As all linguists know, English owes way more debt to Arabic than borrowing just 15 words from it. Most of the English vocabulary in astron...
As all linguists know,
English owes way more debt to Arabic than borrowing just 15 words from it. Most
of the English vocabulary in astronomy, for instance, (such as “acme,” “azimuth,”
“nadir,” “zenith,” etc.) are derived from Arabic. So are many vocabularies in
science such as “alchemy,” “chemistry,” “borax,” “benzoin,” “elixir,” and
mathematics such as “average,” “algorithm,” “cipher,” etc.
Many everyday English
words like “assassin,” “arsenal,” “albatross,” “admiral,” “fanfare,” “garbage,”
“lemon,” “lime,” “tariff,” etc. also trace lexical descent from Arabic. Most of
these words didn’t come to English directly. Several of them first appeared in
Spanish (as a result of the Muslim conquest of Spain from about 711 to the 1400s)
and then in other European languages (particularly in Latin, Italian, and
French) by way of Spanish, from where they made their way to English. A few, though,
came to English directly, and others from Persian and Sanskrit.
In this March 9, 2017
article you will read below, James Harbeck of the Week magazine identifies 15
everyday English words derived from Arabic. It was originally titled “15 English words we stole from Arabic.” Enjoy:
You have zero interest in algebra, so you grab some alcohol
— or maybe a coffee with extra sugar — sit on the sofa or mattress, eat an
orange or some candy, and read a magazine or surf the web with Safari and Adobe.
And just like that, you've used a dozen words that came from Arabic.
Yes, thanks to the traffic of goods and culture around the
Mediterranean throughout history, English has many common words that it got
from Arabic. It didn't borrow all of them directly; they mostly came filtered through
Latin, Turkish, French, Spanish, German, and/or Italian, and have changed in
form — and sometimes meaning — since they left Arabic. But our language has
accepted all these imports, and they have assimilated well and been very
useful.
1. Zero: The
electronic device you're reading this on wouldn't exist without digital
programming, which wouldn't exist without the number 0 (zero), which — believe
it or not — Europeans didn't think of as a number until the Italian mathematician
Fibonacci introduced it to them in the early 1200s. He learned it from Arabic
culture in North Africa, where he grew up. He took the Arabic word sifr,
meaning "empty" or "nothing," and Latinized it as zephyrum.
That got trimmed down a little bit over time to the Italian zero. Of course,
along with the concept, he needed a way of writing it. Roman numerals didn't
have a zero (of course), and anyway they're not good for doing decimal
mathematics: It's much more bother to work with XX times LXVII than with 20
times 67. So he borrowed numerals from Arabic, too — which is why typographers
call our digits Arabic numerals. (The way they look in Arabic now is different from
how they look for us now.)
2. Algebra: Zero
and the numerals aren't the only math that English owes to Arabic culture.
Algebra comes from Arabic al-jabr, which refers to a reunion of broken parts,
like setting a bone. A 9th-century Arabic treatise on math gave us the
figurative use of the term. The author of the treatise was al-Khwarizmi, whose
name has become another mathematical term:
algorithm.
3. Adobe: Before
it was a software company, adobe was — as it still is — a kind of sun-dried
brick. We got the word from Spanish. But Spanish got it from Arabic. Much of
Spain was under Muslim ("Moorish") rule from the early 700s into the
1400s. One of the many things Spanish adopted from them was al-tub, "the
brick," which changed over time to adobe.
4. Safari: This
word so strongly associated with expeditions in Africa came from an African
word for "expedition": the Swahili safari. But Swahili got it from
the Arabic safar, or "journey." These days Mac users go on Safari and
never leave their sofas. It's probably safer that way.
5. Sofa: Some of
us sit on a sofa and some sit on a couch, but it's the same piece of furniture.
Those of us who call it a sofa are using a word we got from Turkish, which got
it from the Arabic suffa, which refers to a raised platform with carpeting on
it — which is a more Arabic place to sit than a couch.
6. Mattress: Speaking
of furniture, Europeans didn't always sleep on big, soft, cushioned things.
Bedding was sparer throughout much of their history. But the Crusaders, for all
the bad things they did, at least learned a few things from Arabic culture, one
of which was the idea of sleeping on cushions. And the Arabic word for the
place where the cushions were thrown down is matrah, which came from taraha,
"throw." It came into Latin as materacium or materatium, and from
there Italian and the other European languages picked it up.
7. Orange: Europeans
got a lot of our favorite things from trade with points farther east. Oranges
come from South and East Asia originally, and the Sanskrit word for them was
naranga; that became the Persian narang, which became the Arabic naranj. It was
Arabic traders who brought oranges to Spain and Sicily, and the word came with
them. It lost its first n through
what linguists call reanalysis: the old French un norenge became un orenge. English
got the word from French.
8. Sugar: We owe
a lot of enjoyment to Arabic traders. They brought sugar to Western Europeans
(first the Italians and French, and from them the English), plus their word for
it, sukkar, which they in turn got from Sanskrit, sharkara.
9. Candy: We also
got candy from Arabic — qand — which referred to the crystallized juice of
sugar cane. Arabic got it from Persian, which got it from Sanskrit.
10. Syrup: Of
course if Arabic gave us sugar and candy, it also gave us syrup. In this case,
the original is sharab, which refers to a beverage: wine, fruit juice, or
something sweeter.
11. Artichoke: Each
European language has a slightly different version of the word for this
vegetable — French is artichaut, Italian is carciofo, and Spanish is alcachofa,
for example — but they all trace back to al-karshufa, which was what it was
called in the Arabic spoken in Spain (slightly changed from the classical
Arabic al-harshafa).
12. Cotton: Cotton
isn't originally from Arabia — it's native to India and Central and South
America, among other places — but since Westerners were doing trade with
traders from Arabia, we (and the rest of Western Europe) got our word for it
from Arabic, qutn.
13. Coffee: We
got this word from Italian, caffè, which was taken from Turkish, kahve. Turkish
got it from Arabic, qahwah. We also got the beverage from Arabia (via Italy via
Turkey); Arabia in turn got it from eastern Africa.
14. Alcohol: Are
you surprised that alcohol comes from Arabic? The word does, but the thing
doesn't. In the original Arabic, al-kuhl means "the kohl," which is
to say a cosmetic powder for the eyes. It was made by an extraction process
from a mineral, and European chemists took to using alcohol to refer to
anything produced by extraction or distillation. But then the "alcohol of
wine" (the spirit you get from distilling wine) took over the name
exclusively.
15. Magazine: A
magazine such as The Week is a veritable storehouse of well-turned prose, which
is why it's called a magazine — the word originally means
"storehouse." It's still used in the military for a storage place for
explosives. We got the word from French (which now uses magasin to refer to a
store), which got it from Italian, magazzino, which came from Arabic, makzin.
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