This is extremely interesting, & might lead to (needless) existential crisis among many South Asian Muslims (& perhaps Hindus). Persian “namāz” & Sanskrit “namaste” both essentially mean the same thing & that is because both are derived from the same > vajabaz.wordpress.com/2019/10/10/%D9…
>Indo-Iranian root word. How cool is linguistics! "When Arabic-speaking Muslims perform صلاة/ṣalāt, Persianate Muslims do نماز/namāz, or actually, ‘read’ namāz. Among Chinese-speaking Muslims (Hui, or Dungan), most of whom share the same ancestors as modern Tajiks, the Islamic >
>prayer is 乃玛孜/nǎimǎzī (sometimes also 乃麻子/nǎimázi), evidently a transliteration of نماز/namāz. Many are familiar with the term نماز/namāz & the Hindi/Sanskrit greeting नमस्ते/namaste separately, but have never realised that they are, in fact, the same word, & essentially >
> the same concept. नमस्ते/namaste is in reality 2 words, namas & te, where namas means ‘bow’, therefore ‘reverence’, & therefore ‘adoration, homage, veneration’, & te is the 3rd person dative singular of the personal pronoun त्वम्/tvam ‘you’. Therefore नमस्ते/namaste actually >
>means ‘bow to you’ or ‘reverence to you’ – a meaning that is only transparent in Sanskrit & obscured in Hindi. The Persian نماز/namāz is the same word as the Sanskrit word above, & used to mean exactly the same thing. Both come from the Indo-Iranian verbal root *nam- ‘to bend, >
> to bow’, which came from the Proto-Indo-European *nem, with the same meaning. Natively in Iranian, the Kurmanji word for ‘prayer’ is nimêj, where the ê reflects a regular sound change from SW Iranian to NW Iranian, & the j recalls Parthian, where the word was namāč. Cheung >
> (2007) points out that the Kurdish dā nawin (<*namin) & the Awromani (ara-)nāmiāy/nāmia- both mean ‘to bend down’, so the root is somehow still alive in New Iranian. So when one performs نماز/namāz, semantically one is saying नमस्ते/namaste to God. In fact, the >
> root *nam- includes the sense of prostration, as a prostration is an exaggerated form of a bow, and both involve bending one’s body."
To add to this, in early Bactrian ”larod namos” /λροδο ναμοσο/ (salutation & praise) was used to greet kings, gods & the buddhas. A sort of a transition b/w the modern Perso-Islamic & Hindu usage of the word. In modern Islam the Persian salutation ”durūd” (cognate to Bactrian >
> ”larod”) still carry an association with saluting & praising the prophet Muhammad. So here you have cognates of both “durūd” & “namaste” used in the same phrase to praise other gods & kings.
> BTW the Arabic word for nimaz, “salah/salath” which has come to mean “prayer” is related to Classical Syriac ܨܠܘܬ (ṣəlōṯ) & its root meaning is “to bow down.” So Persian “nimaz” & Sanskrit “namaste” are exact parallels.
