The Arabic Contributions to the English Language: An Historical Dictionary.

• Author: Behnstedt, Peter

The present work consists of a 113-page introduction dealing with technical problems of lexicography, chapters on the semantics of the Arabic borrowings, their chronology and phonology. The latter is written by Alan S. Kaye. Two thirds of the book consist of the historical dictionary.

The lexical materials have been collected entirely from dictionaries and the novels of Sax Rohmer, who uses Arabic words "to create an eerie atmosphere." But are Arabic words used by this author really part of the English lexicon? To quote some of his examples: aribiyeh "horse-drawn carriage for passengers" (p. 139), El-hamdu li'llah! (p. 186), La il aha il'a Allah! (p. 233), lailtak sa 'idi (p. 234), Naharak said (p. 268), selam "Muslim prayer" (!) (p. 297).

Recently quite a few political terms from Arabic have been borrowed not only into English but also into other European languages, like intifada or fedayeen. The question is whether ad hoc quotations of Arabic political or geographical terms in newspapers like samidin "the steadfast," the name that the Palestinian West Bankers give themselves (p. 292) or infitah "the policy of opening the Egyptian economy to foreign investors" (p. 214), Misr "Egypt," should be regarded as borrowings. Does one speak of "the infitah of China"?

Cannon's list of Arabic loan words in English is quite impressive, but no distinction is made between very common ones like sugar, lemon and highly specialized ones like jummabandi and zumboorukchee. In his introduction he states that he rejected a few hundred Arabic words listed in former works because they were too technical. As a matter of fact there are still too many technical terms, e.g., those used by islamologists, botanists, as well as slang words used by British soldiers some fifty years ago. A number of words are classified as obsolete, such as Mahound for Muhammad. Yet "Mahound" is the title of chapter two in Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses! Cannon includes an item "if it was ever used in Arabic, whether or not it went directly from Arabic into English or even was ultimately of Semitic origin." Thus we find words like coral, alukah, crocus, cum(m)in, jasper as Arabic contributions. Applying this to other languages one could thus classify Latin loans in English as contributions of French to English. Most of the Arabisms listed are not direct borrowings but came into English via other languages. There are hundreds of loans from Spanish and there are as many from Hindi in...