Talk:Mogadishu

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Mogadishu was one of the Geography and places good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
March 19, 2014	Good article nominee	Listed
January 18, 2023	Good article reassessment	Delisted

Current status: Delisted good article

Cities: National capitals

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Removal of sourced text

Latest comment: 1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion

@Garaadiye Discuss your recent disputed edits here before making further changes to the article. I don't believe you should just remove a theory on the etymology of the city just because you don't view it as true. Limegreencoral (talk) 04:13, 12 August 2026 (UTC)Reply

Linguistic Issues in Proposed Etymologies

Latest comment: 1 month ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Earlier discussions on Mogadishu/Muqdisho's etymology have focused on sourcing. Here I want the focus to be on linguistics.

First, early non-Somali sources consistently use the short vowel -a- between the initial M and q, making it highly improbable that an initial long vowel -uu- was ever original. Somali vowel harmony provides the mechanism for how the Semitic term Maqdishu likely transformed into modern Somali Muqdisho without positing an ancient initial -uu-. In Somali vowel harmony, the final high rounded /u/ in the original term Maqdishu raises and rounds the initial /a/ to /u/ across the uvular /q/, a consonant that retracts the tongue and favors back-vowel assimilation. Modern Muq- is thus a regular Somali harmonic shift, not a retention. Moreover, the final -u underwent a common Cushitic place-name lenition, where final high vowels in geographic terms routinely lower to mid /o/ under Somali prosodic constraints, yielding -sho.

Second, the sobriquet Xamar/Ḥamar also shows signs of being a Semitic term. The Arabic root Ḥ-M-R relates to the color red.^[1] The article currently attempts to nativize this via a connection to the Somali word for tamarind (ḥamar), but this is in my view implausible. Raqay (and its variants) is the native Cushitic or pre-Arab contact term for tamarind. Raqay cognates with inland Cushitic languages, whereas the ḥamar-tamarind connection appears mainly in Somali and Afar, coastal Cushitic languages with substantial Arabic loan influence. Garaadiye (talk) 06:50, 12 August 2026 (UTC)Reply

@Garaadiye: This is WP:OR. Wikipedia editors are not supposed to include their own perspective into an article. Limegreencoral (talk) 08:43, 12 August 2026 (UTC)Reply

References

↑ Bulakh, Maria (2016). "Was There a Color Term *ḥmr 'to be red' in Proto-Semitic?". Babel und Bibel 9. Proceedings of the 6th Biennial Meeting of the International Association for Comparative Semitics and Other Studies. Penn State University Press: 3–18. doi:10.5325/j.ctv1bxh139.3. JSTOR 10.5325/j.ctv1bxh139.

[Bulakh-1] Bulakh, Maria (2016). "Was There a Color Term *ḥmr 'to be red' in Proto-Semitic?". Babel und Bibel 9. Proceedings of the 6th Biennial Meeting of the International Association for Comparative Semitics and Other Studies. Penn State University Press: 3–18. doi:10.5325/j.ctv1bxh139.3. JSTOR 10.5325/j.ctv1bxh139.

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Talk:Mogadishu

Removal of sourced text

Linguistic Issues in Proposed Etymologies