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Fascinating article! Consider this tidbit: "One morning in class, Rifaat taught the word for “mud brick.” In ancient hieroglyphs it was djebet, which became to
by Jun8 10y ago
Fascinating article! Consider this tidbit:
"One morning in class, Rifaat taught the word for “mud brick.” In ancient hieroglyphs it was djebet, which became tobe in Coptic, and then the Arabs, adding a definite article, made it al-tuba, which was brought to Spain as adobar, and then to the American Southwest, where this heavy thing, having been lugged across four millennia and seven thousand miles, finally landed as “adobe.”"
This sort of historical word flow was what piqued my interest and led me to study in linguistics. Unfortunately Ancient Egyptian has very few words that made it into other languages, which is strange considering their longevity. Familiar terms about them mostly come mostly from Ancient Greek (e.g. pyramid was mr https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mr https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mr) and some from Arabic (e.g. mummy).
Another such borrowing is the Arabic word for oasis, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oasis#Etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oasis#Etymology
- adrianratnapala 10y agoSome of the Greek words we have might have Egyptian origins. It would not surprise if modern Greek had many such words, picked up in Hellenistic and Byzantine times. Other European languages less so as their Greek borrowings tend to be from classical vocab, but even classical Greek probably had Egyptian words picked up through trade.
- jacobush 10y agoCould it be possible to identify these words by cross correlation with IE words?
- vowelless 10y agoArabic has had a tremendous influence on Spanish (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language_influence_on_the_Spanish_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language_influence_on...) which shows up occasionally in English. My personal favorite is that California is derived from Khalif, a Muslim Ruler (same word that Daesh uses to refer to their leader today). In 1917, Ruth Putnam printed an exhaustive account of the work performed up to that time. She wrote that both Calafia and California most likely came from the Arabic word khalifa which means steward[6] or leader. The same word in Spanish was califa, easily made into California to stand for "land of the caliph" خلیف, or Calafia to stand for "female caliph" خلیفه .[7] Maltese is another language that has a surprising amount of Arabic influence. The way they say their numbers is almost exactly the same as Arabic.
- subliminalpanda 10y agoChess in another example. If memory serves, "Checkmate" was derived from the Arabic "Sheikh maat" (the Sheikh has died).
- amyjess 10y agoShah maat, actually, and it came from Farsi/Persian, not Arabic. Shah is Farsi for king. Edit: The word chess itself also derives from shah. According to Wiktionary [0], it comes from Old French eschés, the plural of eschec, which comes from Vulgar Latin (scaccus* being the unattested reconstruction), which comes from Arabic shah, which finally comes from Farsi shah. [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chess https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chess
- subliminalpanda 10y agoI see thanks for the clarification.
- khedoros1 10y agoThat makes it clearer where the German "Schach" probably came from. I wondered about it when I learned that word.
- abrowne 10y ago> Maltese is another language that has a surprising amount of Arabic influence. The way they say their numbers is almost exactly the same as Arabic. Not too surprising because Maltese is descendant from Arabic and would probably be considered an Arabic dialect except for cultural factors like religion and alphabet.
- b_emery 10y ago"According to another theory, the term could derive from the Old Spanish Calit Fornay, an alteration of the Latin Calida Fornax, meaning hot furnace" This is the one I've always heard, the Khalif origin is new to me - and very interesting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_California#Alteration_of_Calida_Fornax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_California#Altera...
- amyjess 10y agoI was surprised a while back to find that the well-known names for all the Egyptian gods are actually Hellenizations of the original names.