet’, Lane annotates this as an ‘extraordinary, or complete dissociation’ from the main Classical Arabic meaning,20 which indicates (although Lane does not say so) that it is from a different Semitic root altogether. In the modern Arabic dialects, the distribution of cognate words denoting ‘shutting, stopping or blocking’ is possibly indicative: in southern Iraq,21 skār has exactly the same meaning as in Bahraini rural communities, while sakkar is the normal verb for ‘to close’ in the dialects of the Levant generally22 — but is unknown in this sense in Egypt. Southern Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and, on the argument being advanced here, eastern Arabia, are exactly where one might expect such a distribution, since all of them were areas where Semitic languages in which the main sense of the word is ‘stop, block’ were spoken before these languages were replaced by Arabic.