You may speak (a little) Arabic without knowing it. At the very least, you probably use English words derived from Arabic on a daily basis, either directly or via other Mediterranean languages such as French, Italian or Spanish.
Would you like to play a little?
The old caïd was resting peacefully on his terrace, sipping a last glass of alcohol before going to bed. He liked his hermitage, where he could enjoy the quiet solitude he had missed so much during his years in prison.Because no one ever took this little dirt track by chance to come and find him in his little house on the edge of a customs road, just a few miles from the tarmac. And he liked it that way. He had suffered so much from overcrowding when he was in the pen that this little out-of-the-way place, far from everything, was a paradise for him. Oh, of course, there was no need to make a mountain out of a molehill, he wasn’t a dangerous assassin, just a small-time crook, he hadn’t been to Alcatraz or the penal colony, just Central, and that was more than enough for him.
Now he lived alone, surrounded by acacias and olive trees, he often went fishing, and when he came home empty-handed, he’d open a can of tuna and eat it with his rice salad. A cup of sweet coffee on top, and the evening was looking good.
Obviously, when he was a child, he had very different dreams. He imagined himself as a secret agent, an elegant James Bond sent on the most dangerous missions by ciphered messages, or as a sea captain going to the tropics to fetch precious cargoes of muslin and acajou.
Or else, as pasha of the admiral ship of a great expedition, he would rescue a captive from the barbaresques and bring her back to port, despite the storms of the monsoon, smiling and voluptuous in her alcove draped in satin sheets. He had begun dreaming of India at a very young age, reading a report in one of his mother’s magazines about the monks whose saffron-yellow cotton robes had dazzled him.
Can you guess how many words in this list are from Arabic?
Arabic vocabulary in Western languages
Arabic vocabulary has entered our European languages at various times, and sometimes, strangely enough, we have rediscovered Greek or Latin words through Arabic, when the translations of ancient authors made in the Middle Ages by scholars in Andalusia and the Middle East gave us access to texts that we had lost.
Arabic also gave us many words from Persian, and sometimes from more distant countries.
After the Middle Ages, when religious controversies and exchanges between scholars brought us into contact with the language just as much as the Crusades did, the second wave naturally came during the period of colonisation.
It’s interesting to see when certain words arrived in languages such as French, English, Spanish and German. Etymologies, translations and shifts in meaning tell us a lot about the history of our exchanges.
Spanish (and Portuguese) are, of course, the languages most steeped in Arabic. Apart from place names and derivatives, there are just over 850 words of Arabic origin in Spanish, compared with 420 in French (Source: Henriette Walter, l’Aventure des langues en Occident), the English corpus being about as large, but different, and the German corpus smaller.
Some words arrived directly from Arabic in each of the languages, while others had more complex journeys.
Today’s slang also comes partly from Arabic
This post was originally written in French, and applies partially only to English. Nevertheless, similar trends exist in English, through immigration. They are more various, as the Commonwealth includes many Islamic countries with a non Arabic mother tongue, like Farsi or Indi.
While the first wave, up until colonisation, was essentially linked to vocabulary, the contribution of Arabic to European languages became more complex with the arrival of immigrant populations and family reunification.
It was no longer English-speaking expatriates who ‘picked up’ Arabic words (such as clebs or toubib), but bilinguals who often spoke dialectal Arabic at home and transferred Arabic expressions into French or English, before modifying them if necessary. The late 2000s saw the arrival of these new formulas.
Linguist Jean-Louis Calvet, for example, has shown that the French expression “je ne le calcule pas” (litterally I do not calculate him, meaning I don’t like him, I don’t trust him) comes from the confusion between two Arabic words, “hasaba” (to calculate) and “hasiba” (to take into consideration), which have become a single verb in Algerian Darija, “haseb”.
In English, words link Bint entered very early in the language, with a derogatory meaning, while it just means “Girl” in Arabic. Similarly “Wallad” (boy) took the meaning of “idiot”. Maybe because it sounds like the English word “wally“.
Askari, which means “soldier” in Arabic, became “Policeman” in London slang.
Other words, like “Akhi” (brother) kept their meaning, as they became popular through rap
The next post will give you the solution to our game, and tell you about a word that’s much richer than it seems at first sight, the divan.
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