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Comment by cassianoleal | Hacker News Reader

Funny trivia, "azar" means "bad luck" in Portuguese.

Also, gambling is generally referred to as "jogos de azar" ("games of bad luck" - at least in Brazil), which fits neatly into the Chatroulette reference.

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That's really interesting to me, because in Spanish we have the exact same word, "azar", but from how I understand it it's just randomness (apparently according to the dictionary some of the other meanings have a negative take). We have the same expression too : "juegos de azar" for games of chance/gambling.

It's also quite close to the french equivalent : "hasard", which also means randomess and has similar usage, with "jeux de hasard".

In all cases it's an interesting fit with the Chatroulette reference.

Anyway, thanks for the insight !

Spanish (ultimately Arabic) is where the name did come from. Source: I worked at Hyperconnect and heard it from the founder who picked this name.

Huh, in French, 'hasard' (pronounced azar) means randomness in general. The spelling change is weird

That is far from the only word that sounds almost the same in French and Spanish, but with a lot of silent letters in the French spelling.

according to wiktionary, they both originate from Arabic اَلزَّهْر‎ (az-zahr, “the dice”). presumably frenchmen were simply wont to add a bunch of silent letters.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hasard https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/azar

As another linguistic point, in Bulgarian 'зар' means dice

Zar in Balkan languages – it exists in e.g. Romanian and Albanian as well – is an Ottoman-era loanword from Turkish, which in turn borrowed it from Perso-Arabic (i.e. possibly directly from Arabic, but more likely through Persian mediation).

Huh, "azar" also means "illness" in Marathi (आजार), although that's not on the Wiktionary page. Coincidence or is it a loanword in Marathi as well?

according to wiktionary, they both originate from Arabic اَلزَّهْر‎ (az-zahr, “the dice”).

Just like Latin where Spanish "aleatorio" comes from: alea = dice.

Caesar's famous words "alea jacta est" = "dice has been thrown".

The "h" is necessary to indicate there is no liaison with the previous word and the "d" is an indication that that derivative words use a non-silent "d" (like "hasardeux").

In a Spanish accent (or most of them in Spain anyway) the z would be /θ/.

The Spanish pronunciation of orthographic z as /θ/ is rather late, post-16th-century. So, I would presume that French could have borrowed the word earlier than that.

I believe it was /ts/ and /dz/ before that, depending on if Old Spanish had ç or z. It's not like it went from [s] to [θ], which I think is what some people assume.

Yes, there were affricates originally, but in the meantime there was first deaffrication to /z̪/ (and then devoicing, etc.).

Wikipedia for Old Spanish says there were two distinct variants of z:

    The affricates /t͡s̻/ and /d͡z̻/ were simplified to laminodental fricatives /s̻/ and /z̻/, which remained distinct from the apicoalveolar sounds /s̺/ and /z̺/ (a distinction also present in Basque).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Spanish#Sibilants

That's pretty interesting. I don't have any experience distinguishing between sounds like that but reading around I start to wonder if I might produce such differences without being aware of it.

which looks like 'hazard' in english, which is (from mw dictionary)

* a source of danger * the effect of unpredictable and unanalyzable forces in determining events : chance, risk * a chance event : accident * a golf-course obstacle (such as a bunker or a pond) * a game of chance like craps played with two dice

i'd guess there's a connection? i'm no word historian person though...

In Italian "gioco d'azzardo" has the exact same meaning as "juego de azar". But an "azzardo" is a dangerous or risky behavior or action (the implication being that doing it would be a gamble).

And in Polish 'hazard' just means gambling.

I wonder if that became the word for gambling, on its own, due to the strong influence of Catholicism.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, the origin of hazard is as follows:

Middle English (in hazard (sense 3 of the noun)): from Old French hasard, from Spanish azar, from Arabic az-zahr ‘chance, luck’, from Persian zār or Turkish zar ‘dice’

It bears mentioning, as an interesting fact that I just found about, that azzahr comes from Andalusi Arabic, and that zahr (in Arabic) means 'flower', from which the Spanish word azahar (the white flower on some trees such as orange trees) comes.

Etymologies from the most official Spanish dictionary:

azar: Del árabe hispánico *azzahr, y este del árabe zahr 'dado'; literalmente 'flores'.

azahar: Del árabe hispánico azzahár, y este del árabe clásico zahr 'flores'.

In Russian the word азарт means the feeling of being high on gambling or on risk in general.

Yes, I would guess that in Brazilian portuguese the expression "jogos de azar" comes from this original meaning of the word "azar", as randomness. But the isolated word "azar" took on the specific meaning of "bad luck", which kind of leaked to how one would interpret "jogos de azar" around here.

Reminds me of this (mildly NSFW) Silicon Valley scene[1] (though in that case he was making things up).

Also reminds me of this urban legend[2] about poor sales of the Chevy Nova in Spanish-speaking countries because "no va" means "doesn't go".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVoFzu-vH4o

[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chevrolet-nova-name-spanis...

More funny trivia, "azarar", as a verb, means to flirt or to successfully match up in Brazilian portuguese.

https://dicionario.priberam.org/azarar

"hazard" in English is also a cognate.

If I remember correctly, the founder was just a huge fan of a footballer named Eden Hazard, hence the name

What do you know, I looked it up and the English word hazard has the same root.

oh yeah -- as in the idiom "hazard a guess"

Dukes of hazard

Azar is also the last name of former Department of Health and Human Services Secretary (Alex. M. Azar II) under President Trump during the height of COVID-19 pandemic[1].

That last name's origin is Lebanese[2].

[1]: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/01/31/secretary-azar-dec...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Azar

It is fairly common Persian/Hebrew name.

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