Languages have a funny way of working. Risk and hazard are two words that come from Arabic and are, for us, closely linked. The meanings of the two words evolved when they became French and later English. While ‘hazard’ has only had its meaning extended by a banal metonymy, ‘risk’ has undergone a complete change of meaning, coming to mean almost the exact opposite of what it means in Arabic.
Risk is originally a gift, something we receive from God
Indeed, in Arabic رزق means: a gift, sustenance, what you are given.
How did we arrive at the French meaning, which is, on the contrary, negative? To risk something is to put yourself in a position to lose it, in the hope, in fact, of gaining more. Risk is also the possibility of something happening, generally with a negative connotation: we risk a second wave of the coronavirus, but we have a chance of being cured. If you are told that a drug risks to cure you, this implies that it is highly unlikely.
The journey of “risk” is long and complex. The Arabic origin of the word was belatedly recognised by a distinguished orientalist, Marcel Devic, at the end of the 19th century.
Before Marcel Devic, the word risk, which is found in all Western European languages, was thought to come from the Italian rischio, which dates from the 13th century.
But where did rischio come from? If it comes from Latin, there is no convincing etymology.
The Arabic root RZQ in classical Arabic means a sustenance, a benefit, a gift that you receive from God, without having done anything for it, in a fortuitous way, unexpected by a happy chance. It could almost correspond to serendipity, except that in the latter there is no notion of divine intervention. For a Muslim, “rizq is delimited [decided] by Allah“. Rizq is also military pay, whether in money or in kind, and, later, wages in general. It also corresponds to the manna sent by God to the desert.
In Darija, the meaning drifts towards the notion of luck. On the other hand, in Andalusian Arabic, the possibility of a negative “rizq” appears, with the use of the word in expressions such as “at one’s own risk and peril”. From “good or bad fortune”, the word becomes associated with “bad luck”. These expressions can be found in contracts from the 12th and 13th centuries.
Today, in Arabic, “Rizq” refers to wealth, to everything that an individual acquires in his life, but of which he is not really the owner, because he has received it from God.
The word hazard certainly comes from Arabic
But beyond this certainty, based on phonetics, we are not very sure of the “how”. Several hypotheses coexist, as the word does not seem to exist in classical Arabic.
Chance came into French, and then into English, through the Spanish azar, which refers to a bad roll of the dice. It is thought to come from the Andalusian Arabic az-zahr, meaning a dice to be played (al zahr turns into az-zahr in front of a solar letter).
It is thought that this word comes from the classical Arabic أزهار flowers, which, again in Spanish, gave azahar, the orange blossom. And that it would have meant dice because they would have been decorated with flowers… I have my doubts, I didn’t see any flowers on the photos of old dice that I saw while preparing this post. More like numbers or dots. Now, there’s nothing to stop you giving a brand a name, as is done in some card games. Or, as Roland Laffitte says, consider that the concentric circles engraved on the faces of the dice could look like flowers, or that the winning face of the dice could have a flower on it.
I spent quite a bit of time there, and the only image I could find of ancient dice from a Muslim country is this one: dice from around the 10th century, from Khorasan (now Afghanistan). You can see concentric circles, totally different from the dots we’re used to. And, on the left, something I thought was a circle like the others, damaged by a blow, before looking closely. Now it reminds me an awful lot of a stylised rose.
The ‘flower‘ is really engraved differently. It is not surrounded by a deep concentric circle like the other marks.
Funnily enough, in English, ‘hazard’ has a negative connotation that it doesn’t have in French. Words change as they travel.
More information
A typo or syntax error? You can select the text and hit Ctrl+Enter to send us a message. Thank you! If this post interested you, maybe you can also leave a comment. We'd love to exchange with you !
