All these Arabic words...

The old chap was quietly enjoying the evening on his terrace. After the heat of the afternoon, the air was cooling, and his enjoyed his pull-over over his cotton shirt, while the sun was disappearing over the horizon into an amber magnificence, the zenith was already dark crimson. It was time to have dinner !
Yesterday, he's gone fishing with a friend of him, and he had received his part in several pounds of tuna, which was too much for him. He has distributed it to his neighbours, and kept some for his salad, tonight. Mixed with rice, spread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper and cumin, it was fresh and delicious. He thought also cooking in with saffron and cabbage, a recipe he enjoyed a lot, but that would have been too long. A bottle of soda and a fruit salad with apple, apricot, pear and banana completed his dinner, before the ritual of the heavy sugared cup of coffee in the night.
He did not drink any alcohol anymore. It was his enemy, drinking too much broke his career, when he was a young marine dreaming of becoming a big boss, a pasha ruling a huge crusader. But he could not stand wine nor beer, and was expelled. Termination of a dream starting as a young boy, reading in old almanacs the adventures of admiral Nelson, Jonathan Livingstone and others… He tried to work in an office, but was not good enough at writing, others could not easy decipher his work, and after some other unsuccessful attempts, he fall on the wrong side and joined the local organization. The times of the prohibition were far away, Al Capone was long gone out of Alcatraz, diminished and fool, but crime in Chicago was still paying well. Instead of ruling the seas, he specialised in racket and drugs and showed more than genius in the area of gambling and games. Hazard or treachery ? He was caught by the police, and, because was just a robber and no assassin, benefited of a relatively mild sentence, of ten years only.
But he was already feeling an old man when he was freed. Time was over for such activities, and he enjoyed nothing more than his small retreat.

cotton is one of the many words of trade, introduced in Europe through the long caravans that were going so far away as China, and brought back precious goods like amber (or more precisely, ambergris, which comes from animal, and is totally different from the fossil amber), dyes like crimson, food like tuna, apricot, rice or coffee and sugar.

Balm, and hence balsam and balsamic come from the arabic "balma", when the spice saffron takes its name from the word meaning "yellow" in Arabic (no wonder why!). It gave its name to Saffron walden city, where a large production centre existed formerly.

Alcohol simply means essence, and is he same word as the khôl or kohl used in the eyes make-up.

Pasha is a high dignitary, when the admiral is the ruler of the Seas.

An almanac was a book listing days and times, used for astrology, as was called astronomy in these times. Many words of astronomy come from Arabic, like the zenith, a direction in the sky. Another science where Arabs gave us a lot of words is mathematics, with the "sifr" giving the zero and the action of cipher.

Fatalists as they are (Mektoub, it's written), Arabs also gave us the hazard, from yasara, play dices.

Racket come from raha.. the palm of the hand, where you lay the requested money !

Alcatraz is a word directly taken from Spanish, which means fortress, indeed.

And assassin comes from the name of the Sect of the Hashishin, who were well known to drug themselves with hash before going to fight and kill theur ennemies !

Marie-Aude, Pierre-Olivier and Herbert

We all speak arabic

The old chap was quietly enjoying the evening on his terrace. After the heat of the afternoon, the air was cooling, and his enjoyed his pull-over over his cotton shirt, while the sun was disappearing over the horizon into an amber magnificence, the zenith was already dark crimson. It was time to have dinner !
Yesterday, he's gone fishing with a friend of him, and he had received his part in several pounds of tuna, which was too much for him. He has distributed it to his neighbours, and kept some for his salad, tonight. Mixed with rice, spread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper and cumin, it was fresh and delicious. He thought also cooking in with saffron and cabbage, a recipe he enjoyed a lot, but that would have been too long. A bottle of soda and a fruit salad with apple, apricot, pear and banana completed his dinner, before the ritual of the heavy sugared cup of coffee in the night.
He did not drink any alcohol anymore. It was his enemy, drinking too much broke his career, when he was a young marine dreaming of becoming a big boss, a pasha ruling a huge crusader. But he could not stand wine nor beer, and was expelled. Termination of a dream starting as a young boy, reading in old almanacs the adventures of admiral Nelson, Jonathan Livingstone and others… He tried to work in an office, but was not good enough at writing, others could not easy decipher his work, and after some other unsuccessful attempts, he fall on the wrong side and joined the local organization. The times of the prohibition were far away, Al Capone was long gone out of Alcatraz, diminished and fool, but crime in Chicago was still paying well. Instead of ruling the seas, he specialised in racket and drugs and showed more than genius in the area of gambling and games. Hazard or treachery ? He was caught by the police, and, because was just a robber and no assassin, benefited of a relatively mild sentence, of ten years only.
But he was already feeling an old man when he was freed. Time was over for such activities, and he enjoyed nothing more than his small retreat.

Can you guess how many words in this list come from Arabic ?
Arab words enter our European languages in several waves, sometimes, strangely, we found anew some old Greek or Latin words through Arabic, when antic manuscripts were translated and saved by Arabs, in the Middle-Age, in Andalusia and Middle-East, giving us again access to texts we lost. Arabic gave us also many words coming from Persian, and even farer away countries.
After Middle-Age, where religious disputes and exchanges between doctors exposed us as much to the language as the Crusades, the second wave came with the colonisation.
It is also very interesting to see when did some words arrived in some languages, French, English, Spanish or German. Etymologies, translations, modifications of meaning are somehow different and say a lot about the history of our exchanges.

Spanish (and Portuguese) are the European language with the highest number of Arabic words. Apart from the place names, and derivation, Spanish counts around 850 words of Arabic origin, for 420 in French, (Source : Henriette Walter, "L'aventure des langues d'Occident"), English corpus being different but comparable, and German one being sensibly smaller.
Some of these words directly came from Arabic in each of the languages, others had more complex an history.

We are three people, Pierre-Olivier, a French specialist of Spanish, and Herbert Braun, a German linguist, and we'll post regularly some words and stories.

Next week, solution for the text of today, and we'll speak about a fascinating word, Divan.

And if you're interested, you can also ahve a look at the french text... it is somehow different. But it would help you to spot the words, so don't cheat !