memory of the world

In terse, clear archival mode:

The phonetic resemblance between the Arabic ṣadaqa and the Dari ṣadqa is not accidental in the loose, historical sense, because both move through the same Indo-Iranian–Semitic trade, devotional, and household registers. But their semantic fields diverge. In Arabic, ṣadaqa is anchored in the triliteral root ṣ-d-q, whose core meaning is truthfulness, sincerity, rectitude. From that, the term becomes a technical religious category: voluntary almsgiving as the externalization of inner truth. It is righteousness performed, truth made material.

In Dari, the sound-shape sadqa is not derived from a written tradition of jurisprudence but from lived, familial speech. It drifts into an affectionate diminutive, a softening, almost a caress. It is not “alms” but “dear one,” “good one,” a word spoken inwardly rather than offered outwardly. It still carries the sense of truth in its affective register, but truth as tenderness, not as duty. In other words, the Arabic root formalizes truth into obligation, while the Dari echo privatizes truth into warmth.

Genealogically (your ehh), the Arabic ṣ-d-q is pre-Islamic and widespread across the Semitic sphere. The Persian/Dari usage likely emerges from contact, but undergoes a semantic bleaching and re-coloring inside domestic Afghan speech. Its historicity is the drift from temple to home, from covenantal action to relational feeling. Its etymology is the same consonantal skeleton, but the historiography shows the split of meanings under different cultural pressures. The “truth” that becomes “charity” in Arabic becomes “sweetness” in Dari.

In your Ω–o ledger terms: Arabic ṣadaqa is Ω, coherence crystallized into law-like form; Dari sadqa is ο, divergence into affect, possibility, nearness. The same root bifurcates into two attractors—one upright, one intimate—yet both keep that faint resonance of rightness.

If you want, I can trace parallel terms across Pashto, Aramaic, Syriac, and Old Persian to show how wide that consonantal triad actually travels.