What is the difference between the rather similar-looking words بنت and ابنة (daughter)?
Caveat: It’s been a couple of decades since I studied Arabic and my skills have rusted into near-uselessness. Case in point, I misremembered the usage and screwed up my initial reply.
The difference is just dialect. ابنة (ibnah) is the more formally correct form - it’s the feminine form of the word for son, ابن (ibn). The loop with the dots you see on the left side is the ta marbuta, “the broken T”, which is the feminine suffix.
Getting down into the weeds, depending on the surrounding words/sounds, the ta marbuta is unvoiced, so in isolation, ابنة would be pronounced “ibnah”. But in a sentence or phrase, if following by another word, the ta marbuta becomes voice, so ابنة would be pronounced something like “ibnatu”. بنت (bint) is a variant, where the voweling has migrated, and the ta marbuta has become a ta.
Similarly, son is more formally ابن (ibn) but often بن (bin) due to vowel drift.
bint is the standard in colloquial Egyptian Arabic.
“Variant” is probably not the technically correct linguistic term; I meant “bint” is derived from “ibna(t)”. I think “bint” is the standard in most colloquial Arabic.
I learned Modern Standard Arabic, the formal, academic, standardized form of Arabic, which is rarely used in day-to-day conversation. I think “ibna(t)” is the technically correct form in MSA, but even in an academic setting, I remember “ibna(t)” as being more of a hypothetically correct form; both we American students and our native speaker instructors pretty much always used “bint”.
So I was about ask if this had any relation to the derogatory English term, but Google tells me it is the same word, that entered the language during the British occupation of Egypt:
bint - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Never heard this. It is not used in the U.S., or if it is, quite rare.
As I understand it, it is (or was) a fairly common working class British slang term. It certainly turned up with some frequency in Monty Python and other 70s and 80s British imports on PBS.
As griffin1977 indicates, it probably came back from Egypt with British occupation troops (which is why it’s a term in British English and not American English).
It seems to me that it probably became popular because of some coincidental phonetic connotative associations. It combines the phonemes of two much harsher English derogatory terms for women (BItch and cuNT), and is also similar to “bit” (small and inconsequential), which makes it convenient as a mildly derogatory and dismissive term for women.