316
The Arabic Language
find Romance in the refrains (
jarchas
;
Arabic
ḫarja
) in the same way that poets of
this genre in the east used the vernacular to close their poems. In the following
instance of such a
jarcha
, colloquial Arabic and Romance are mixed for stylistic
reasons (Zwartjes 1997: 264):
álba díya esta díya / díya d-al-ʾanṣara ḥáqqa
bestiréy mew al-mudabbáj / wa-nišúqq ar-rumḥa šáqqa
‘A white day is this day / the day of Saint John, indeed
I shall put on my brocade dress / and break the lance’
In this poem the words
álba
‘white’ and
díya
‘day’ are Romance, and so is the
verbal form
bestiréy
‘I shall put on’ and the pronoun
mew
‘my’; the rest of the
poem is Arabic.
The local dialect of the petty kingdom of Granada, which survived until the
end of the
Reconquista
in 1492, contained a
large number of Romance loans, as we
know from the description of Pedro de Alcalá, who lists in his vocabulary of 1505
words like
xintilla
‘spark’ (Spanish
centella
),
banq
, plural
bunúq
‘couch’ (Spanish
banco
),
cornéja
‘crow’ (Spanish
corneja
), with Arabic plural
carániç
and diminutive
coráyneja
.
The Arabs called the Romance vernacular
lisān al-ʿAjam
or
ʿAjamiyya
‘language
of the foreigners, non-Arabs’ and the assimilated bilingual speakers
mustaʿribīn
‘those who have become like Arabs’ (hence their name in Spanish,
Mozárabes
).
When these people wrote down their own Romance language, they used the Arabic
script; the literature in which their dialect has been preserved is often called
aljamiado
(<
al-ʿajamiyya
). There is another corpus of texts in Romance in Arabic
script, the literature of the
Moriscos
, the Muslims
who stayed behind after the
Reconquista
and compulsorily converted to Christianity in 1525 until their expul
-
sion from the peninsula (1609). Their use of the Arabic script does not mean that
they knew Arabic: almost certainly some of them were monolingual in Romance.
The centuries of Arabic linguistic domination did not fail to affect the Romance
language. The total number of Arabic loanwords in Spanish has been estimated at
around 4,000; they cover almost the entire lexicon, but are particularly numerous
in the domains of warfare (
alcázar
‘fortress’ < Arabic
qaṣr
,
almirante
‘admiral’ <
Arabic
ʾamīr
), agriculture (
albaricoque
‘apricot’ < Arabic
barqūqa
, itself from Greek
praikokkia
< Latin
praecoquum
), commerce (
aduana
‘customs’ < Arabic
dīwān
,
almacén
‘warehouse’ < Arabic
maḫzan
) and building (
albañil
‘mason’ < Arabic
bannāʾ
). The
majority of the loans are nouns, most of them borrowed
together with the Arabic
article
al-
, but there are some adjectives of Arabic origin (e.g.,
mezquino
< Arabic
miskīn
‘poor’,
gandul
‘lazy’ < Arabic
ġandūr
‘dandy’,
azul
‘blue’ < Arabic
lāzuward
‘lapis lazuli’). There are even a few verbs that were borrowed from Arabic, such as
halagar
‘to caress’ (< Arabic
ḥalaqa
‘to shave’). The two Spanish words for ‘so-and-
so’
are of Arabic origin,
fulano
(< Arabic
fulān
) and
mengano
(< Arabic
man kāna
‘who
was it?’), and the Spanish interjection
ojalá
‘may God will’ derives from the Arabic
Arabic as a World Language
317
wašallāh
. There is one example of a suffix,
-í
, that became moderately productive
in Spanish; it occurs in the loanword
baladí
‘insignificant’ (< Arabic
baladī
‘rural’),
but is also used in Spanish words such as
alfonsí
‘belonging to king Alfonso’. There
is, however, little evidence of syntactic influence of Arabic in Spanish. Perhaps the
conjunction
hasta
‘even, until’ was taken from Arabic
ḥattā
. Semantically, Arabic
influence may be seen in the large number of Spanish expressions containing
God’s name.
From Spain, large numbers of Arabic words were transmitted to other countries
in Western Europe. We have seen above (Chapter 1, pp. 1f.) that during the Middle
Ages Arabic was regarded as the language of scholarship not only in al-ʾAndalus,
but also in the universities of Western Europe.
After the fall of Toledo, many
Arabic texts on mathematics, medicine, alchemy and astronomy were translated
into Latin, and in the process a host of Arabic technical terms were borrowed in
their original form. In mathematics, for instance, most European languages took
over the word
algorithm
, derived from the name of al-Ḫwārizmī (d.
c
. 232/850),
whose book
al-Jabr wa-l-muqābala
(
Restoration and Comparison
)
lived on in the term
algebra
. In astronomy, terms such as
almanac
(<
al-manāḫ
‘station of the Zodiac’),
azimuth
(<
as-samt
‘course, direction’),
zenith
(<
samt ar-raʾs
‘vertical point in the
sky’),
nadir
(<
naḏ̣īr
‘opposite’), and the names of many stars, such as
Betelgeuse
(<
bayt al-Jawzāʾ
‘Gemini’) and
Aldebaran
(<
ad-Dabarān
‘the Follower’), derive from
Arabic. In medicine, many of the Latin terms that are still current are calques of
Arabic terms that ultimately go back to Greek sources; thus, for instance,
retina
and
cornea
are translations
of the Arabic words
šabakiyya
and
qarniyya
, rather than
direct translations of the Greek terms
amphiblēstroeidēs
and
keratoeidēs
.
Spain, however, was not the only source of Arabic loans in the European
languages. There were other routes through which they could reach Europe,
primarily through Italy, either via Arab Sicily, or via Venetian and Genoan traders.
In some cases, the phonetic form of the word betrays its Spanish or Italian
provenance. The Italianised loans were usually taken over without the article,
whereas Arabic loans in Spanish were often borrowed together with the Arabic
article. Compare, for instance, the pairs Italian
carciofo
(North Italian
articiocco
)/
Spanish
alcachofa
‘artichoke’ (< Arabic
ḫaršūf
);
cotone
/
algodón
‘cotton’ (< Arabic
quṭn
);
zucchero
/
azúcar
‘sugar’ (< Arabic
sukkar
). In these three examples, the other
European languages took the word from Italian.
Dostları ilə paylaş: