Arabic Revision

I was learning some Arabic a couple weeks ago and the pronunciation of a few words struck me as a little funny. The word for two is “thalatha” and the word for sir is “usteth.” Both evoked images of a boy with a lisp. But there was something else to it. There was some distant connection that was on the tip of my heavy tongue as I said those words. There was something soothing, enjoyable and relaxing in saying ththththth.

It wasn’t until I saw the Wrester’s girlfriend last weekend that it hit me. She’s from Barcelona. Of fucking course – the lispy Castilian Spanish. I must have ordered a “thervetha” (cervesa) a thousand times when I lived in Barcelona. It wasn’t just the lisp either. The Spaniards add a staticy sounding “hhk” that is eerily similar the Arabic “ha” in words like “Mexico” that the Latin Americans do not. Could there be a connection? Moorish invasion, maybe? Nine centuries of Muslim and Christian covivencia? Some report that 17 percent of words in Spanish come from Arabic. Did pronunciation pass over as well? And if there is a connection, why did the Latin Americans evolve away from the Arabic sound?

I’m not the first to think that pronunciation of these words came from Arabic. The web is filled with theories, but, in the end, nothing is provable and nothing is definitive. Language is fluid and changing and no one knows why our accents change. It’s really anybody’s guess.

But the thought has made me reexamine my time in Spain. How much of what I saw, heard and tasted came from the Moors? Words like “azucar,” “guitar,” and “ole” all come from the Arabic. We know that a massive amount of food, fruit and spices came from them. Did music and dance come as well? Today, we don’t normally think of the Muslims as being party people, but their culture has been revised to be more conservative. The Moors of al-Andalus were very different. Or perhaps because the Moors weren’t so wild, the Christian Spaniards stayed up late to spite them. After all, pork is enormous in Spain. Was their diet revised just to prove they were extra Christian? What about literature and poetry? For instance, windmills came from the Moors. Did Cervantes, a man who was enslaved by Algerian pirates for years, consider this when Quixote fought them? Cervantes, with his tongue in cheek, claims that Don Quixote was found and not written by him, but instead translated from Arabic.

I’m not certain what connections are real and what I am imagining and I most certainly will never know. Did Usted come from Usteth? But I am looking forward to following in the footsteps on Cervantes and Spain into a world of Arabization and de-Arabization.