A little while back I talked about history of the Spanish language and some of the events and cultures that influenced it; briefly I touched on the Arabic influence, now I would like to elaborate on that further and look at some of the many words and histories of these words, as the Arabic language has had such a large impact on the Spanish spoken today.

Arabic is a language that comes from the group of Central Semitic languages, including others such as Aramaic and Hebrew; these Semitic languages belong to Afroasiatic, which includes 300 languages spoken by more than 300 million people. Arabic is most widely spoken of these, being used in the Middle East and parts of North Africa.

To reiterate my previous post, “In the year 711, Islamic Moors invaded the region and brought with them the Arabic culture and language…” until in 1492 “…The Castilians began to reconquer the peninsula, driving out the Islamic and Arab presence.”

Once the Arabic forces were expelled, the resulting linguistic influences were for the most part only lexical, that is to say, that Spanish adopted many Arabic words, but the grammatical structure remained intact. The Arabic language is believed to have had the second largest influence on Spanish after Latin, there are four thousand Arabic or Arabic derived words in the Spanish dictionary, constituting 8% of it; most of these are nouns, with some verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and one preposition in “hasta,” meaning until. 

Let’s look at some words now: Starting with “asesino,” Spanish for assassin, this word comes from the crusades and the Arabic word “hashasheen,” which means ‘smokers of hash.’ It comes from a legend about a group of warriors who lived in the mountains, they attacked prominent leaders that threatened their movement, and then made no attempt to escape, sacrificing themselves. The word has two conflicting sources, one states that the warriors smoked the herb to reduce fear and heighten their courage; the second states that they were heavy smokers and pampered with all manner of drugs and pleasures in their mountain lair.

Somewhat related to assassins are hostages, and in Spanish a hostage is “rehén,” owing to the Arabic “raheen,” which means to deposit as security.

The Spanish “Ojala” means hopefully, the Arabic origin of it is “wa sha allah,” that is to say should god will it. Interestingly, another common Spanish phrases to mean hohpefully is “si dios quiere,” meaning if god wants. 

For all you designers out there, maybe you know of “Adobe” as the amazing all purpose software; the name comes from as far back 2000 BC, Middle Egyptian “dj-b-t,” meaning mud brick to refer to those old mud house structures. Arabic took the word as “al-tub,” and then the Spanish got hold of it as “adobe.”

There are thousands more, for you to look up and ponder over. What other interesting words do you know of Arabic origin?