The root š-g-l ‘to lift and carry’
In my Bahraini data, this root occurs in a Form VI verb:
ay sī ṯigīl, tšāgalū-h xamsa maʿā-y
‘… a heavy air-conditioner, which five men and me together lifted (into place)’.
This root is not listed at all in Lane, and in the Lisān the Form 1 verb is given as ‘to weigh (a coin)’. In the dialects, the Form I verb šaqal ‘he lifted up, he carried’ occurs in Lebanon, and is identified by Feghali23 as a borrowing from Syriac šǝqal with the same sense of ‘lift, carry’; Frayha24 gives the Form VI tašāqal ‘to lift and carry a load in turns’, also for Lebanon. Barthélemy25 notes šaqal for Syria and the Levant generally with the meaning ‘porter dans ses bras avec une ou deux mains; enlever, soulever avec les mains’; he also notes it as being of Syriac origin and ‘différent de l’arabe litéral šaqala “peser”’. The latter “weigh” meaning would appear to be a later semantic extension of the same borrowing in Classical Arabic. Since Syriac š normally corresponds historically to Arabic s, the š in Bahraini šagal, tišāga1,26 as in other Arabic dialects, makes it look like a case for Syriac substratal influence, barring, of course, a direct borrowing into the Bahraini dialects from the Syro-Lebanese dialects (I know of no other example of such a phenomenon). In the Gulf region, I have so far been unable to find any other attestation: neither Landberg (for S W Arabia), nor Brackett (for Oman) note it, and nor do Woodhead and Beane for Baghdad. Here, then, there seems to be a direct link between the form and meaning of the Bahraini word and the Syriac cognate, whereas the CLA meaning ‘weigh’ appears to be a later development of the basic and original meaning of ‘lift’ which Bahraini Arabic, Syriac, and the Syriac-influenced Arabic dialects of the Levant, share.