Learning Arabic from Egypt's Revolution
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
"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) and some from Arabic (e.g. mummy).
Another such borrowing is the Arabic word for oasis, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oasis#Etymology
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_California#Altera...
Maltese is a lot like English in that it has so many substrata that you have to look at it very closely to see where it came from.
Maltese is actually a direct descendant of Arabic, but it has been so heavily influenced by multiple Indo-European languages that 2/3 of its vocabulary has been replaced by words from Italian, Sicilian, English, and possibly others.
Compare this with how English is a West Germanic language but it has multiple substrata from Old Norse, French, and Latin influences.
Not really. That was the invention of Edward Everett Hale (a theologian with no linguistic training, who died 100 years ago).