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FEATURE |
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Borrowings into English from Arabic What do you notice about the following sentence: All the above nouns are derived from Arabic. This imaginary
conversation might then continue: Another seven words of Arabic origin! Words borrowed into English tend to be nouns, for example al-kuhul, which literally means 'the spirit'. Sometimes, the borrowed words have undergone changes, as in dar a-sina'a for arsenal, literally 'house of industry', where the initial d has been dropped, and a final l added. Spanish has borrowed this twice, as dársena and arsenal which both mean dockyard, while the English word has now lost the archaic meaning of dockyard. The word magazine means not only a book, but also a place where weapons and ammunition are stored – and yes, an arsenal! It comes from Arabic makhzan meaning 'store'. The clue to its Arabic origin is the word pattern ma-a indicating a locative noun. Of all the European languages, Spanish has absorbed by far the greatest proportion of Arabic words. In 711 the Arabs landed at a rock they named the hill of tariq, or jabal tariq – Gibraltar. Arab rule in Spain then lasted for eight centuries. The absorption of Arabic words into European languages throughout these centuries – Europe's Dark Ages – paints a fascinating picture of the Arab contribution to the development of arts, sciences and commerce. Perusal of a Spanish dictionary for words beginning with the Arabic definite article al will reveal diverse borrowings from Arabic in every field from astronomy, alchemy and algebra, to cookery, engineering and philosophy. An interesting borrowing is the informal valediction so long, from salaam, an Arab and Muslim greeting, meaning peace. The Spanish farewell hasta luego, means literally 'until then'. This is an unusual borrowing of the Arabic preposition hattaa. There are no real howlers to entrap unwary English students of Arabic or Arab students of English, on the lines of Spanish/English embarrazada/pregnant and constipado/having a cold. English speakers of Arabic are few and far between, whilst many Arabs are at least trilingual: colloquial Arabic dialect at home, classical Arabic at school, and then tertiary education in English and/or French. In addition, yet another language, such as Berber or Kurdish may be spoken in the region. Arabic often has a choice of a Semitic word, and several foreign loan words. A table can be called maa'ida which is the classical Semitic root. Or, it can be called taawola from Italian tavola, taken from the Latin root for table. (This also means backgammon or trick-track). Then again it may be called taraabayza from Greek trapezium. A telephone has a classical root – haatif which means shouting. But taleefoon is also used, as is the verb talfana. A mobile phone can be naqqaal/moving, jawwaal/roaming, or khilawee/cellular. It is also called boortaabil/portable, and, inevitably moobayl. Mysteriously, in Morocco, it is called a takseefoon, possibly harking back to the days when only taxis had radio-phones. But confusion sometimes arises when a word is borrowed backwards and forwards. Spanish dársena/dockyard seems to have been re-exported back into Arabic as tarsaana. It can also be spelt tarskhana, in an apparent attempt to make it sound like Arabic khaan/hotel or caravansarai. Alphabets, scripts and numbers Around three thousand years ago there was a crucial development in the history of writing when the alphabet was invented. This is credited to the Phoenicians, a seafaring people from the eastern Mediterranean. An alphabet of around thirty letters proved much simpler than the earlier cuneiform, hieroglyph and ideogram systems, which required learning hundreds or even thousands of signs. It was from the Phoenician alphabet that the Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic alphabets eventually evolved. Thus it was that alphabets from the same origin entered two completely separate language families – Indo-European languages via Greek and Latin, and Semitic languages via Hebrew and Arabic. By recording religious beliefs and traditions in writing – and not just orally, the very word 'writing' took on religious connotations. Scriptures literally means 'writings' and the holy books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam spread their languages and alphabets. Our signs for numerals originated in India. They were adopted and modified by the Arabs, who then transmitted them to Europe, where they were again modified into the characters we now call 'Arabic numerals', which distinguished them from Roman numerals. An important feature was the introduction of the concept of zero. From the Arabic word sifr come the English words zero and cipher. A prime example of two-way borrowing arose from the French occupation of Egypt, and Napoleon's military communications. French for code or cipher is chiffre, derived from sifr. Hence the Modern Arabic for code or cipher is shifra. An important contribution to mathematics by the Arabs was algebra, which comes from aljabr meaning resetting or combination. Civilisations, cultures and scholarship In the preservation of ancient civilisations and cultures, Arabic has played a crucial role. The legacies of Greek and Roman civilisations were preserved by the Arabs at a time when the Vandals were sacking Rome, Crusaders sacking Jerusalem, and Europe was declining into mediaeval ignorance. The Arabs left a rich legacy to Europe after their expulsion from Spain and the reconquest. And ultimately a positive outcome of the Crusades was the transmission of more Arab and Greek culture to Europe, and the injection of many more Arabic words into English. Medical and agricultural vocabulary was translated literally, or transliterated, from Greek and Latin into Arabic, and thence into English. The Arabs were also the curators of knowledge from the earlier Egyptian Pharoahs, and the Mesopotamian 'cradle of civilisation' in the Fertile Crescent. With the advent of the European renaissance, merchant adventurers traded with the Middle East. Biblical scholars studied Arabic. The Koran refers to the Jews, Christians and Muslims as ahl alkitaab – the people of the book. In 1632 Sir Thomas Adams, a wealthy trader and Lord Mayor of London, endowed the first chair of Arabic at Cambridge University. At the same time Archbishop Laud endowed the first professorship of Arabic at Oxford University. At the time these universities must have regarded the English language as unworthy of scholarship. Business was conducted in Latin, and it took centuries before chairs of English were established! Arabic is the mother tongue of a quarter of a billion people in the Middle East and North Africa. From Damascus to Khartoum, and from Casablanca to Baghdad, classical Arabic is the official language of over twenty Arab states. In 1974 Arabic became the sixth official language of the United Nations. Beyond the Arab world, classical Arabic is known to many more millions of Muslims as the language of the Koran – the holy book of Islam. Koran is sometimes written Qur'an, using a more academic transliteration system. So whilst Arabic is the mother tongue of just 3% of the world's population – compared to English at 6% – it also has importance outside the Arab countries. However, no language rivals the global usage of English, not even Chinese which is the mother tongue of 20% of the world. Whilst educated Arabs can read, write and speak classical Arabic – nowadays termed Modern Standard Arabic, or MSA for short – they always converse informally in a local colloquial dialect of Arabic, learned in the cradle. So, in a sense, every Arab is bilingual. To foreign students of Arabic this comes as a shock. Imagine you have just persuaded the professor of classical Arabic that you can master a language with 400 words for camel. You then realise that your perfect Arabic will be understood, but you will not comprehend the dozen dialects spoken to you by the man in the street. Some dialects, such as Egyptian, are well known from television and cinema, in the way that Hollywood has made American English familiar around the English-speaking world. But the lesser known dialects, and regional variants of pronunciation, could make conversation difficult between, say, a Moroccan and an Iraqi, unless they were able to converse in the lingua franca of classical Arabic. In Arabic itself, classical is termed fus-ha and colloquial is termed darja. Little has been published on colloquial dialects, often
regarded as mere slang by native speakers, and not worth recording in
writing. However, dialects are richly imbued with borrowed foreign words.
In Anglo-Arabophone countries, such as the Gulf states, English words
have come into Arabic with a smattering of Urdu: There is a fine collection of such words in the Hobson-Jobson dictionary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words. The author of this dictionary, Colonel Yule, wrote in 1886 that the title, "according to Major Trotter of the Punjab, is in fact an Anglo-Saxon version of the wailing of the Mahommedans as they beat their breasts in the procession of the Moharram – 'Ya Hasan! Ya Hosain!'" In the Franco-Arabophone countries of the Maghrib, the above word hafiz for office would be rendered beeroo after the French bureau. The dialects have a rich mixture of French, English and Spanish borrowings. Railway station is gaar ittren, and seeklet ittrabandeest means the smuggler's bicycle. In addition there are Berber words, and many classical Arabic words used by the conquerors from Arabia in the eighth century, no longer in use in modern Arabic. Foreign borrowings are now intruding to the extent that the French verb faire (to do), and noun affaires (business) is conjugated on the Arabic model: farayt (I did business with), etc. Arabic nouns form plurals in two ways. The sound plural, masculine, ends with -in as in mujahedin/fighters. The feminine suffix is -aat. Strangely, all foreign borrowed words take the sound feminine plural ending, such as iskroobidraywilaat/screwdrivers and boyaat/manservants. The broken plural reformulates a word with a second long vowel, such as maktoob/makaateeb for letter/letters, and jumhoor/jamaaheer for crowd/crowds. This has led to some jokey spurious plurals, like kookteel/kakaateel for cocktail/cocktails. The correct Arabic plural is, of course, kookteelaat! Translators were stumped when President Muammar Al-Qadhafi wrote his Green Book declaring the republic/jumhooriya of Libya to be a jamahiriya. How to pluralise public? Finally it was rendered the state of massdom. And, by the way, there are over a hundred spellings in English of the President's name. The Arabic alphabet has two more letters than English, but only half have direct English equivalents. Unique to Arabic is a consonant, called 'ayn, that is notoriously difficult to pronounce. It is the deep guttural sound at the beginning of the place names Oman, Amman, and the oasis called Al-Ayn, which means fountain, and eye, as well as being the name of this letter. Academics write 'ayn as ' or an inverted comma. It is the first letter of the word 'arabi which means Arab, Arabic, and Arabian, although the consonant is invisible in English. All true Arabic words are basically triliteral, meaning composed of three consonants. The word Arab is spelt 'ayn-ra-ba. The letter ra is a downward stroke, cognate with the Greek letter rho which looks like an English p. This is a clue to their common ancestry in ancient Egyptian and Phoenician, where the equivalent letter to an English r looks like a circle on top of a pole – a crude sketch of a head. The root word is ra's, which, unsurprisingly, means head. The glottal stop is treated as a consonant in spoken and written Arabic, and transliterated as a ' or a comma. Arabic also has two versions of d, h, s, t, and z, which phoneticians term "emphatics". A traditional epithet of Arabic is "the language of DaaD", the emphatic d, which was believed unique, and is certainly difficult for a non native speaker to pronounce. To use a Semitic word that entered English from Hebrew and the Old Testament, it is a shibboleth – the speech test that betrayed an enemy tribe unable to pronounce sh. Arabic belongs to a large group of languages, nowadays termed Afro-Asiatic. This has superseded the older term Hamito-Semitic, which designated a smaller language group in the Middle East and North Africa. In biblical history Ham and Shem were the sons of Noah – the two patriarchs who begat the Hamitic and Semitic peoples. The son of Ham was Cush, and the Cushitic languages come from Somalia. The major Semitic languages are Arabic, Hebrew, Maltese, and the Ethiopic tongues Amharic and Tigrinya. Other subbranches of Afro-Asiatic are Egyptian Coptic, and the Berber tongues Tuareg, Kabyle and Tamazight. The origin of Semitic languages The ancestor of Arabic is a lost language termed Proto Semitic. Phoenician, the origin of alphabets, also came from that source. From Proto Semitic are also descended Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac, which in the past have virtually ceased to be everyday spoken tongues, but have somehow survived as liturgical languages of religion. Notably Hebrew has been revived, and the modernised version bears its ancient name of Ivrit, meaning "from the other side of the river". This is spelt 'Ibrani in Arabic. Finally, we all labour under misconceptions about foreign languages, so here is everything you always wanted to know, but never dared ask! An Arab is any native speaker of Arabic. It is primarily a linguistic term, although often used ethnically. Arabs are usually of the Muslim religion. But they may also be Christians – such as the Coptic Egyptians, the Maronite Lebanese or the Assyrian Iraqis. Or Jewish – there are still Jewish Arabs in Morocco, just as there are Muslim and Christian (Palestinian) Arabs in Israel. An Arabian is a person from the Arabian peninsula,
jazeerat al'arab. This comprises Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Qatar,
Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (or UAE). Arabic is also an alphabetic script. It is not confined to the Arabic language, but also used in Persian and Urdu. Iraqis are Arabs, because their mother tongue is Arabic. Iranians are not Arabs, and their mother tongue is Farsi meaning Persian. Farsi is written in Arabic script. Unless you are an Iranian Tajik, in which case you will write Farsi in Cyrillic script. Farsi looks foreign because it is written in Arabic script. However, its grammar is closer to English than Arabic, because it is an Indo-European language, descended from Sanskrit, just as English is descended from Latin. Dictionary of Languages, A. Dalby (Bloomsbury,
1999) Next in the
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