Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Visitors from Britain or North America strolling through an Arab city and
listening to the Arabic conversations of passers-by are usually unaware that
the English language includes a good number of words derived from that
strange tongue. Yet, if they are not students of linguistics, they cannot be
blamed.
Many of the Arabic words borrowed by English are so anglicized that, for
the layman, it is difficult to identify their true origin. There are some 3000
basic words and 5,000 of their derivatives which have some connection with
the language of the Holy Qur'an. Upward to 500 of the basic words are
common in the everyday language.
To tell the story of how these Arabic words entered the language of
Shakespeare is a fascinating story. At the dawn of Islam in the 7th century,
the Arabic language and Islam became inseparable. As the Muslim armies
moved through North Africa, then through the Iberian Peninsula, the tongue
of the Arabs as a part of the new religion, spread like wildfire.
The masses of newly-converted Muslims, in many cases, took as their own,
the idiom of the conquering desert men. In a few decades, Arabic became
the intellectual medium which united the new world of Islam.
Eastward, from the Arabian heartland, the Muslim armies occupied countries
which had developed numerous civilizations and cultures. However, unlike a
good number of conquerors before and after, they did not destroy but
preserved the cultures they had overwhelmed.
In the ensuing centuries, they absorbed the learning of these lands to produce
an Arab-Islamic civilization which was to be mankind's beacon for hundreds
of years. From the conquered lands, the Arabs borrowed thousands of
scientific and technical words, greatly enriching their poetic tongue.
Between the 8th and 12th centuries, this enhanced Arabic, with an endless
vocabulary, became the intellectual and scientific language of the entire
scholastic world.