Note 448 — Chapter V · THE MOST PROMINENT FIGURES IN HEBREW MYTHOLOGY. (continued 2)
R. (Russell) Martineau translation
Among the Arabic names of the sun, we find the curious appellation al-jaunâ (Ibn al-Sikkît, p. 324), a word of colour, which belongs to the aḍdâd of the Arabic philologians, i.e. words with contradictory signification, and may denote either white or black (see Redslob, Die arab. Wörter mit entgegengesetzter Bedeutung, Göttingen 1873, p. 27). Al-jaunâ is especially the setting sun, e.g. lâ âtîhi ḥatta taġîb al-jaunâ, ‘I cannot come to him till the jaunâ sets;’ and the setting sun is well described by a colour-word which, by its faculty of standing for either white or black, answers to the transition from sunshine to darkness.