The Arabic Contributions to the English Language: An Historical Dictionary

This work was modelled on Pfeffer and Cannon's German loanwords in English: An historical dictionary (1994). It is comprehensive in that it gives as many details as necessary for any scholar or general reader to consult. Pfeffer and Cannon's historical dictionary underwent several stages of experimentation before it reached a method and approach ideal for future models of etymological investigation. The contribution of the Arabs and Islam to world culture is well known in areas such as chemistry and astronomy and during the Crusade period of the twelfth century. Arabic loanwords in English are many and diverse; some entered the language directly but others came via other languages which were in turn influenced by Arabic during the Islamic expansion between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. Cannon, in collaboration with Alan S. Kaye, investigates loanwords in three separate stages: a) the date they first appeared in English writing; b) the reliability of their occurrence and acceptability by the English-speaking society; and c) the productivity of the lexemes in question. Several attempts to study Arabic loanwords in Spanish and Portuguese, Italian, Hausa and Swahili, and Ethiopian languages have laid the platform for Cannon's contribution; English itself contains a large inventory of loanwords from many languages and this dictionary is a further attempt to show how languages in contact interrelate. The data presented in this dictionary have been collected entirely from lexica and Sax Rohmer's novels (pp. 8-9). All the entries are written rather than oral forms, and in some way one may argue that the dictionary falls short of representing true specimens of English. One would wonder why Rohmer's novels were chosen as the provider of examples of Arabic loanwords. His novels seem to have been read widely around the world and the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish borrowings gave an oriental mystique to those who read and assimilated his language; hence, the loanwords made their way into the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster's Dictionary. Cannon's dictionary employs the Roman alphabet instead of Arabic. Not all words bear the phonemic transliteration in the etymology. The English entry-spelling was maintained when it was considered that such words incorporated all the Arabic sounds: