You have zero interest in algebra, so you grab some alcohol – or maybe a coffee with extra sugar – sit on the sofa or mattress, eat an orange or some candy, and read a magazine or surf the web with Safari and Adobe. And just like that, you’ve used a dozen words that came from Arabic.
Yes, thanks to the traffic of goods and culture around the Mediterranean throughout history, English has many common words that it got from Arabic. It didn’t borrow all of them directly; they mostly came filtered though Latin, Turkish, French, Spanish, German, and/or Italian, and have changed in form – and sometimes meaning – since they left Arabic. But our language has accepted all these imports, and they have assimilated well and been very useful.
The electronic device you’re reading this on wouldn’t exist without digital programming, which wouldn’t exist without the number 0 (zero), which – believe it or not – Europeans didn’t think of as a number until the Italian mathematician Fibonacci introduced it to them in the early 1200s. He learned it from Arabic culture in North Africa, where he grew up. He took the Arabic word sifr, meaning “empty” or “nothing,” and Latinized it as zephyrum. That got trimmed down a little bit over time to the Italian zero. Of course, along with the concept, he needed a way of writing it. Roman numerals didn’t have a zero (of course), and anyway they’re not good for doing decimal mathematics: It’s much more bother to work with XX times LXVII than with 20 times 67. Continue reading “15 English words we stole from Arabic”