Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
The Adventure of English: Biography of a Language, a new book by Melvin Bragg, has just appeared in London. The copy I ordered of this story of the birth and growth of English has not yet arrived, so my knowledge of the book is restricted to reviews and excerpts. The author opens with Winston Churchill's inspiring exhortation of 1940, pronounced during the dark times of the German blitzkreig: "We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the landing grounds, we shall fight them in the hills... We shall never surrender."
Bragg's contention is that every word in the aforementioned quote is Old English, except "surrender", which is French. Old English, which came to England in the fifth century, he says, was "massively amplified with words from Latin, French, Greek, Spanish, Portugese and 100 or more other languages". Well, one of those 100 or more languages was undoubtedly Arabic, which though not mentioned in this excerpt may well be mentioned elsewhere in the book. Since I have myself undertaken research on the topic, which formed the basis of my book An Approach to English Philology, I might use this opportunity to offer my own version of the story -- if only by way of celebrating Bragg's book.
There are approximately 1,000 main words of Arabic origin in English and many thousands of derivatives of these words. Some two thirds of these are either obsolete or rare; and one third of all that remains is technical jargon. So only about 260 of the original 1,000 are in everyday usage. The words that entered the language prior to the Restoration period have since assumed English form, with a distinct pronunciation -- so much so that those who use them are seldom aware of their Arabic origins. To mention but a few examples (of words that start with 'a'): admiral, algebra, assassin, alchemy, alcohol, alkali, arsenal...
How and when did such words become part of the English language? When Arabic words were first translated into Latin in the 12th century, human beings everywhere sought the knowledge that Arabs possessed -- knowledge of alchemy, of medicine, mathematics and astrology. Travellers and merchants have since borrowed a wide variety of words from Arabic, whether directly or by way of Latin and French as well as other Romance languages. Latin provided Arabic words from the Old English period onwards. French made its own contribution during the Middle English period, with Chaucer using words like "alchemy" in his famous works. And the Spanish language provided Arabic as well as Spanish words, through translations resulting from colonial and mercantile expansion, from the 16th century onwards.
Words borrowed directly from Arabic began to appear in English at the end of the 16th century, when English travellers and merchants came in contact with Arabs and Arabic was studied in England. William Bedwell (1561/2-1632) was the father of Arabic studies; his student Edward Pococke (1604-1691) was the first to teach Arabic at Oxford. There is no foundation in fact for the prevalent notion that Arabic words entered the English language in the time of the Crusades -- no example of such interaction can be found anywhere; nor did Arabic words find their way into other European languages during the Crusades. Most early loan words were being used before that time, in bilingual Spain and Sicily, following the so- called Moorish conquest, which made Spain the home of Islamic civilisation for more than five centuries.
Spain spread the cultural and scientific benefits of contact with the Muslims to the rest of Europe through trade, universities and through literature. Many Arab scholars in Spain read and wrote Latin, which obviously helped. It is also worth mentioning that all Mozarabs (Spanish Christians living under Muslim rule) spoke fluent Arabic. Arabic affected Spanish at the most impressionable stage of the growth of the latter language, when it was developing its own identity over and above Latin. Consequently, of all the European languages, Spanish has the greatest number of Arabic words in its diction.
But this is a different topic altogether, and it calls for another article.
