وكان يسترق النظر إلي الفتيات في الحارة ... محصنات بالزواج والاستقامة
And he (Izzat) would steal a glance at the girls of the neighbourhood [who were] chaste/of unblemished reputation / well-protected/ sheltered in married life and integrity.
The source of this sentence is Naguib Mahfouz's 'Asr al-Hubb, p. 58, Dar al-Shuruq, 3rd edition (2008).
I actually couldn't nail down the precise meaning of محصنات in the above sentence, so I inserted several possible translations. But, to me, the etymological link to the Hebrew root חסן and the words חוסן (ḥosen = strength) and חסון (ḥasun = strong/powerful) seems quite clear. Usually, the Arabic emphatic ص appears as a צ in Hebrew cognate roots, but this is not always the case and does not apply here.
The semantic link between sheltered/well-protected/unblemished and strong may not be immediately apparent to all. However, if we look at some of the other Arabic words with the same root (حصن), we'll also find the verb حَصَّنَ (hassana) which means both to fortify and to immunize. In Hebrew, we find that the verb חיסן (hissen) also means to immunize. A closer cognate couldn't be found: the Hebrew verb is in the pi'el binyan, which is equivalent to the fa''ala Arabic verb form (what among foreign students of Arabic is generally referred to as verb form II).
Not sure if any of this post made sense, but I will henceforth remember the meaning of the word محصنة (chaste/unblemished woman) by recalling its Hebrew cognate חסונה (strong fem.)
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