س ج ن

Etymology
The root derives from the noun, which is borrowed from , from , so called because the Roman field standard , as well as the war chests and soldiers’ savings, were kept in the , in the center of the headquarters. The being central to Roman ideology and religion, the warden of these monies was called  and  and anything deposited there was brought ad signum. As this cellared building was well guarded, arrestees where brought thither – in Constantinople the of the  –, so  the colloquial Greek attested from the 4th to 7th century used the phrase  for “into prison”.

Accordingly the Arabic is first attested by an (albeit like many possibly forged) verse of  أَيُّمَا شَاطِنٍ عَصَاهُ عَكَاهُ … ثُمَّ يُلْقَى فِي ٱلسِّجْنِ وَٱلْأَْكْبَالِ, then in the Umayyad era by. That is because the nomadic Arabs, obviously, had no prisons, which were only known in the periphery settled by Byzantines, instead the outer punishment was exclusion from the tribal community which was likely to entail death. The other words and  meaning places to lock up miscreants were  loanwords too.

As the occurrences of the word and derivatives in the Qurʾān are all from the and in 26:29 again about the Pharaoh threating with imprisonment, the term has been repeatedly suggested as mediated via 🇨🇬, where the word also occurs, however it is just that the Pharaonic Egypt was imagined like the recent Greco-Roman Egypt, while Coptic was limited to Egypt, unlikely to lend any loanwords to Arabic before its Arab colonization, unlike, where the Greek plural was borrowed, possibly heard by Arabs as its emphatic state to be clipped into the state. But since Arabs were in Byzantine military service and its command language was Latin, till the 7th century ending bilingualism, it could well have been borrowed from either Greek or Latin directly.

Root

 * 1) related to gaoling or jailing

Derived terms

 * Verbs


 * Nouns
 * ; f. and pl.  and
 * ; pl.
 * ; f.
 * ; pl.


 * Adjectives