
Learning Arabic from Egypt's Revolution - wallflower
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/learning-arabic-from-egypts-revolution
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Jun8
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)

~~~
vowelless
Arabic has had a tremendous influence on Spanish
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language_influence_on...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language_influence_on_the_Spanish_language))
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.

~~~
supermatou
> California is derived from Khalif, a Muslim Ruler (same > word that Daesh
> uses to refer to their leader today).

Not really. That was the invention of Edward Everett Hale (a theologian with
no linguistic training, who died 100 years ago).

See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_California](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_California)

~~~
csomar
Did you actually check the link you posted. Because he is quoting from there.

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lappet
I can share some of the pain Egyptian Arabic speakers seem to have. My mother
tongue is Tamil but owing to constant moves I was never able to read/write the
language decently, though I can/could speak it. The main reason being that
written tamil is very different from spoken tamil. Only after growing up did I
realize that this is known as diglossia.

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aorth
Fantastic article (though not sure it belongs on Hacker News)! Makes me want
to subscribe to The New Yorker. And wow, just look at the amazing descender on
"Sayyid Qutb".

