The influence of Arabic

 
 While  Spanish sentences and grammar resemble Latin more than any other
living tongue, thousands of words have their origins in the language of the Muslims
whose stay in some parts of the peninsula lasted eight centuries.  And many of
these “Spanish” words later found their way into other European languages.
Phonetically, too, Spanish may be the most similar language to Latin, but some
sounds, like the guttural j, or jota, come straight from Arabic.  Most household words
beginning with al- (or with a-, since the article was often slurred and left without its
letter l) are Spanish versions of Arabic words.
Examples which can be easily appreciated without much knowledge of Spanish
are sugar, azúcar, originally assukar; and cotton, in Spanish algodón, from al-qutun. 
Olive in Spanish is aceituna, and olive oil aceite, from the Arabic for olive, al-zeitun,
while olive tree is from Latin, olivo. 
Many place names are composed of Arabic words.  Alhambra is said to mean “the
red palace” while others believe it means “the palace of Alhamar”, the sultan who
founded it.  Almería means “the mirror of the sea”, while Algeciras is a shortened
version of the full name al-jazeera khadraa, literally “the green island”.  When the
first Moors entered Spain through Gibraltar, they were so impressed by the relative
fertility of the place, after the aridity of Morocco, that they likened it to an isle of
verdure.
When the Spaniards shout olé at the bullfighter or the flamenco dancer, they echo
the Muslim invocation of God, Allah!  Some still say ala as a conversational
interjection, as we would say “really” or “is that so”.
The cold soup, gazpacho, which was originally made of bits and pieces of stale
bread and vegetable scraps crushed in cool water, oil and vinegar, has its name
from an Arabic word meaning “almsbox”, because everything from coins to chunks
of bread and cheese were deposited in to feed the poor.  The Spanish word
mezquino, and the French word mesquin, both of which mean “petty”, come from the
Arabic word mskeen meaning “wretched”.
The English word magazine, and the French word magasin come from the
Spanish almacén and the Arabic al-makhzan, for “storehouse”. Our sofa, and the
Spanish sofá, come from suffa, Turkish and Arabic for rug or divan.
In Spanish, duck is pato, from the Arabic bata. The English and French “alcove”
comes from the Spanish alcoba, meaning bedroom, which has its origin in the Arabic
al-kubba, the central room in a Moorish house. Since this room is usually covered by
a domed ceiling, kubba is also used to signify “dome”. 
The Spanish word for corner, rincón, comes from the Arabic rukán, while the word
for quarter or neighbourhood, barrio, originates in the Arabic barri, outside, since
quarters were external to the castle or citadel).  Which means that when a Spaniard
talks about a corner of his neighbourhood – un rincón de mi barrio – he is basically
speaking Arabic!
 The French, and English massage comes from the Arabic massa, “to stroke”, and
coffee is said to be named, through Arabic, for the place in Ethiopia which first grew
it, Kaffa.   In Spanish, an orange is a naranja, which comes from the Arabic naranj,
meaning bitter orange, while the Arabic word for a sweet orange is portukal, from the
Greek portokalls.
Not all the words peculiar to Spanish culture have Arabic roots, though. Siesta
comes from the Latin for sixth hour of the day, sexta, which would have been several
hours earlier than the Andalucian after-lunch nap.
The formal second person pronoun, usted, has an even more curious origin.  It
was originally Vuestra Merced, “Your Mercy”, similar to “Your Grace”.  In writing, this
was abbreviated to Vd. (a form still used) but because it was impossible to utter a
word composed of two consonants, those who refused to say it aloud in its full form
devised the oddity usted, which later took its place. 
And paella is really the word for the flat pan and not the rice cooked in it, in
Catalonian, patella, which Castilians adopted without the t and vocalizing the double
l.
Likewise, the suffix –ez at the end of Spanish names has older-than-Arabic roots. 
For the Visigoths, Sanchez was the son of Sancho, Rodriguez the son of Rodrigo,
Vasquez the son of Vasco.
More than a source culture, the Arabs acted as a bridgehead between Asia and
Europe, carrying with their caravans, from as far away as Indonesia, plants,
inventions and words.  The numbers we use and call Arabic because the Arabs
imported them – although no longer use them themselves - are in fact Indian.  The
eggplant comes from the Persian batinjan, which the Arabs transformed to
badinjanah and passed into Spanish as berenjena, and into French, with the article
still in place but transformed from al- to au-, as aubergine.
The Arabs took many words from Latin and Greek before surreptitiously returning
them to Europe, via Spain, in an exotic form. Tuna fish in Spanish is atún, from al-
tun in Arabic, which in turn comes from the Latin thunnus.  As in azúcar, only the a
of the article survived the hispanizing process.  But the Spanish word for “admiral”,
almirante, comes from the Arabic emir, leader, and it was hispanized with the article
intact.
When the Arabs invaded Spain, they found a highly organized Roman colony with
cities whose Latin names they pronounced in their manner, and which, many
centuries later, returned to the Spanish language in the Arabic form.
The most striking example is that of the military camp of Caesar Augusta, which
was arabized as Sarakusta and, long after the Latin original had been forgotten,
hispanized as Zaragoza.
Another is Mérida, on the western border. The Emperor Augustus founded a new
colony near Portugal where land was given out to his most deserving veterans –
meritii.  It was called Augusta Emerita, or simply Emerita, which after the Arabs
invaded Spain was pronounced Mérida.
The port of Seville was called by its Roman founders Hispalis, said to mean
“palisade” for the stilts which kept its houses above water when the river flooded. 
Under the Arabs this Latin name was pronounced Ishbiliya, before taking its
definitive form of Sevilla, pronounced in Spanish se-BEE-ya.. 
The word almuerzo, lunch, comes from a word used in Islamic Spain composed of
the Arabic article al and the Latin for “bite”, morsus (as in morsel, a bite, and
mordant, biting).  So when a Spaniard invites you to a four-course midday meal with
tapas, he is in fact offering you a bite to eat!
The river which passes through Seville is purely Arabic in name, wadi-al-kbeer,
“the great river” (wadi=river, kbeer=great) hispanized as Guadalquivir.  But the name
of the city’s ancient poor quarter on the far side of the river, Triana, is the arabization
of the name of the great Roman emperor Trajan, himself born in Seville.
Barcelona’s main thoroughfare, La Rambla, which plunges down through the city
to the harbour, and Granada’s square, Plaza Bibarrambla, have the same Arabic
origin in the word rambla which in Arabic means strand or riverside.  The avenue
was once a stream, and the plaza once had a gate - “bib” or “bab” – which faced
Granada’s river. Its name would be in English “Strand Gate Square”.
Granada’s old casbah, El Albaicín, was once thought to have a purely Arabic
name, but it is now believed that its origins are Roman, and Latin.  In the
Reconquest, when the Christian knights took the Muslim city of Baeza, the
inhabitants fled south to Granada and settled on the hill, in a place which became
known as al-Bayazin - "the place of the people of Baeza". But the name Baeza was
only the arabization of the earlier, Roman Beatia.
In our times, Andalucia is the region which stretches across southern Spain, but
the Moors called al-Andalus the entire peninsula including Portugal, even before
they invaded it. As the Roman empire collapsed, barbarian tribes swept through the
old colony of Hispania, one of which, the Vandals, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar
and reached Carthage. They were so ferocious that the terrified North Africans
called the land from whence they had come “land of the vandals”.  But instead of
saying “al-Vandalus”, they dropped the v.  The Spaniards later hispanized the name
al-Andalus to Andalucía, by which they meant the southern part of Spain which was
still in Moorish hands in the 12th century.
The name of Granada does not mean pomegranate, even though it is
homonymous with the Spanish word for that oriental fruit.  It is thought to come from
an ancient, but unknown word for fortress, which the Romans Latinized as
Garnatum.  The Arabs pronounced it Garnata and it entered Castilian as Granada.
And the name of Córdoba is neither Latin nor Arabic in origin, but Phoenician. 
The Carthaginians founded the port on the highest navigable reach of the
Guadalquivir and named it for one of their generals, Doubs.  The prefix for “city” in
their Phoenician tongue was Kart-, as in the name Carthage itself – “new city”. The
Spanish port became Kart-Doubs, which after being Latinized and then Arabized
came down to us as Córdoba, with the accent still on the first syllable – the part of
the name that meant “city”.
Algebra is Arabic for “the reduction” and came into European languages as part of
the title of an Arab mathematical treatise.  Alcohol comes from the Arabic al-kuhul,
although the Arabs did not invent the still, as is often said.   Avería, which in Spanish
means “breakdown” or “defect”, with relation to machines, comes from the Arabic
awarriyah, “defective merchandise”, the root of which, áwar, when applied to
humans, means “one-eyed”.  Baño, Spanish for bath, comes originally from the Latin
balneum, but after transiting through Arabic as banyo, pronounced in exactly the
same way but with a slightly more specific meaning, “bathtub”.
A pig, in colloquial Spanish, as opposed to the Latin-derived puerco, is called a
marrano, which is also an adjective for dirty “piggish” person.  Marrano is an Arabic-
origin word coming from haram, best known to us in its English form “harem”. A
harem, in Arabic haram, with the accent on the second syllable, is a place forbidden
to intruders, which suggests that it is much less permissive than is often assumed. It
is the direct opposite of halal, which means sacred, pure. Indeed, anything that is
wrong, unjust or unlawful can be described as haram. 
The Jews of medieval Spain commonly spoke Arabic, and they used a form of this
word to label those brethren who to escape persecution converted to Christianity,
contemptuously calling them marranos.  This new word came to mean, in Spanish,
anything foul or disgusting, and so made its way to the common pig.
When Spaniards bid one another farewell and say “Hasta mañana” they are, quite
unconsciously as with most of these words, using the Arabic hattá which still means
what it did in the Middle Ages when it entered Spanish – “until”.  Even so, hattá was
not an Arabic original, but a compression of the Latin words ad ista – “to this”, which,
according to the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, expressed the same idea
of “up to”.
Deepti

1. papagayo
2. paraíso
3. Pomperos,
4. pardido,
5. pokadio,
6. poonto,
7. playa.
8. quilma

Nikita

9. quina
10. quintal: weight unit of about 46 kg.
11. quermes
12. quilate/quirate
13. quiosco
14. Rrabal
15. rafal
16. rafe
17. ragua

Neha

18. rahez
19. ramadán
20. real: Military encampment; plot where a fair is organized; (in Murcia
region) small plot or garden. From Arabic rahl: camping.
21. rebite
22. recamar
23. redoma
24. rehala
25. rehalí
26. rejalgar: realgar. From Andalusi Arabic reheg al-ghar: "powder of the
cave"
Nancy

27. requive
28. resma
29. retama
30. rincón: Corner. From Andalusi Arabic rukan, derived from classicar Arabic
Rukn.
31. robda
32. robo (or arroba)
33. roda
34. romí/rumí
35. ronzal

KAVITA

36. rabazuz
37. rabel
38. rábida
39. rabadán
40. rambla
41. rauda
42. rauta
43. rebato
44. recua
45. rapido
46. ronda

Siddharth

47. roque
48. rasmia
49. rubia

50 zaharrón
51. zahén
52. zahón
53. zahora
54. Zahorí
 Ashish

55. zaida
56. zaino
57. zala
58. zalamelé
59. zalea/zalear
60. zalema/zalama
61.zalmedina: Same meaning and origin aszabalmedina.
62. zalona

Pratulay

63. zamacuco
64.zambra: Traditional festivity of the Moriscos in Spain which is maintained by the Gypsy
community of
Sacromonte, Granada. From Andalusi ArabicZamra, originally from classical ArabicZamr.
65.zanahoria: carrot, presumably from Andalusi Arabic. The only Arabic dialect with a
cognate form is Tunisian
withsfinaria.
66.zaque: Leather recipient for wine or extracting water from a well. Drunken person. From
Andalusi Arabic zaqq.
67. zagüía
68. zoco
69. zafío
70. zoquete

Zuber
71. zurrapa
sajelar
72. salema
73.sandía: Watermelon. From ArabicSindiya "from Sindh (province in India)".
74.sarasa: Homosexual or effeminate man. From "Zaraza".
75. sarraceno
76. sebestén
77. secácul
78. Serafín
Medha

79. siroco
80. sofí
81. sófora
82. soldán
83. soltaní
84. sufí
85. sura
86. tabal (or atabal)

Saurabh

87. tabaque
88. tabefe
89. tabica
90. tabique
91. taca
92. tafurea
93. tagarino/tagarina
94. Tagarnina

Rahul

95. taha
96. tahalí
97. tahona
98. tahúr
99. tajea
100. Talco
101. Talega