Arabic in world languages book english version

Arabic in World Languages

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‫© ‪shutterstock images‬‬

‫زخرف من قصر الحمراء في غرناطة (القرن الرابع عشر)‬

Jastrow/ Commons.Wikimedia

‫مقبض خنجر على شكل رأس حصان‬

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The King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture has released this booklet for the occasion of the UN Arabic Language Day, which takes place annually on December 18th, and documents the influence of the Arabic language in eight world languages, namely Spanish, Italian, French, English, German, Turkish, and Indonesian. With the exception of English and German, which have been chosen due to their intrinsic importance, these eight languages have been selected as case studies because they are the most influenced by Arabic; yet they represent by no means an exhaustive list: Maltese is in fact a Semitic language deriving outright from Arabic, and the only reason on why it was not discussed is the limited number of its speakers, barely surpassing 430,000 people as it does. Swahili, Tamazight, Kurdish, Urdu, Greek, Russian, and Albanian are all Arabic-influenced, and even the artificial languages which are a phenomenon from the mid-20th Century – such as Esperanto and Interlingua – contain terms of Arabic origin.

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The greatest extent of Arabic influence on the languages of the Old World took place, specifically, between the 8th and 12th Centuries; yet Arabic remained more or less the first language in the world, in the realms of commerce, sciences, and diplomacy, for nearly a thousand years, until English took its place in our current time. It is imperative for us to have a quick look at the historical background of the Arabic language if we wanted to understand the reasons behind its diffusion – be it geographically, or temporally, or across disciplines, such as science, literature, philosophy, social sciences, or daily life.

Arab conquests The Arab people left their native desert with a mission to spread the message of Islam, and their feet carried them, after a long course, in the Iberian peninsula, and were thus exposed to other civilizations and cultures. However, these civilizations did not disappear but rather intermixed with and absorbed Arabic as part of their culture, until the effect of Arabic shone in sciences, literature, jurisprudence, and all aspects of human knowledge.

With the interaction of the Andalusian Arabs with European peoples, Arab terms pertaining to science and literature, and even daily life, found their way to European languages, especially Romance languages at the beginning, from which Arabic terms seeped into Anglo-Saxon and other Germanic languages. Slavic languages, on the other hand, were probably influenced by Arabic through their direct points of interaction in the Caucus and the Balkans.

Why did they love Arabs?

In the introduction to his seminal dictionary Lisânu Al Arab, the Egyptian author Ibn Mandhûr Al Ifrîqi wrote, “God placed Arabic above the languages of all [other] people and nations.” Furthermore, whomever converts to Islam, regardless of his origins, would tend to learn Arabic in order to be able to read the Qur’an properly, and understand its verses in the best possible way. Arabic is the only living language in the world whose books continue to make sense to its readers, linguistically, 1400 years after.

Pride in the Arabic language, however, did not make Arabs any less enthusiastic to enrich their language through learning the languages of other peoples and through reading their scientific and literary works. It was due to such efforts that the Arabic language reached its golden age as the international language, the sine qua non for any progress or knowledge. Any ambitious student interested in taking his scientific knowledge to its logical extent had to learn Arabic, just the way the students of today learn English in order to have a first-row view of technological and scientific advances.

In his book Arabic and Persian Poems in English, Omar S. Pound wrote, “the golden ages of Islamis civilization would feature a student traveling for long distances, in order to look into the source of the meaning of a mysterious word used by some tribe”.

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shutterstock images ©

‫بالط من السيراميك التركي القديم‬

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The effect of Islamic heritage Reinhart Dozy, the famous Dutch orientalist with a focus on Arab Andalusia, notes in his book Spanish Islam that it was due to the international appeal of the Arabic language that Jews and Christians in Andalusia were keen on learning Arabic, and that they were enamored with the language and its literature. Dozy also cites Alfaro, Cordoba’s priest then, as complaining that his people – Christian Spaniards – were eager to read the scientific and literary books of Muslims, not in order to rebuke them, but in order to master Arabic, the language that they loved.

Later on, when the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon conquered Toledo from the hands of the Moors, northern Spaniards found a wealth of Arabic books in its libraries, which prompted a wide movement to translate these books to European languages, which in turn prompted the European Renaissance. In a similar scenario, when Cordoba surrendered to Catholic armies and its Muslims emigrated to the Maghreb, Catholic Spaniards fell again on most of the scientific and literary manuscripts left by the Moors; so much so that one of the libraries of Andalusia was found to contain no less than 400,000 manuscripts.

Due to translation, Arabic words found their way, bit by bit, into the various European languages – despite some European intellectuals who try to deny the strength of the Arabic influence.

Yet Arabic has a linguistic influence way beyond the Old Continent; it expanded southwards to the Black Continent and eastwards to the Yellow Continent, and it has a different story in each of these settings. This booklet does not claim that it, in a span of less than 100 pages, has managed to tackle all the aspects of the story of Arabic, but we can safely say that it is an excellent introduction for whomever is interested in having an overview of the subject. Geographically comprehensive as it is, it should be of use in helping the casual reader to form a preliminary impression, and the specialized researcher to decide upon which language/context should be taken for further research.

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Spanish

“One of the strangest things that have occurred in the history of humanity is the spread of the Arabic language.

At first, it was unknown.

Suddenly, it started in full perfection, flexible, rich and complete. It has neither a childhood nor aging. This language exceeded its counterparts by the variety and accuracy of its meanings and the perfection of its structures.”

Ernest Renan, French Orientalist 10 8

The story of Spanish with the Arabic language needs to begin with the following anecdote: In 2004 a Lebanese family travelled to Andalusia for tourism, and sat in a coffee shop in Malaga after a long day of sightseeing. When it was time to move on, the bill needed to be ordered, so the lady raised her hand and addressed the waitress in English by saying, “The bill, please,” Which the waitress did not understand. The lady tried French this time, saying, “L’addition, s’il vous plaît,” Which the waitress also did not understand. The lady got confused and address her family members in Arabic about the need to get the bill, mentioning the Arabic word “fetûra”. Upon hearing the latter word, the waitress said, “¡ Ah, la factura !” And promptly brought the bill.

The Arabs ruled the Iberian Peninsula – which corresponds to present-day Spain and Portugal – for seven centuries from 711 to 1492 (Al Tamîmi 2010). Arab rule was characterized with tolerance, especially that Arab rulers gave Christians and Jews the freedom to keep their respective religions, and as such these groups developed no sensitivity towards Arabic and were not resistant to the inflow of Arabic terms into the various Hispanic languages – some of them were even called Mozarabs because their language became with time quite similar to Arabic (Kaye 1994). Their is no academic consensus on whether Arabic became the everyday language or whether a close second language (the case of the Mozarabs supports the latter hypothesis), but it is sure that Arabic was particularly present in Spain and Portugal until six centuries ago (Versteegh 2001).

Arab rule in Spain finished with the Reconquista, which was a series of military operations led by a number of Catholic rulers with the aid of some mercenary groups.

The Reconquista was an extremist movement that aimed at depicting Arab presence in Spain as occupation, and 11 9

Commons.Wikimedia

‫قطعة «تطريز» من القرن العاشر‬

at “purifying” the country from all Muslim and Arabic linguistic and religious traces. Muslim Spaniards were forcibly converted to Catholic Christianity, and those of them who refused would be either executed or exiled.

Despite this, the influence of Arabic on Spanish and Portuguese is comparable to that of Middle French on English, which is quite profound – as would testify any scholar of English linguistics (Kaye 1994). Spanish is still the first amongst the languages of Europe with regards to the count of terms of Arabic origin in it, and in fact it was the most important intermediate language in transmitting Arabic words into the European hinterland. What we need to note, however, is that it was not the final intermediate language but would rather transmit Arabic terms into Medieval Latin and French, and those two languages would then transfer these terms to, say, German or English, since they were the languages of science in Medieval Europe (Vennemann 2011); for example, Toledo was particularly important in transmitting sciences from Arabic to Latin, for in 1130 a committee of translators dedicated to this end was established there, and it was normal for translators to keep Arabic terms – or to simply latinize them – when they couldn’t find authentic Latin equivalents (Al Tamîmi 2010).

It is to this context of scientific translation in Spain that one of the most important Western loans from Arabic comes; in his book Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1968), the German-American philosopher Jacob Klein recounts that Spanish translators were at loss at how to translate the Arabic word “shay’” (something), and which was used to designate unknowns in Arabic mathematical equations, reason being that Spanish – and Latin-scripted languages in general, for that matter – does not have an individual letter that designates the sh sound. As such, they yielded to Greek, using the letter χ, which designates the sh sound. With the passing of time, the Greek letter 12

was replaced by the closest thing resembling to it in Latin, namely the x, and x became a standard sign for the unknown in Western mathematics.

Spanish contains around 4,000 terms of Arabic origin, most of which have become obsolete, and which broadly cover the entire linguistic spectrum but which are most abundant in the fields of warfare, agriculture, and construction (Versteegh 1997). Most Arabic terms were borrowed to the languages of the Iberian peninsula (such as Castilian/ Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan) with the al article kept, and this is a property that distinguishes Iberian loans from their Italian counterparts, in the sense that Italians also delivered Arabic terms into the European hinterland but did so while dropping the al article. This difference owes itself to the context in which there terms were borrowed: in the Iberian peninsula Arabic seeped into Spanish in the course of everyday life, where there was a great deal of cohabitation between the two languages, which led to the importation of Arabic terms “as is” so to speak; while in Italy – Sicily excepted – Arabic words were imported in the context of trade. As such Arabic was not an everyday language but was rather an “other” language from which Italians caught many terms, which led to its importation in its simpler form, namely without the al article (Versteegh 2001).

Most Arabic loans in Spanish are names, yet there are some adjectives from which we will cite three: • Mezquino: Means “poor lad” and comes from the word miskîn.

• Gandul: Means “sloth” and comes from the word ghandour which actually means “dandy”.

• Azul: Means “blue” and comes from the word lazurd, which the Arabs in turn borrowed from the Latin lapis lazuli.

Interestingly enough, the two Spanish words that are used to designate “whomever” are fulano which comes from the word fulân, and mengano which originates from the question “ma kâna?”, which means “who was that?”.

Spaniards also continue to use the word hasta, originating from the word hatta, to mean “until” (Versteegh 1997), and this is an important word because it figures in everyday speech as a farewell expression, whether the speaker is saying “hasta luego” (see you soon), “hasta la mañana” (see you tomorrow), or “hasta martes” (see you on Tuesday).

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In terms of interjections, Spaniards say ojalá to mean “hopefully”, which comes from the Arabic phrase in shâ’a lLâh (if God wills); and they also say he to designate “there [you are]”, which comes from the Arabic word ha.

shutterstock images ©

.‫ غرناطة‬،‫زخارف متشابكة على جدران قصر الحمراء‬

There is also a minor effect in word formulation left by the Arabs on Spanish, namely the í suffix which turns nouns into adjectives, as is the case for example in the word alfonsí (pertaining the King Alfonso) and baladí (meaning vulgar in the sense of originating in the balad – the countryside – which is an Arabic word in its own right) (ibid.).

The Iberian peninsula is also rife with toponyms of Arabic origin, of which we have chosen the most famous instances: - Andalucía: From Al Vandalusia, meaning “that which is inhabited by the Vandals”.

- Almería: From Al Merâya, which means the watchtower.

- Gibraltar: From Jabal Târiq, which means “the mountain of Târiq”, referring to Târiq bin Ziyâd, the army general who led the Islamic conquest of Andalusia.

- Lisboa: The Portuguese capital is Arabized today Lishbôna, although the original name was Al Ashbûna.

- Madrid: The Spanish capital is arabized today as Madrîd, although it originally comes from the Arabic word Al Majrît, which means “the water source”.

- Sevilla: Its name is not of Arabic origin but rather the Latin Hispalis. Arabs arabized it Ishbîlia and Spaniards hispanized it Sevilla.

- Guadalquivir: A major river passing through Cordoba and Seville, it originates from the words Al Wâdi Al Kabîr which means “the great valley” but which was used as “the great river”.

Lastly, worth noting is that the famous Paella owes its name to Arabic; fishermen used to gather whatever they had fished and had not managed to sell over the course of the day, and would eat it collectively after throwing rice and spices into it. They used to refer to that dish as Al Baqeyya – the leftovers – and eventually it was hispanized into Paella.

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Italian shutterstock images ©

‫صورة قصر زيزا العربي في باليرمو بإيطاليا‬

Arabs had various modes of interaction with the Italians; with the cities of the north the interaction was strictly commercial, while the southern cities were ruled by the Arabs in staccato fashion between the 10th and 12th Centuries, and apart from that were kept in touch through commerce. Lastly, in the island of Sicily they held their first settlements in Palermo in 831, and moved on to occupy the entire island by 902, making of it a hereditary emirate in 948. As a matter of fact, Sicily stayed an Arab province until 1268, when Pope Clement requested to the governor of Naples, Charles II of Anjou, to lead a Crusader campaign against Arab presence in Sicily. The campaign was fierce, and in its course around 200,000 Muslim Sicilians were massacred. Mosques were also destroyed. By the 14th Century Sicily had lost all of its Muslim population, but Sicilians continued to be arabophone for a century after Charles II’s campaign, and its dialect continues today the richest in Arab terms (Leclerc 2014). More importantly, Arab Sicily gave Malta its language, which until today is the only Arab-based language written in Latin characters – although we must note that around half of the words in Maltese are taken from Italian due to the geographic, cultural, and religious ties between the two countries (Kaye 1994).

In the north, Arabic was one of the languages in currency, albeit strictly for commercial communication, in the cities of Pisa, Venice, and Genoa – in which a school for Arabic was inaugurated in 1207 –, all of which were independent city states between the 15th and the 18th Centuries (Leclerc 2014, Vennemann 2011, Zinâti 2012). In addition to that, Western academic researchers were keen on translating Greek, Persian, Sanskrit, and ancient Latin texts to Middle Latin – which was the language of science at the time –, and they found no better source for these texts than Arabic translations of them, which contributed to the introduction of many Arabic terms into Middle

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Latin. This took place in lots of Western Europe’s cultural hubs, and in the Italian peninsula specifically the cities of Palermo, Salerno, and Naples were particularly active, aided in that by the abundance of Arab speakers amongst their respective populations (Vennemann 2011). Also worth noting is that the first printed Arabic book was printed in Italy, namely Avicenna’s book The Canon of Medicine. Its types were cast by Giovanni Battista Raimondi in the city of Cremona in 1593 (Zinâti 2012).

Italian was pertinent in transmitting Arabic words to French and German in specific, because Rome was a point where German pilgrims would stop in their transMediterranean journeys, and because the north of Italy was a transit region for trans-Alpine trade (Vennemann 2011).

However, the Italian that was used as the “standard” version after the unification of Italy in 1871 was the Tuscan version, which naturally was little influenced by Arabic.

This explains why the current standard Italian today features only about 300 terms of Arabic origin (Wikipedia 22.11.2014).

- Gèbbia: Which is an artificial lake used to store water.

It originates from the Arabic word khâbia which means “jar”.

- Saia: (water canal) From sâqia, of the same meaning.

- Zaffaran: (saffron) From za’farân.

- Zagara: (bloom) From zaher.

- Burnìa: (jug) Was kept unchanged from the Arabic burnìa.

- Zibbibbu: Which is a type of grape, and which comes from the word zabîb, which means “raisin”.

- Zuccu: (trunk) From the word sûq.

Apart from that, and beyond agriculture, Arabs left in Sicilian the word ràisi, which means “the chief”, and which comes from the Arabic word ra’îsi, which means “my chief”.

In standard Italian, Arab loans cover a lot of domains, of which we will discuss here art, gastronomy, fauna, household items, material, and administration. Worth noting is that Arabic left in Italian a large number of terms in mathematics and astronomy, but these terms were taken on by French, English, and German, and will as such be discussed in the proceeding sections (Leclerc 2014, Vennemann 2011).

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Starting with the arts, some terms are the following: • Calibro: (caliber) From qâlab, which in turn means “mold”.

• Chitarra: (guitar) From qîthâra.

• Carato: (carat) From qîrât.

- Intarsio: Is a type of wooden relief ornamentation and originates from al tarsî’, which means “embellishment”.

In gastronomy: • Spinacio: (spinach) From as-sabânikh.

• Carciofo: (artichoke) From ardi shawki.

• Curcuma: (turmeric) From curcum.

• Limone: (lemon) From laymûn.

• Cassata: From qashta.

In fauna: • Cammello: (camel) From jamal.

• Ubara: (houbara) From hubâra.

• Giraffa: (giraffe) From zarâfa.

In household items: • Materasso: (mattress) From martaba.

• Sabato: (Saturday) From Sabt.

In material: - Alcol: (alcohol) From al kuhûl.

- Catrame: (tar) From qutrân.

- Cotone: (cotton) From qutun.

In administration: - Dogana: (customs office) From dîwân.

- Fondaco: (storage space) Probably originates from funduq.

- Magazzino: (shop) From makhzan.

- Tariffa: (tariff) From ta’rifa.

- Fattura: (bill) From fatûra.

- Sultano: (sultan) From sultân.

- Sceicco: (sheikh) From sheikh.

- Ammiraglio: (admiral) Originates from amîr al bahr, which means “the prince of the sea”.

- Alfiere: (ensign) From al arîf.

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- Mafia: What is sure is that this word reached standard Italian through Sicilian Italian, but there is a number of stories on the exact origin of the word: this might be mihyâs, which means “boaster” in certain Arabic colloquial dialects; it could be marfoud, which means “rejected”; it could be maha which means cave (which makes sense because the word for cave in Sicilian Italian is mafie); or mahfal, which means assembly; or mu’âfât which means healing and could have been used to designate protection; or Ma’âfir, which is the name of the Arabic tribe which ruled Palermo from 831 until 1072

.‫ القرن الخامس عشر‬،‫نقش قديم من الفن التيموري‬

Photographer : Marie-Lan Nguyen/ commons.wikimedia

“Arabic is the richest language in the world.” – German Ulrike Freitag, Researcher 20

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French

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Historically, the relationship between France and the Arabs was unstable if not outright hostile; it was the Franks who stopped the advancement of Arab armies from Andalusia to the European hinterland, and the La Tour battle in 732 was decisive in limiting Arab presence to Septimanie, the western extremity of the Franco-Mediterranean coastline. In addition to this, the Franks were among the powers that supported Catholic Spanish rulers in their military campaigns to drive the Arabs out of the Iberian peninsula in what was known eventually known as the Reconquista, and they formed the nucleus of the Crusader armies that occupied the eastern Mediterranean in the 12th and 13th Centuries. Later, during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Age, Napoléon Bonaparte conducted his famous military campaign into Egypt, and the French Republic colonized the countries of the Arab Maghreb well into the mid-20th Century. It must be noted that France itself served as an inspiration for the élites of the Arab Mediterranean during the same period, and that the principles of republicanism, secularism, and equality did charm many of these writers and intellectuals – especially that many of them led their higher studies in French universities – and that France has therefore a contribution to the Arab Renaissance, but this of course did not translate into Arabic linguistic influence on French.

We have just enumerated the reasons that did not help Arabic terms spread into French, yet any linguistic survey would be lacking if it were to disregard the elements that were indeed conductive to linguistic influence, the first of which – paradoxically enough – is the Crusader wars (Kaye 1994). We can certainly say that the Crusaders needed to learn Arabic while present on arabophone territory, and that they took this language with them upon returning to their native France, yet there is actually more to this; Arab civilization at that time was more advanced than its European counterpart, and as such the Crusaders had to 22

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learn Arabic not only in order to govern the people, but also because the tools and concepts to which they were exposed during their stay on the eastern Mediterranean had to equivalents to them in French.

Later, during the Renaissance, commerce grew between France and Arab provinces, and Paris, Chartres, and Toulouse, and Montpelier were among the cultural hubs that translated Arabic manuscripts as well as Arabic translations of ancient manuscripts to Medieval Latin. This caused the latter language to become an intermediary language in transmitting Arab terms to French (Versteegh 2001). Today, we can observe the phenomenon of acquisition of Arab terms by contemporary French due to the interaction of Frenchmen with the Maghrébin diaspora; yet this phenomenon is limited in magnitude and is limited in scope to slang French.

Statistically, the Algerian author Salah Ghamriche cites the linguist Henriette Walter as follows: “Of the 35,000 words included in everyday French, 4192 of them come from other languages: 25% from English, 16% from Italian, 13% from German. And the French lexicon includes 280 words of Arabic origin (while the rest, around 120 words, is distributed between Turkish and Persian), and this means that of 3192 French words of foreign origin around 7% are Arabic, which also shows that Arabic gave French more words than some European languages such as Spanish for example. In fact, there is double the amount of words found in French of Arabic origin than there is of Gallic” (2008).

Worth noting is that Walter’s estimate is the smallest academic estimate on this issue, and this is probably due to the fact that she limited her survey to everyday terms, for linguistic estimates tend to shrink or expand depending on how keen the linguist is on excluding words that exist but that are not in currency. The highest estimate for Arabic words in French is around 700 words, and was presented by the French orientalist Henri Lammens in his book Remarques sur les mots français dérivés de l’arabe (Remarks on French Words Derived from Arabic); followed

by Qâmûs Al ‘Arbâwiyyât (The Dictionary of Arabisms) authored by Hassan Makki, a Swiss architect of Lebanese origin, in 2002, where he gave an estimate of around 500 terms; followed by Qâmûs Al Kalimât Al Faransiyya Min Asl ‘Arabi (The Dictionary of French Words of Arabic Origin) authored by aforementioned Algerian writer Salah Ghamriche, which featured 391 terms; and lastly the French author Pierre Jirot who estimated these terms 24

to be 280. As such we can assume that Arabic words in French near 400 terms.

These terms are entirely nominal – in the sense that the influence of Arabic did not reach verbs and conjugations for example. Indeed there is non-nominal word of Arabic origin which is truchement, which means “through” or “by means of”, but its origin is a nominal word, namely turjumân which means “translator”. In his explanation, Dr. Anwar Zenati clarifies, “this word infiltrated Old French in the 12th Century either as drugment or trucheman before evolving into truchement, and in terms of meaning it used to refer to the translator himself or he who speaks on behalf of another, then it expanded its meaning through abstraction, such that we would now say « Par le truchement de ... », through the means of...” (2012).

Another word that is inspired by a human character the word cafard which means “cockroach” but which also means “telltale”, and whose origin is the Arabic word câfir which means “infidel” (ibid.); while one recent borrowing that owes itself to recent interaction with the arabophone diaspora in France is toubib which means “doctor” and which comes from the word tabîb.

As is the case with other Western European languages, French carries a lot of words of Arabic origin in the field of astronomy due to the advancement of Arab knowledge in that field; the brightest star in the Taurus constellation, for example, is called Alderban and means in Arabic “the eye of the ox”, and there is also the Algol star which comes from the word Al Ghoul, which means “the ogre”, and the Altair star which comes from the word Al Tair, which means “the bird”. The words zénith and nadir – meaning zenith and nadir – come in turn from Arabic, where the origin of the first is samt al ra’s (“the top of the head”) and the second is nadhîr (“the opposite entity”). Also, the word astrolabe comes from the ancient Greek astrolabos which means “the star taker”, but was acquired by French through the Arabic intermediary astarlâb.

In technology, it is necessary to talk about the word arobase. Arobase might not necessarily mean much to English-speakers, for it only means “electronic base”, but its sign is key to the Internet scene: @. This word reached French through Spanish as arroba, where it was used as a unit for measurement. What few people know is that this unit was a hispanization for the Arabic word ar-rubu’ (“the 25

quarter”), and that it was mostly forgotten until 1972 when the first attempts to created an “electronic base” were made, which prompted the resurfacing of this ar-rubu’ (Jabbâr 2008).

Arabic also has contributions into the world of gastronomy: the Levantine salad tabbouleh has been integrated into French as taboulé, but there are older loans which we will cite in what follows (Zenâti 2012): • Café: (coffee) From qahwa.

• Sucre: (sugar) From sukkar.

• Abricot: (apricot) From barqûq.

• Sirop: (syrup) From sharâb, which means “drink”.

• Sorbet: (sorbet) From sharabât, which means “drinks”.

In the domain of finance, Frenchmen started towards the end of the 20th Century, due to their interaction with the arabophone diaspora, to use the word flous, which is an Arabic term, in referring to money informally. More formally speaking, it is worth noting that the word chèque (check), originates from the word sak.

Lastly, mousseline (muslin) originates from the word Mûsli, which means “originating in Mosul”, since the city of Mosul was a major trade center for that fabric (Vennemann 2011).

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Walters Art Museum

Carlo Alfonso Nallino, Italian Orientalist

‫ بحركات ملونة‬،‫نص مخطوط مغربي‬

“The Arabic language has greater charm than any other language, and its qualities are innumerable.”

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deror_avi/ commons wikimedia

1575 ‫صحن من سيراميك إزنيك في تركيا‬

English If we were to look historically, we would find that a great deal of Arabic terms found their way to England along with the Crusader soldiers returning from the eastern Mediterranean, after the fall of their kingdoms towards the end of the 13th Century. This lexical agglomeration was added to another agglomeration, that which England acquired through direct contact with Spain and Sicily.

Moreover, Crusader soldiers brought to England a lot of traditions and habits that they had acquired in the Levant, and it became common to find various oriental items imported by merchants after having heard of them through soldiers.

During the Renaissance, English contact with the Portuguese and the French increased, which further enriched English with Arabic terms.

Beginning in the 18th Century, and up to the 20th Century, England (and the Great Britain as a whole) experienced direct contact with arabophone provinces in Africa and the Middle East. In Africa, GB colonized Egypt and Sudan, and in the Middle East, it colonized Aden, Oman, the Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Palestine, Jordan (qua Transjordan), and Iraq. Even the British colonization of India – which back in the day still included Pakistan and Bangladesh – served to add Arabic words to the English language, since Urdu and other languages spoken by Muslim Indians are generally rich in Arabic. It is true that linguistic exchange in the modern era has been functioning in the other way around – Arabic is becoming Anglicized as well –, but English did get influenced by Arabic during the colonization era, and this phenomenon could well be a continuous one right now.

There is no academic consensus regarding the count of terms of Arabic origin in English; in his famous study (1933), Walt Taylor presented the highest estimate, namely

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around 1000 terms, but he himself noted that most of these terms have become out of use, and that the terms that continue to be part of the everyday repertoire are around 260. Exactly 40 years later, Sahira Abdul Hameed Al Sayyed made a count of the number of Arabic terms still in use and found them to be 515. It would be useful, in this context, to mention the study that was put forth by Charles Augustus Fennell in 1892, finding in English 225 terms of Arabic origin, and that is because also surveyed the influence of other languages on English; according to this study, Arabic came in seventh (preceded by Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and “Hindoo”, in that order). Nearly a century later, in 1987, David Barnhart made a similar survey, and the result came out to be similar, where Arabic ranked sixth (after French, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, and Latin) (Kaye 1994).

Apart from that, Arabic has enchanted English minds in science and literature, and there are many examples to that; English researcher Adler of Bath travelled at the beginning of the 12th Century to the European continent in order to study Arabic, and he translated Al Khawarizmi’s astronomic tables to Latin. He was not alone in that endeavor, for there were many a academician from England who would make expeditions to the continent in the search for Arabic manuscripts that they would translate to Latin, and Arabum studia (Arabic studies) was an important academic field, so much so that the University of Oxford created its first Laudian Chair for the Arabic Language in 1636, and it was occupied by Edward Pollock who had laid down a book called A Survey of the History of Arabs (Wilson 2001).

In literature, we can talk about Jeffrey Chaucer in the 14th Century as being the first major English writer to borrow Arabic terms and to use them in his writings, which owes itself to the fact that he was passionate about Medieval science and philosophy, greatly influenced by Arabic as we have already established. In fact, the English language owes to Chaucer the very word “Arabic”, but also owes him 23 other terms of Arabic origin that he borrowed principally from French. Among those we mention almanac which comes from the word al manâkh (the climate), nadir which comes from al nadhîr (the opposite entity), alkali, which comes from al kali (alkali), satin which comes from zaitûni (that which comes from Tsink Yang, seemingly a major trading hub for satin in the Middle Ages), and amalgam, which comes from al ilghâm (charging or 30

compiling). A famous expression in the chess lingo that was introduced by Chaucer is check mate, where the first word is of Persian origin and means “the king”, and the second is of Arabic origin and means “has died”.

During the age of Enlightenment, borrowing of Arabic words continued in English literature, even though it was no longer used to create new words but rather to create an “exotic” ambience in a number of writings pertaining to the orient. This was the case with the writings of “Sir William Jones in the 1770s and 1780s, and [...] William Beckford in his novel Vatekh (1784), Byron in various poems, Thomas Moore in Lalla Rookh (1817), and necessarily in E. W. Lane’s scholarly translation of the Arabian nights’ entertainments (1838-40)” (Kaye 1994). On the other hand, Sax Rohmer had such admiration for Arabic culture that he would use Arabic words in order to provide his works with an Arabian flair; for example, in his novel Island of Fu Manchu, the two protagonists yield to Arabic psychobabble such as “‘Imshi! Rûah! Bundukîyah,’ ‘Etla bárra! Gehánnum,’ and ‘Kattar khêrak’ [in order to] secure their safe passage past ominous, wondering sentries” (Kaye 1994) which is justified by the protagonists by the idea that Arabic “‘has a powerful effect on these descendants of West Africans,’ who now speak French and do not know Arabic” (ibid.).

Today, Arabic terms exist in virtually all lexical fields in English, and for the sake of example we would mention that the English speaker evokes Arabic terms, consciously or unconsciously, in all that follows: architecture, fauna, clothing, fabric, chemistry, colors, metals, gastronomy, geography, travel, astronomy, household items, everyday life, singing and music, theater, make-up art and accessories, botany, sciences and mathematics, sports, commerce, and money.

Arabic terms are especially present in astronomy, for Richard Hinckley Allen’s book Star names: their lore and meaning included an Arabic index due to the abundance of the names of stars that have an Arabic origin. Furthermore, Mario Pei in his book Story of English Language 183 star names, of which 125 – thus 68.3% – were of Arabic origin (ibid.).

In geography as well there is a lot of Arabic influence on English, and to be exact, there as 94 geographic terms (ibid.). Interestingly enough, of those 94 terms there are 25 that reached the English language in the 19th Century, 31

The Revolutionary

and 16 of them reached English in the 20th Century, which means that Arabic – no longer productive in the field of astronomy – has not ceased to provide English with geographic terms.

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‫ القرن الحادي عشر‬،‫حفر على لويحة يمثل صيادين‬

For those interested, the nine (relevant) words of Arabic origin in the field of mathematics are the following: - Algebra: Originates from the title of a book by Al Khawarizmi, Kitâb al Mukhtasar fi Hisâb al Jabr wal Muqâbala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing).

- Algorism: Originates from Al Khawarizmi’s name.

- Algorithm: Same origin.

- Cipher: From the number sifr, zero.

- Sine: Reached English through the Latin word sinus, which is the translation used by Europeans for the Arabic word al jaib, “the pocket”).

- Surd: (meaningless, think of the word “absurd”) Reached English through the Latin word surdus, which is the translation used by Europeans from the Arabic word Asam or Sum, “deaf”, and which was used by Arabs in the same mathematical context.

- Tariff: From the word ta’rifa.

- Zenzic: No clear origin.

- Zero: From the word sifr.

Zero

deror_avi/ Marie-Lan Nguyen/commons wikimedia

Lastly, we ought to examine the field of mathematics because it is a special case in Arabic-English linguistics; admittedly, the number of borrowed Arabic terms in this domain is only 11, yet most of these terms in still in currency, and they also occupy a central position in mathematics. It is well known that the Arabs are who introduced the notion of the zero to Western mathematics, but they have also introduced the words algebra (from the word al jabr, which means repairing parts), cipher (from the word shîfra), and sine (from the word al jaib) (Kaye 1994); and in fact the very word algorithm goes back to the name of the Arab mathematician Al Khawarizmi, given that the latter did not only lend his name to a key element in mathematics, but also gave Western civilization the system of Arabic numerals after centuries during which it used to follow the complex Roman system. His book The Book of Addition and Subtraction According to the Hindu Calculation was translated to Latin in the 12th Century, and that was the first step towards the use of the Arabic numeral system in the West.

The complexity of the Roman counting system used to be a hindrance to sciences and mathematics in Europe before the advent of the Arabic counting system which brought in the number zero. It was very cautiously that Europe started to use the latter system between the 13th and 17th Centuries, and this gradual shift owes itself to the growth of trade between the European and Arab worlds. In 1202 it was used by Leonardo de Pisa in Italy, and in 1480 it was used Pierro Borgi, also in Italy. In France, it was used in 1485, and England it was first used as late as 1604. Only after 1800 did it become truly mainstream, and the shift from the Roman to the Arabic counting system was obviously concomitant with the shift from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

Another element supportive of this shift was the translation of the books written Mohammed Bin Mousa Al Khawarizmi (died in 847) who founded Algebra as a field of study – as well as other Arab mathematicians and scientists – in the 12th and 13th Centuries.

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1510 – 1500 ‫سيراميك من إزنيك‬

World Imaging/ commons.wikimedia

German Similar to English, German is little influenced by Arabic, and had little historic interaction with its regions. If we were to lay aside the German pilgrims who would visit Jerusalem since Germania’s conversion to Christianity, we can say that the first German contact with the Middle East is less than a thousand years old, namely in the 13th Century in the context of the Crusader wars. Since then, interaction between German-speaking nations and the Middle East was virtually nondescript. Indeed, there has been interaction with an Islamic – but not Arab-speaking – political entity, namely the Ottoman empire, which reached Vienna in 1529. The German-American researcher Nina Berman says that the Ottoman-German interaction during that period might have been one of the elements that led to the German industrial surge two centuries later, and that is because the Ottomans introduced the Austro-Hungarian empire – and thereon the German kingdoms – to coffee, which helped Germans to drink less spirits, and therefore to “sober them up” to use machines (2011).

After the Second Vienna Siege in 1683 and its conclusion with a decisive defeat of the Ottomans, the German stereotype of the Middle East started to improve; on the one hand, the specter of Ottoman rule no longer haunted Germans, and on the other hand, Central Europe was experiencing the Enlightenment Age, which laid great stress on the ideas of humanism and universality (ibid.).

As such, Prussia and Austria was seized by a wave of interest in the Middle East and its products and literature – especially A Thousand and One Nights – and that was the beginning of German orientalism.

In German literature, we find a phenomenon that does not recur in its French and English counterparts, which is that of writers whose perception and depiction of the orient stems from a genuinely positive identification. This phenomenon included Buber, Steiner, Hesse, Lessing,

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and Goethe (Berman 2011b), and it is imperative that we discuss the latter in some detail, firstly due to his importance in the history of German literature, and secondly to the extent of his interest in the arabophone world at a personal level.

Goethe’s interest in the orient dates back to his childhood, where his mother and grandmother used to recount to him stories that included Arabic elements. He also read A Thousand and One Nights and was so impressed by it that his first work, Die Laune des Verliebten, was influenced by “Histoire d’Amine”, a story featured in Galland’s collection of A Thousand and One Nights. The influence of the latter book was not limited to Die Laune des Verliebten, but rather it served as the inspiration for Lila (a play), Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (a novel), and Goethe’s own magnum opus, Faust (Berman 2011a).

Over the course of his life, Goethe made some serious attempts to learn Arabic, and was passionate about reading the travel memoirs of orientalists. He was also interested in and influenced by pre-Islamic poetry, read the works of Hafez and Ibn ‘Arbshah, and “engaged in” (ibid.) Jacob Reiske’s translation of Al Mutanabbi’s works.

He studied the Qur’an over the course of his life and was interested in Islam. Specifically, he admired its principles of monotheism, acknowledgement of successive prophets, stress on good deeds, and rejection of miracles. He even wrote a poem entitled “Mahomets Gesang” (The Chant of Mohammed) (1773), in which he presented the metaphor of the river that gradually expands, referring to Islam. Lastly, Goethe had a project for a tragedy that stems from the biography of Prophet Mohammed, and which he started to write in 1772, but which he never fleshed out, and of which little remains (ibid.).

Despite the profoundness of German intellectual interest in the Middle East, the linguistic link between the two remains weak. There is no consensus about the number of Arabic terms in German, but the most generous estimate does not assign more than 342 terms (Othman 1982 in Vennemann 2011). More importantly, if we were to eliminate defunct terms, we would end up with less than 200. Most of these terms, furthermore, were not directly taken from Arabic but rather through intermediary languages such as Latin, French, and Spanish. Latin in specific played an important role in introducing Arabisms to German, and that is because it was the language used 36

by Western academicians to translate scientific and philosophical works. They knew that most of these works had been translated from their native Sanskrit, Persian, and Greek to Arabic, so they started to translate these works from Arabic to Latin. Soon, in the 11th, 12th, and 13th Centuries, translators became enamored with Arabic works per se, which added the count of Arabic terms in Medieval Latin and that got transmitted eventually into German. In the study prepared by Theo Vennemann (2011), six terms of Arabic origins were imported without any intermediary language, and these terms are the following: - Atlas: From the word atlas.

- Fakir: From the word fakîr.

- Haschisch: From the word hashîsh.

- Kadi: From the word kâdi.

- Scheich: From the word sheikh.

- Sultan: From the word sultân.

If we were to exclude the words Atlas and Haschisch, these terms have been borrowed to express certain concepts strictly in their Arabic versions, and are as such ethnographic loans more than genuine linguistic loans; it is true that the word Fakir is a German word in currency, but if we wanted to express the idea “poor man” we wouldn’t say Fakir but rather ein armer Mensch, and if we wanted to say “judge” in the general context of things we wouldn’t say Kadi but rather Richter.

That, and it must admitted that in spoken German there is a phrase entirely imported from Arabic, which is die Mutter aller... and which comes from ummu ‘l Ma’ârik (ibid.). Apart from that, German contains a number of terms that contain controversy regarding the Arabism of their origins, but which are interesting. These terms are the following: - Orange: (orange) Is not of Arabic but rather Hindi origin. It was originally nârang, and was adopted by the Arabs who in turn introduced it to Europe through Sicily. It lost its initial n in the Italian peninsula and the French changed it from arancio to orange, transmitting it to the Germans in that form.

- Papagei: (parrot) From the Arabic word babbaghâ’.

Italians borrowed it over the course of the Crusader wars, and it entered Germany through France.

- Minarett: (minaret) Is a deviation in meaning of the Arabic manâra, which means “lighthouse”. Turks imported

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it, pronouncing its otherwise silent terminal t, and the French took it from the Turks, passing it on to the Germans.

- Bohne: (bean, as in “coffee bean”) Is said to come from the word bunn which means “coffee bean” in Arabic.

- Zucker: (sugar) Was taken from Italian which in turn took it from Arabic; yet Arabic is not its native language but rather an intermediary to Sanskrit, where the word originated as sarkarâ, which means “gravel”.

- Ries: (ream) From the word razma which means “bundle”.

- Rasse: (race, in the context of ethnicity) From the word ra’s, and Vennemann does not put a decisive opinion on whether it reached French through the Italian razza, the Spanish raza, or the Portuguese razão, but asserts that German took it from the French race.

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© Shutterstock.com

John Haywood, British Linguist

‫فن الخط العربي عل ورق قديم‬

“The Arabic language is credited for having introduced scientific expression to the West, and it is one of the purest languages, for it has been singular in the means of scientific and artistic expression.”

Also worth nothing is that German uses the same way of counting as Arabic, where hundreds are mentioned before tens, and ones before tens; in Arabic one would say mi’atan wa khamsa w ‘shrûn – “two hundred and five and twenty” – just as in German one would say zwei hundert fünf und zwanzig. Whether this is the result of direct Arabic influence, however, is unlikely.

It is clear from this overview that no real past exists between Arabic and German, yet the future might bring further cooperation between the speakers of these two languages, especially that Germany is leading the European Union to which the Middle East is the closest neighbor (at least geographically), which means that Europe’s advantage in the long run lies in further cooperation with arabophone countries on the issues of immigration, desertification, and trans-continental terrorism; a cooperation which is bound to reflect linguistically in the fashion of most political cooperations conducted in modern history.

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Turkish

© Shutterstock.com

‫رسم عثماني من القرن السادس عشر‬

As is well known, Asia Minor stayed until relatively late outside of the sphere of Arab interaction, for it used to be part of the Byzantine empire and was hellenophone.

The situation stayed so until around the 11th Century, when it was invaded by Turkish-speaking Seljuk tribes from Central Asia. The shift in rule in Asia Minor caused a linguistic change from Greek to Turkish, but since Persia was a passageway for these tribes, Persian – heavily influenced by Arabic as it already was – left a strong mark on Turkish, and this means that the first Arabic influence on Turkish was indirect (Farland 2011).

Worth noting is that the Seljuk empire did not include any arabophone provinces apart for the Levantine coast, eastern Mesopotamia, Oman, and present-day Emirates.

As such Arabic influence on Turkish started out timidly and only made a real surge around the 15th Century, after the Ottoman empire replaced the Seljuk, including more arabophone provinces as it did so (Oglü 2008).

The borrowing of Arab terms in Turkish was generally steady during the Ottoman era, and many think that the de-arabization of Turkish started out with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the 1930s. In fact, this operation did reach its greatest extent upon the installation of the modern Turkish Republic, yet it did not come ex nihilo, but rather was preceded by less successful attempts while the Ottoman empire was still in existence. The Tanzimât which the ailing empire witnessed at the end of the 19th Century included a moratorium on Arabic (and Persian) loans, which meant that Turkish translators were now obliged to look for Turkish origins upon translating foreign words in order to give an impression of their linguistic authenticity (Perry 1985). Later, at the beginning of the 20th Century, the Young Turks made disparate attempts at de-arabizing Turkish, especially newspaper Turkish, and from them stemmed Genç Kalemler (The Young Pens), a literary movement which concentrated its efforts on this endeavor

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as well as on using a written Turkish more similar to its spoken counterpart (ibid.).

During the republican era, the Society for Turkish Language Research was in charge of de-arabizing Turkish.

Interestingly, in the course of its work, the Society had to change its own name and that is because its initial name, Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti, contained an Arabic word (cemiyeti, committee, comes from the Arabic jam’iyya), so it had to rename itself Türk Dil Kurumu (hereafter TDK).

The TDK succeeded in its endeavors, for in a comparative study made by the Turkish researcher Dogan Aksan in 1993, the percentage of Arabic words in Turkish newspapers dropped from 51% in surveyed newspapers in 1931 to 26% in 1965 (Versteegh 2001). Also, the TDK 2007 dictionary counted most words existing in the Turkish language (a total of 104,315 words), surveying their origins, and words of Arabic origin only counted for 6.19% (Wikipedia 11.11.2014).

Despite all of this, Arabic continues to be the first language after Turkish itself in terms of abundance in the Turkish language, and in terms of absolute numbers, there are 6,463 terms of Arabic origin, which is not insignificant if we were to take into account the systematic campaign waged against the traces of Arabic language by the successive Turkish governments. It is also interesting to know that French still comes second after Arabic in the same list (according to the same dictionary, there are 4,974 terms of French origin, which accounts for 4,76%), given that French was actively supported by the TDK, where words of Arabic origin would be replaced by their French equivalents if Turkish equivalents were not available.

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© multitel / Shutterstock.com

There is a number of linguistic indices that can be used to trace words of Arabic origin in Turkish. Their source is Thomas Farland’s book Arabic and Islamic Influence on Modern Turkish (2011), and we will cite them as follows:

‫جدار من جامع الفاتح في تركيا‬

Another note that needs to be made in this context, is that Turkish words of Arabic origin are not limited to the fields of agriculture and household life – as is the case with Spanish, for example – but rather are in the heart of the lingos of literature, thought, and politics, and as a matter of fact the Turkish words for “faith”, “freedom”, “literature”, “poetry”, “love”, “republic”, “law”, and “reason” are all of Arabic origin (Maalouf 2009).

- Words with an accent circumflex. For example, the word mucizevî comes from the word mu’jizâ’i (miraculous) and means just that. Lâzım was taken as if from Arabic and has even kept the meaning as is, “must/obligartory”, and nar without the accent means pomegranate and is a Turkish word, but nâr with an accent means “hell”, and it comes from the Arabic word nâr.

- Words with repetitive consecutive vowels, especially the letter a. For example, beraat means “innocence” and comes from the Arabic barâ’a, matbaa means “printing press” and comes from the Arabic matba’a, and ziraat means “agriculture” and comes from the Arabic zirâ’a.

- Gendered words: This is because Turkish is a nongendered language, where “he”, “she”, and “it” are all referred to as “o”. Arabic is gendered and has brought this phenomenon into Turkish with such dualities as müdür and müdire (“director” in male and female forms, respectively), and sefir and sefira (“ambassador” in male and female forms, respectively).

- Dual words: Which again is a free-standing numerical category in the Arabic language alongside the singular and the plural, and which is altogether foreign from Turkish. Most dual words in Turkish have become out of use, but three that still exist are the following: - Harameyn: In reference to Islam’s two holiest shrines, which is Arabic are pronounced haramayn.

- Tarafeyn: Meaning “two sides”, and which in Arabic is tarafayn.

- Ebeveyn: Which means “the two parents” and which in Arabic is abawayn.

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Worth noting here is that Turks, oblivious of the fact that the -eyn suffix serves duality, treat these words sometimes as singular, adding to them -ler, the proper Turkish pluralizing suffix, thus saying ebeveynler when talking about their two parents.

“How can a person resist the beauty of this language, its sturdy logic, and its unique charm? Even the neighbours of the Arabs, in those provinces they have conquered, have fallen for the charm of this language.”

Sigrid Hunke, German Author 44

• Words that end with the -at suffix, and which can be divided into two categories: – The first category is these words whose -at suffix is a remnant of the Arabic pluralizing -at. For example: iktisadiyat literally translates into “economics” and comes from the same Arabic word, edebiyat translates into “literaries” (literary studies) and comes from the Arabic adabiyyât, and ruhiyat literally translates into “spiritualities” (psychology) and comes from the Arabic rûhiyyât (although the actual term used in Arabic for “psychology” is a completely different term, namely ‘ilm al nafs). It is clear from this enumeration that this category is particularly pertinent for academic fields.

– The second category is these words whose terminal t was a real part of the original Arabic word. Examples include ruhsat which means “license” and which comes from the Arabic rukhsa (the terminal t here is silent), and maslahat which means “interest” and which comes from the Arabic maslaha. Interestingly enough, some words have lingered in Turkish with a terminal t even though they originally finished with a d, as is the case with the word istibdat which means “tyranny” and which originally was istibdâd, or even with a hard ṭ as is the case with inzibat which means “police” and which originally was indibâ.

Did the successive Turkish governments make the right choice in distancing Turkish from its Arabic linguistic heritage? This is a thorny, controversial question, and in fact entire articles and books have been written in response, but what is certain is that Turks are paying direly for this puritan policy, in the sense that they are in a state of feud with their near and distant past. It is well known that the Turks of today cannot read the manuscripts that were written during the Ottoman era because these were written using the Arabic script, which was replaced by the Latin script by Atatürk in 1928; yet there is another matter that needs to be pointed out, which is that the Turks of today cannot understand the speeches of Atatürk himself despite the fact that they were written with the Latin script, and that is because the Turkish of today is drastically different from the Turkish of Atatürk, less than a hundred years ago, due to this systemic dearabizing policy (Farland 2011).

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Persian

commons.wikimedia

‫عربي وافرنجي يعزفان على العود‬

Persian is probably the richest language in Arabic terms.

More than 50% of its words are borrowed from other languages, and most of these words are Arabic in origin (Marszałek-Kowalewska 2011).

Arab rule of Persia lasted from the 7th to the 11th Century.

During that time, Persian continued to be the everyday language, but the élite became arabophone, which led to the replacement of most scientific, technical, and literary terms in Persian itself with Arabic terms. MarszałekKowalewska estimates that the percentage of Arabic words in 11th Century Persian was 30%, and that it reached 50% in the 12th Century. More importantly, the end of Arab rule of Persian in the 12th Century did not mean the end of Arabic linguistic influence into Persian, for Persian literature kept a tight relationship with its Arabic counterpart. In fact, Persian witnessed the greatest influx of Arabic terms one century afterwards, namely in the 13th Century (Perry 1985), while this phenomenon was slowed down under the Safavid dynasty which assigned Persian as Persia’s official language, thus preventing the country from turning arabophone (Versteegh 2001).

The 19th and 20th Centuries featured a number of initiatives for de-arabizing Persian, but we ought to mention here that these initiatives were not directed against Arabic specifically much as they were an expression of a Persian puritanism against foreign terms generally, be they Arabic, Turkish, Greek, French, or Russian. In the 19th Century the Qajar writer and prince Jalal od-Din Mirza was among the first figures calling for linguistic puritanism, and even attempted to write in an Arabic-free Persian, yielding whenever he needed to pre-Islamic Persian. Mirza Fath Ali Akhundzade, on the other hand, started out by trying to reform the Arabic script, and eventually called for an outright latinization of Persian, which was repeated by Sayyed Hasan Taqizade in 1928 to no avail (ibid.). In 1903, before the Constitutional

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Revolution, there was an attempt to form an academic committee which was called Majlis-i Akadimi. Chaired by Nadim Sultan, it was the forerunner for Farhangestan, The Academy of Persian Language, which we will see in the 1930s (Marszałek-Kowalewska 2011).

During the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi (1925-1941), the puritan linguistic movement became more organized, and in fact the Shah had given the order in 1924 for the formation of a committee that would modernize Persian.

In addition to that, eleven years later, thus is 1935, he gave orders to found the Academy of Persian Language which was known in Persian as the Farhangestan. The latter aimed at removing all foreign terms – especially Arabic ones – from the Persian lexicon, and it was inspired in its action by the Türk Dil Kurumu in Turkey, and to which the de-arabization of Turkish is attributed. Farhangestan, however, did not turn out to be as successful as its Turkish inspiration, and was officially disbanded in 1948.

Mohammed Reza Shah, Reza Pahlavi’s son, revived it in 1971 as The Second Academy, but the Islamic Revolution of 1979 disbanded it again (Perry 1985).

Today, the official Iranian linguistic policy, post-Islamic Revolution, tends to the advantage of the Arabic language; Article 16 of the Iranian Constitution states that Arabic must be taught in all levels and domains after elementary school, and the Iranian government re-established in 1991 the third Farhangestan on bases quite different from those of its two predecessors: it still calls for the purity of Persian, and it does claim that it is possible to formulate new words by yielding to Old and Middle Persian, but it also states that it is possible to yield to Arabic, which means that it has effectively placed Arabic within the definition of “Persian”, not outside it (Marszałek-Kowalewska 2011).

Persian, then, has only had two centuries containing ernest attempts to de-arabize it, and is as such the richest among the world’s major languages with Arabic terms.

As a matter of fact, Persian played for Seljuk Turkish the same role played by Spanish for the languages of Western Europe, namely the intermediary language from which many Arabic words were taken, and as such it is no wonder that it contains nearly 8,000 terms, which is around 40% of spoken Persian if we were to assume that the latter comprises of 20,000 everyday terms (Perry 2002).

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Linguistic borrowing in Persian is not limited to nouns and adjectives, the way it is in most other languages, but rather there is a real structural intertwining between Arabic and Persian in the sense that one can take an Arabic word and add Persian prefixes or suffixes to formulate new words from it. A simple example to that is the word na-ma’lûm, which negates the Arabic word ma’lûm (“known”) by adding the Indo-European prefix na to it, thus expressing the idea “unknown” (Versteegh 2001). The matter, however, is more complicated, because Persian uses the Arabic system of deriving words from roots in many of its own words: for example, “from the triliteral root Ṣ-L-Ḥ ‘(being) right, fit, proper, harmonious’ are derived the following Arabic verbal nouns that also appear in Persian, often as verbs or verbal idioms: ṣolḥ ‘peace’, ṣalāḥ ‘honesty, propriety, fitness’, ṣalāḥ dānestan ‘to deem appropriate, see fit’, maṣlaḥat ‘interest, expediency’, maṣlaḥat didan ‘to deem prudent’, eṣlāḥ kardan ‘to improve, correct, edit; shave’, moṣāleḥat ‘reconciliation’, eṣṭelāḥ and moṣṭalaḥ (pl. -aÌt) ‘(technical) term, idiom’.” (Perry 2002).

In fact, this linguistic intertwining was one of the reasons behind the failure of the first and second Farhangestans in their missions to de-arabize Persian – the intertwining was simply too intimate.

Apart from that, and due to the abundance of Arabic words in the Persian language, it is imperative that we tackle this phenomenon by it linguistic type (ibid.): - Nouns: Arabic nouns were generally imported without too much alteration, and to hark back to the notion of linguistic intertwining, Persians do not hesitate to add pure Persian suffixes to these names. For example, ketāb-hā-ī means “several books” (deriving from the Arabic ketâb, which means “book”), and bī-vafā’-ī means “disloyalty” (deriving from the Arabic wafâ’, which means loyalty). Also, there are lots of singular feminine Persian nouns that, similar to Arabic, end with an e, such as the word wâlide (“mother”) as well as plural feminine nouns that, similar to Arabic, end with êt.

- Adjectives: Are the second most common type of loans in Persian, and they are dominated by a terminal î. For example, shakhsî (“personal”), kâkî (“khaki”), tijârî (“commercial”), and ‘aksî (“photographic” – although we must note that the Arabic word here would be fotogrâfi, which somehow renders the Persian adjective more Arabic than the Arab. That said, linguists say that this specific word entered Persian through Ottoman Turkish 49

rather than Arabic).

- Pseudo-loans: These refer to nouns that have Persian roots but whose formulations were Arabic, which renders them something in between. For example, the word kaffâsh means “cobbler”, and originates from the Persian word kafsh which means “shoe”; yet it was formulated in an Arabic lexical base denoting personalization. Similarly, the word nazâkat means “civility” and originates from the Persian nâzok which means “dainty”, but was formulated in an Arabic lexical base denoting quality.

- Change of category: Some Arabic words were borrowed such that their lexical category changed, normally from noun to adjective. For example, khalwat comes from the Arabic noun khalwa which means “a space for privacy”, but in Persian simply means “private”; râḥat comes from the Arabic noun râḥa which means “comfort”, but in Persian means “comfortable”; and lastly salâmat originates from the Arabic noun salâma which means “safety”, but in Persian means “healthy”.

- The al article: Broadly speaking, Persian does not keep the Arabic al definite article, but there are some exceptions – mostly exclamations – that did keep it: al-amân! means “mercy!” although in Arabic al-amân means “safety!”; al-wadâ’! means “farewell!”, al-ân means “now”, and al-batta means “never”.

The al article is also conserved if it links two words that come together as in bi-l-’aks (“on the contrary”) and jadîdu-l-wurûd (“newly arrived”).

commons.wikimedia

)1830( ‫العمارة العربية – النورماندية‬

“The Arabic language is the easiest, clearest language in the world. It is futile to toil over new ways with which to facilitate the easy and clarify the obvious.”

George Sarton, Belgian-American Chemist 50

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Bahasa Indonesia ‫ القرن الثاني‬،‫موسيقيون مسلمون في بالط روجر الثاني‬ commons.wikimedia.‫عشر‬

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Arabs never ruled the Indonesian archipelago. Instead, Arab-Indonesian relations were based on commerce, and Islam penetrated the archipelago due to interactions with Muslim populations such as Arabs, Persians, and Indians.

The first Muslim settlement in Indonesia was established as a commercial port on the northern coast of Java in the 14th Century, and interestingly enough, according to French orientalist Denys Lombard, was not founded

by Arabs but rather by Muslim Chinese (Lombard 1990 in Versteegh 2001). During that period, Islam stayed an maritime, urban phenomenon, but by the 16th Century it had succeeded to find its way to the rural hinterland.

Bahasa Indonesia today is Indonesia’s official language, and it is a descendant from Malay. It started to be used on the island of Sumatra as a commercial language, and it spread to the island of Java during the 7th Century (Versteegh 2001). It was written with various scripts such as Pallava, Kawi, and Rencong, until Indonesians started to use the Arabic script in the 14th Century, which is a writing system known as Jawi (possibly in reference to the island of Java). Jawi is still used officially in Brunei, somehow in Malaysia, and to a slight extent in Indonesia itself, for Bahasa Indonesia was latinized by Dutch settlers in 1901.

As expected, given the history, Arabic words started to find their way to Bahasa Indonesia during the 14th Century, and they probably did not do so through live interaction with Arab traders, but rather through Persian using Indian as an intermediary. The situation stayed so until the 19th Century, when relatively large numbers of Arabs from Hadramût in Yemen arrived to the archipelago and settled in it, yet they settled in big cities, which prevented their linguistic influence from spreading to the rural hinterland (Campbell 1996).

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Quite a few Arabic loans were lost during the three main campaigns to which Bahasa Indonesia (BI) was subjected in order to “reform” it and streamline its spelling, but Arabic linguistic presence continues to be a real feature today. There is no comprehensive academic study on the subject of Arabic loans in BI, but Russell Jones’ study in 1978 counted nearly 3,000 loans (Jones 1978 in Versteegh 2001). That said, some local dialects such as Betawi are richer than the official BI, not having been subject to these linguistic campaigns (Van Dam 2010).

In BI are a number of words that seem to have been imported from Egypt because their j is pronounced a g (which is an Egyptian feature), as we can see in the word gamal (“camel”, originates from jamal) and gengsi (“prestige”, originates from jins which means “type”); and it also has a number of loans that seem to be taken from Persia, where the q is pronounced a g, such as the word gamis (“chemise”, used strictly to designate the Muslim variation of the garmet, and originates from qamîs) and the word gereba (“waterskin”, originates from qirba) (ibid.), yet Indonesian loans seem to be generally derived from standard Arabic where the q stays a q and the -u conjugation is kept at the endings of words and verbs, which is a puzzle for linguists since it casts doubts upon the standard story of how Arabic was brought to Indonesia by traders; traders in general were not fluent in standard Arabic, and for the very few of them who could have, there was no reason why they would abandon their native dialects and speak standard. On the other hand, sheikhs were fluent in standard Arabic but have not been documented as having been particularly present in the Arab-Indonesian scene (Campbell 1996; Van Dam 2010).

No straight-cut story explains why BI kept the q sound unchanged (although it was latinized as k), but there is a number of hypotheses attempting to explain the reason behind the persistent -u conjugation: one hypothesis states that the -u is not a conjugation at all but rather is a remnant of a now-vanished h indicating the third person.

Another hypothesis states that the -u sound again is not conjugation but is rather a feature caught from south Indian Tamil – which makes sense at least geographically since southern India used to be at the trade route –, while a third hypothesis states that this sound is actually part and parcel of BI, and as such that its presence at the endings of Arabic loans was a way of linguistic appropriation by the natives (Van Dam 2010).

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Most BI terms of Arabic origin are not expressive of the direct tangible environment such as body parts, staple foods, or direct nature, much as they are of culture, religion, and abstract concepts. A quick count of the realms cited by Jones himself features the following: “Islamic religion (eg. Muslim). abstract and philosophical terms (eg. ikhlas ‘sincerity’.) euphemisms (eg. hamil ‘pregnant’) political and military (eg. wazir ‘vizier’) nautical and trade (these are mostly Persian rather than Arabic.) botanical and zoological (eg. zaitun ‘olives’) anatomy, medicine (eg. bawasir ‘haemorrhoids’) times, dates and numerals (eg. saat ‘moment’) education, books and writing (eg. eja ‘spell’) cultural innovation (eg. salju ‘snow’)” (1984 in Campbell 1996).

There are also many doublets in BI, in the sense that a certain Arabic word would have been borrowed many centuries earlier and would have been so “indonicized” that the same Arabic word would get re-borrowed in a more obviously “Arab” guise. For example, the words perlu and fardu both derive from the Arabic word fard (“duty”), but the former was borrowed much earlier – which made greater changes on its pronunciation – and designates “duty” in the more general sense, while the latter – being more obviously Arab – is used to designate strictly religious duty (Campbell 1996).

Generally, Arabic loans in BI are nouns, yet there are some verbs as well such as pikir which derives from the Arabic fikr. Interestingly, BI allows its speakers to formulate hundreds of words from one single root, and Kees Versteegh gives an example of this phenomenon, namely the word maksud which comes from the word maksûd (“implied”), and from which “we have the verbal derivatives bermaksud ‘to intend’, memaksudkan ‘to aim at’ and the passive participle temaksud ‘intended’” (2001).

There is also a small number of formulatory loans in BI, and the use of the appropriational -î is one of them; for example Indonesians say alami to mean “natural”, and in so doing they are referring that which is “natural” to âlam – the world – by using the terminal î. They also say gerejawi when they mean “ecclesiastical”, and in so doing they are referring the described object to the gereja – “church” in Portuguese – through the terminal î (ibid.).

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Another formulatory loan in BI is the feminizing suffix -ah, and some examples of this feature would be the masculine/femine pair syarif/syarifah which comes from sharîf/sharîfah (“honorable man / honourable woman), and marhum/marhumah which comes from marhûm/ marhûmah (“deceased man / deceased woman”), which in female proper nouns we find the feminizing suffix -ah in names of Arabic origin such as Aminah and Patimah (Campbell 1996).

Even the pluralizing suffixes -în and -at for masculine and feminine nouns, respectively, can be found in some words such as muslimin and hadirat, but they are grammatically “frozen” so to speak, in the sense that they have been imported “as is”; as such, hadirah means nothing in BI even though in Arabic it would be the singular form of hadirat.

Lastly, there are some conjunctions that we will cite below (Versteegh 2001): - Lakin: (but) From lâkin.

- Labuda: (necessarily) From lâ budda.

- Lau: (if) From lau.

- Oleh sabab: (because) The word oleh is genuinely BI, while sabab comes from the Arabic sabab and the combination means “because”.

- Waktu: (when) From waqtu, which means “time”..

“Arabic has flexibility and malleability that enable it to adapt to the needs of its time.”

William Wright, British Orientalist 56

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Conclusions

If we wanted to summarize the story of Arabic with each of the eight languages discussed in this booklet, the results would be as follows: 1. Spanish: The influence of Arabic came as a result of direct rule, and the number of Arabic loans still in currency nears 1,500. Directionally, Arabic linguistic presence in Spanish is on a systematic downhill..

2. Italian: The influence of Arabic came as a result of direct rule in the south, and trade relations in the north, and the number of Arabic loans still in currency nears 300. Directionally, Arabic linguistic presence in Italian is downhill.

3. French: The influence of Arabic came as a result of trade relations and intermediary languages such as Spanish and Medieval Latin, as well as the current arabophone diaspora. The number of Arabic loans still in currency nears 400. Directionally, Arabic linguistic presence in French is downhill despite recent borrowings.

4. English: The influence of Arabic came as a result of intermediary languages such as Medieval Latin and French. The number of Arabic loans still in currency nears 400. Directionally, Arabic linguistic presence in English is downhill.

5. German: The influence of Arabic came as a result of intermediary languages such as Medieval Latin and French. The number of Arabic loans still in currency nears 200. Directionally, Arabic linguistic presence in German is downhill.

6. Turkish: The influence of Arabic came as a result of direct rule and religious ties. The number of Arabic loans still in currency nears 6,000. Directionally, Arabic linguistic presence in Turkish is on a systematic downhill.

7. Persian: The influence of Arabic came as a result of direct rule and religious ties. The number of Arabic loans still in currency nears 8,000. Directionally, Arabic linguistic presence in Persian is almost stable.

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8. Bahasa Indonesia: The influence of Arabic came as a result of trade relations and religious ties. The number of Arabic loans still in currency nears 3,000. Directionally, Arabic linguistic presence in BI is almost stable.

Upon first glance at this summary, the Arabic language seems to be in crisis; it is downhill in six out of eight languages surveyed, and in two cases – Spanish and Turkish – the elimination is state-sponsored. Also, the two languages that still enjoy good relations with Arabic are those of Muslim countries, which means that what continues to hold Arabic together is the fact that it is the language of the Qur’an, rather than the language of arts and sciences, which used to be the case and which once made the spread of Arabic to non-Muslim countries a possibility.

Yet if we were to throw a second look at this information, we would find the following points of strength: 1. Arabic is sometimes accused of being a language that spread by the sword. This booklet illustrates that this is a myth, for in three out of eight case studies Arabic influence owed itself to direct rule, whereas in five out of eight cases it owed itself to trade relations, intermediary languages, and religious ties.

2. This booklet illustrates that even though Arabic reached its greatest extent indeed in its golden age – namely during Europe’s Middle Ages –, it continues to produce loans today; French, Persian, and Bahasa Indonesia are examples of that.

3. We can also see that Arabic is an international language in the sense that it does not limit its effect to its immediate surroundings. Of the eight languages surveyed here, not a single one is Semitic (given that Arabic has indeed influenced Syriac, Hebrew, and Amharic), but rather six are Indo-European (Spanish, Italian, French, English, German, and Persian), one is Turkic (Turkish), and one is Malay (Bahasa Indonesia).

It also becomes clear that Arabic has fared better in the east than in the west, especially if we took into consideration the fact that it is more or less stable not only in Persian and BI but also in Urdu, Bengali, and Malaysian.

Because it has been centuries since the Arabic language last had a coherent linguistic policy, its stability in the east 59

is almost by coincidence, but it is a coincidence that will be to the advantage of Arabic in the long run, and this is because there is a near-consensus that the future lies east, specifically in Asia, which in turn is because Asia combines population youth and high fertility rates on the one hand with economic growth and political development on the other hand.

We conclude from all that has been set forth that there is an exaggeration in depicting Arabic as “damsel in distress”; it is true that serious challenges currently exist, but it is imperative that we look at these challenges as inspirations for the practical measures that need to be adopted if we wanted a more contemporaneous, more competitive Arabic:

3. We have already said that the flight of Arabic eastwards will be to its advantage in the long run, and it is true that linguistic investment – should we make a choice – would be more fruitful eastwards, yet arabophone countries do not have to make a choice so long as they are capable of using their central geographical location to expand both eastwards and westwards, the way they did one thousand years ago. As such, arabophone countries must aim for more cooperation with Europe in diplomacy, economy, and trade, all of which are realms that have proven historically fruitful in their effect on linguistics..

1. As we have already mentioned, the biosphere of Arabic is almost limited to the Islamic biosphere. It goes without saying that Arabic is honored to be the language of the Holy Qur’an, but it must retrieve its role in arts and sciences if it were to retrieve its competitive edge in non-Muslim countries. This would be done firstly by an increased investment on translation – any language must take before it can begin to give – and by increased spending on education. Naturally, the budgets allocated to the ministries of education in the arabophone countries vary from one country to another, yet they are in general meager if compared with their defense-related counterparts for example.

2. A unified linguistic policy needs to be set regarding this Arabic that we want to spread. In all the languages surveyed in this booklet, there would be a state-assigned committee that would make periodical reviews – be they annual or quinquennial – on the language in question, deciding on which terms need to be buried, how certain loans should be imported, and what extent of linguistic puritanism is desired (id est, to what extent are foreign loans to be tolerated). Arabic is distributed over 22 countries, and this is a double-edged sword; it means that any linguistic policy would require a great deal of networking and communication, but it also means that any linguistic policy, should it succeed, would be truly impactful, spanning 22 countries and thus 22 points of linguistic exportation.

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Arabic references ‫ “التالقح بين اللغة العربية ولغات المسلمين‬.‫ أوغلى‬،‫ أكمل الدين‬.)‫ (الرباط‬2008 ‫ شتاء‬،43 ‫ عدد‬،»‫ «مجلة التاريخ العربي‬،”‫األخرى‬ ‫ االنجليزية‬،‫ “أثر اللغة العربية في اللغات الحية‬.‫ مريم‬،‫ التميمي‬.)2010 :‫واالسبانية مثاال” (الكوفة‬ ‫ «معجم‬،”‫ “عن قاموس الكلمات الفرنسية من أصل عربي‬.‫ آسيا‬،‫ جبار‬.)2007 ،‫ دار لوسوي‬:‫الكلمات الفرنسية من أصل عربي» (باريس‬ .)2012 :‫ “أثر اللغة العربية في اللغة الفرنسية” (إلكتروني‬.‫ أنور‬،‫ زناتي‬‫ “األلفاظ المشتركة في التواصل الحضاري بين الشعوب‬.‫ أنور‬،‫ زناتي‬.)2012 :‫(اللغة اإليطالية)” (إلكتروني‬ ”)‫ “ذاكرة الكلمات الفرنسية من أصل عربي (محاضرة‬.‫ صالح‬،‫ غمريش‬.)2008 :‫(المنامة‬ ‫ دار‬:‫ ترجمة ميشال كرم (بيروت‬،»‫ «اختالل العالم‬.‫ أمين‬،‫ معلوف‬.)2009 ،‫الفارابي‬ »‫ «سويس إنفو‬،”‫“اللسان العربي في اللغة الفرنسية‬ .‫ غير معروف‬ُ -‫اللغة‬-‫في‬-‫العربي‬--‫ استُ حصلت من < اللسان‬.)06-01-2002 ‫(عدد‬ 22-11- ‫ > في‬http://www.swissinfo.ch/ara/518812/--‫الفرنسية‬ 2014

English and French references • Berman, Nina. German Literature on the Middle East: Discourses and Practices, 1000-19899 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011).

• Campbell, Stuart. “The Arabic Element In Indonesian: What Do Students Need to Know About It?” (Sydney: University Of Western Sydney Macarthur, 1996).

• Farland, Joseph. Arabic and Islamic Influence on Modern Turkish (Alev Book,2011).

• Holeš, Jan. “Henriette Walter: L’Aventure des mots français venus d’ailleurs, Paris, Éditions Robert Laffont, S. A. 1997, 472 p.” (1997).

• Kaye, Alan S. The Arabic Contributions to the English Language: An Historical Dictionary (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1994).

• Leclrec, Jacques. “Histoire de la langue italienne” (2014).

Retrieved from < http://www.axl.cefan.ulaval.ca/europe/ italieetat-HST.htm > on 22.11.2014.

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• Marszałek-Kowalewska, Katarzyna. “Iranian language policy: a case of linguistic purism” (Poznań: Adam Mickiewicz University, 2011).

• Perry, John R. “Language Reform in Turkey and Iran” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Aug., 1985), pp. 295-311).

• Perry, John R. “Arabic Elements in Persian” supp. to “(i) Arabic Elements in Persian, (ii) Iranian Loanwords in Arabic and (iii) Arabic Influence on Persian Literature”. EIr. Volume II (2002) pp. 229-36 • Van Dam, Nikolaos. “Arabic loanwords in Indonesian revisited”. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Vol. 166, No. 2/3 (2010), pp. 218-243.

• Vennemann, Theo. “Arabic Loanwords in German(ic)”.

Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics (Managing Editors Online Edition: Lutz Edzard; Rudolf de Jong . Brill, 2011). Brill Online.

• Versteegh, Kees. The Arabic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

• Versteegh, Kees. “Linguistic Contacts between Arabic and Other Languages”. Arabica, T. 48, Fasc. 4, Linguistique Arabe: Sociolinguistique et Histoire de la Langue (2001), pp.

470-508.

• Wilson, Jessica. “Arabic in Middle English”. (Toronto: 2011). Retrieved from < http://homes.chass.utoronto. ca/~cpercy/courses/6361Wilson.htm > on 19.11.2014

Online references • http://www.syriatoday.ca/salloum-arab-lan.htm • http://forums.iwaaan.com/t76662.html • http://www.alukah.net/translations/0/45550/#ixzz3Hz9r72xE • http://www.alukah.net/literature_language/0/21488/#ixzz3HoaoQ4g3 • Wikipedia official website, accessed on several occasions between 15.11.2014 and 24.11.2014.

‫ مراجعة فكتور سحاب‬/‫ أحمد عثمان‬/‫ فريق المحترف السعودي‬/‫دراسة‬

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