The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  The presentation of the peoples of the East as monstrous and malformed was politically convenient. Comfortingly, too, it reinforced Europeans’ sense of their own excellence and privilege. According to Bartholomaeus Anglicus, in his De Proprietatibus Rerum (dating from around 1250), the people of Albania were huge and fair-skinned, and were accompanied by giant hounds. In India there were white lions, together with gigantic worms and snails; the people were pale-skinned, with long, thin beards. Libya and Ethiopia for their part were home to small dark-skinned people, many of them misshapen.13 A person who might now be categorized as a Muslim was known as a Saracen, a name which seems to have derived from a Greek term for ‘easterner’ and may ultimately have originated either in the Arabic for this, sharqiyyin, or in another Arabic word for a ‘marauder’. It served, from the tenth century at least, as a derogatory catch-all for Muslims, nomads, pagans and aliens. It was a limiting word, insensitive to the diversity of these peoples; initially picked up from conservative Latin writings, and used to play up the differences between Christians and Muslims, it was believed, quite wrongly, to have been a name these peoples had given themselves, in reference to their alleged descent from Sarah, the wife of Abraham in the Old Testament. For most Europeans before the seventeenth century, there were scant opportunities to challenge such images, and few reasons to think it necessary to do so.14

  Perceptions of the East were always channelled through particular forms: travelogues, fables, polemics. In 1298 the Venetian Marco Polo, languishing in a Genoese jail, dictated to one of his fellow prisoners an account of his lengthy travels in the East, jewelled with the marvels and mysteries of India, China, Persia and Tibet. His extravagant tales, though damned by many as a tapestry of lies, inspired countless travellers to head east. The volume known as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which began to circulate around 1356, was a standard account of the East for several generations. It is the work (in French) of a man claiming to be an English knight; little is known of the author, but in eighteenth-century illustrations he is presented as a swaggering buccaneer with a parrot and a blunderbuss. He claimed to have travelled for thirty-four years, having originally set out simply to explore the Holy Land, although it is doubtful that he did anything of the sort. His book offered descriptions of India, China and Tibet, and contained appetizingly extravagant visions of the East, complete with cannibals, ‘very handsome’ pygmies, and men whose testicles dangled near their feet. The English version of his text contains the first references to Nubians and Numidians, as well as the first to a mosque (spelt Moseak) and to lemons. Rather appropriately, we can also find there the first use of the adjective aromatic. The veracity of Mandeville was often questioned – and was finally trashed by Victorian critics – but his claim that it was possible to circumnavigate the globe proved hugely seductive for readers of his work. The book enjoyed great popularity long after its publication: Christopher Columbus had a copy with him when he crossed the Atlantic in 1492, and Martin Frobisher read Mandeville while seeking the North-West Passage in the 1570s.

  Mandeville’s vision was at once sinister and alluring. It promoted the idea of a dangerous yet ambrosial Elsewhere. Those who lived at the world’s margins were dark and deformed, apparently descended from Noah’s son Ham, whose progeny had been cursed after he saw Noah naked. But at those very margins there were plants of mind-boggling deliciousness. In the Far East fish sacrificed themselves upon the shore, and the eager traveller would come upon snails so large that three or four men could huddle inside their shells. Little evidence was adduced in support of these claims. But little was needed to make the stories stick. In the first century AD the Greek Strabo had written in his Geographica that the natives of Ireland were cannibals, many of whom had a taste for incest and devouring their dead fathers, and despite admitting that he had not a single witness he succeeded in popularizing this unpalatable image. Gerald of Wales and the Benedictine monk Ranulph Higden, more than a millennium later, perpetuated the idea. Inevitably, there were even greater wonders further afield: harpies and serpents, and creatures capable of speaking all the world’s languages.15

  Where medieval authors of travel books and bestiaries offered extravagant images, those who had participated in the Crusades were well placed to point up their inaccuracies. But, while they could report what they had seen, their experiences were limited by language. The knights in Ivanhoe who speak Arabic are Sir Walter Scott’s fantasy. In reality, crusaders did not go native and learn the intricacies of Arabic – though there were a few exceptions, like Reynald of Sidon and Humphrey of Toron, who were able to converse with the Muslim resistance leader Saladin in his own tongue. For the most part the newcomers employed interpreters and go-betweens – a distinctive feature of the Near East, as so many different languages were spoken there. Turks, Armenians and Greeks could have as much difficulty with Arabic as did those from further west: the crusaders were not alone in needing help.

  By the fourteenth century we find the word dragoman, from the Arabic tarjuman, established as the preferred term for an interpreter or go-between employed in countries where Arabic, Persian or Turkish was spoken.16 Dragomen were often refugees who had fled Christian Europe and settled in Muslim countries; among them were Jews from Spain and Italy. The reliance on these interpreters meant that crusaders’ understanding of the East was perpetually mediated. Eventually, European countries doing business in the Near and Middle East became nervous of this heavy reliance on dragomen, and efforts were made to train what the French liked to call les jeunes de langue. Yet for many generations before these ‘language cadets’ became a useful fillip to diplomacy, the go-betweens served not just as translators, but also, unofficially, as ministers of foreign affairs.17

  The linguistic legacy of the Crusades is sometimes unexpected. For instance, the mechanism known as a capstan seems to have got its name as a result of crusaders’ contact with shipmen in Barcelona or Marseilles in the early fourteenth century, while house, the name of a covering used to protect the flanks of a horse, looks to have been a crusader corruption of the Arabic word for this, yushiah. Popinjay was modelled on an Arabic term crusaders heard: the Arabic name for a parrot, babbaga, was meant to imitate its jarring chatter. The noun hazard may derive from al-zahr, meaning ‘die’ (as in dice), but a more seductive story is that it comes from the name of a Palestinian castle, Hasart. The second of these explanations was furnished by William of Tyre, who claimed that it was during the siege of this castle that a game known as hazard was devised in order to while away the empty hours. The game is mentioned by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales; one of those to refer to it is the sleazy Pardoner, who brackets it with brothels as a corrupting influence on the young. We should hardly be surprised: many of the crusaders were more interested in corruption than in religion, and they were apt to talk about the spices and other otherworldly luxuries they had encountered on their travels. In doing so, they inspired fantasies of the opulent East.

  A few Arabic words entered French at that time, and from there spilt into English: bédouin is perhaps the most enduring example. Meanwhile, the large number of French crusaders established in Arab minds a special sense that Europeans were Franks – hence the Arabic term feringi, used of Europeans in general, and hence too the term lingua franca, to denote ‘an unofficial language of wider communication, which was first used in the Levant’.18 During this period miscreant (from the French mécréant and literally meaning a misbeliever) also comes into use, and we acquire via French the sibilant Arabic assassin.

  It is usually claimed, rather enticingly, that this word meant ‘a hashish-eater’, and the element of crazed dedication is present in the OED’s explanation that the word was used to refer to ‘certain Muslim fanatics in the time of the Crusades, who were sent forth by their sheikh … to murder the Christian leaders’. Other evidence suggests that the Hashshashin were a group of militant Nizari Muslims, active in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who preyed mainly on the Abbasid caliphs; thei
r most celebrated leader was the Iranian holy man Hassan i Sabbah. There is little proof that the Hashshashin habitually used stimulants to inspire their attacks: the myth stems mainly from the account of their activities by Marco Polo. Still, the Hashshashin were undeniably ruthless and murderous, and their exploits live on in the imagination. The word derived from their fearsome name took some time to be wholeheartedly adopted into English. It is found in Latin texts by English authors in the thirteenth century, but the OED’s earliest citation for its use in English dates from 1531. Assassination, for its part, seems to be Shakespeare’s coinage: it appears in one of Macbeth’s soliloquies, a five-syllabled novelty that signifies the overreacher’s fervid probing of his own conscience.

  Words such as hazard and assassin testify to the crusaders’ experience, yet, as I hinted a moment ago in noting the roots of crimson and cotton, the chief conduit of Arabic into English was peaceful, not blood-stained. For the crusaders were not the only travellers to encounter Muslims: there were also pilgrims and peripatetic clerics, diplomats and sociable nobles – cushioned by as many servants as they could afford, their purses as fat and their credentials as impressive as possible. Above all, there were traders, for whom risk was justified by financial opportunity.19 While short-haul trade could be carried out by the people who produced the goods that were for sale, long-haul trade called for entrepreneurial specialists. It involved migration, which was often though not always permanent. When the Greeks were restored to Constantinople in 1261, the Black Sea opened to Europeans, who established trading bases on the Crimean coast and at Trebizond. Other routes developed: to Cyprus, Beirut and Alexandria.

  Right across the Mediterranean, English traders were viewed with suspicion. Giovanni Frescobaldi, a Florentine writing in the early fourteenth century, offered representative advice to anyone who dared make the crossing to England: ‘Wear modest colours, be humble, be dull in appearance but in fact be subtle: if the Englishman [tries to] floor you, woe to him!’20 Trade tested the myth of English aggression. Business with the Levant created many more points of contact between English-speakers and the Arabic-speaking peoples of North Africa. By the middle of the twelfth century the traffic in Eastern luxuries was well developed; to the familiar appetite for pepper were added tastes for Tibetan rhubarb and Nepalese spikenard. 21 Henry III enjoyed the spicy taste of the dried berries of cubeb, which was probably imported from Java via Aden and gets its name from the Arabic kababah. By the early fourteenth century another Florentine, Balduccio Pegolotti, could compile a list of Oriental, Arab and African spices traded, comprising 288 different items.

  In this dynamic market, payments and bribes were often made by sakk, a form of money order which gives us the word cheque.22 Textiles and victuals and luxury goods were paid for in this way. Similarly, tariff comes from the Arabic for a definition or notification, and carat from a word for the weight of four grains (roughly a quarter of a gram, although now a carat is exactly a fifth of a gram). A later acquisition was average, which used to have a more specialized meaning than it does today. An average in the sixteenth century was a financial loss evenly shared by buyers and sellers when a cargo was mislaid. It can be traced back to the Arabic awariyah, ‘damaged goods’. Among the testaments to the complex cross-currents of trade are dictionaries such as the Rasulid Hexaglot – a fourteenth-century vocabulary of Arabic, Persian, Mongol, Turkic, Armenian and Greek – and, from the same period, the seven-language dictionary of Badr al-Din Ibrahim, which included Aramaic and Latin.

  The ethnographer Shelomo Goitein, who translated several dozen letters written by traders of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, explains, ‘In the Middle Ages, textiles were the number one item of commerce in both general and luxury goods. According to a Muslim legend, Abraham was a clothier … The pious and learned Muslims who mostly found their livelihood in the bazaars of the clothiers, simply could not imagine that Abraham, the father of faith, could have done anything other than trade in textiles.’23 The letters themselves speak of a kind of Iraqi taffeta called attabi (in English tabby), and refer to a stone frying pan as a tagine.24 They are full of talk about silks – the heavy material known as ibrisim, the light one called khazz – and other commonly traded goods: types of fragrant wood, pearls from the Arabian seas, rose marmalade from Syria, and Egyptian dyed purple wool. Here too are knuckles of Tunisian honey, flax and camphor, and chests crammed with corals, saffron, shelled almonds, and olive-oil soaps. Words learnt from Arabic by traders included amber, syrup, mohair and damask. Caraway comes from medieval Latin carui, but ultimately from alkarawiya ; dirtily musky civet can be traced to the Arabic zabad, itself possibly connected to the savoury zubd, meaning ‘froth’, or zubda, meaning ‘extract’ or ‘quintessence’; and fragrant jasmine, which comes to us through French, has its roots in the Arabic yasamin.

  The Arabic-speaking world was a trader’s delight. Its hub was the suq – in English commonly spelt souk – where transactions were carried out. Within its compass merchants from outside the Arab world learnt words to do with animals (giraffe, gazelle, the stork known as a marabou), plants, chemistry (borax) and clothing (sash). Arabic words for foodstuffs, alluringly simple, also gained currency. Naranj was the Sanskrit word for the citrus tree and its glowing fruit: in Arabic it kept this form, but in English ‘a naranj’ soon mutated into ‘an orange’. Other names of fruits and vegetables include lime (limah), endive (hindab), artichoke (al-kharshuf ), which was introduced to England in the reign of Henry VIII, and possibly spinach (which may ultimately have been derived from the Arabic isfanaj). English cork comes from the Spanish corcha, but can be traced to the Arabic qurq. The name of aromatic galingale, used by Chaucer’s ulcerous Cook and sprinkled in the land of Tennyson’s lotus-eaters, is believed to have travelled by way of Arabic from the Chinese. Arabic-Chinese contact is exemplified by the experience of Ibn Wahab, who visited China in 872 and was impressed to find that the emperor Yi Zong had a good knowledge of the basic tenets of Islam. Even at its most introverted, China would send out emissaries to gather intelligence about other societies and their learning, and the Arabic world was one obvious destination.

  While the eastern Mediterranean attracted commercial and religious adventurers, the main source of Arabic words was contact with bilingual Spain following the so-called Moorish conquest – and also, to a lesser degree, contact with Sicily (formerly under Muslim rule) and with polyglot traders from Venice and Genoa. Merchants picked up Arabic words or Spanish words tinged with Arabic, and spread them among their associates and customers. Muslim Spain was a vital connection between East and West: a stop-off for goods on their way to North Africa and Egypt, and the hub from which Eastern goods were redistributed to England, France and Italy. Iberian goods were also prized. Trade in Spanish textiles was fruitful under Muslim rule. Figs came from Granada, wool and soap from Castile, olive oil from Seville.

  There were intellectual and cultural contacts, too. For half a millennium Spain was a hive of Islamic culture. The Muslims arrived on the Iberian peninsula in 711, when an army of Arabs and Berbers under Tariq Ibn Ziyad invaded, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar and brushing aside the corrupt Visigoths. A second wave followed, commanded by Musa Ibn Nusair; they quickly took control of Toledo and Zaragoza. In the years that followed they attempted to extend their authority into France, but after defeat by the Franks at Tours in 732 – a moment often characterized as ‘saving’ northern Europe from Islam – they concentrated on their Spanish gains. At first Spain was merely an obscure outpost of the Umayyad caliphs, who were based in Damascus. But when the Abbasids supplanted the Umayyads, in 750, they began a campaign of persecution, and the teenage Umayyad prince ‘Abd al-Rahman fled to Andalucia. There he was able to establish what was in effect a new western caliphate, an Umayyad emirate politically independent of the new power base in Baghdad.

  The Arabic influence was profound. The conquerors married the conquered, disseminating their ideas and the vocabulary they used to ex
press them. Bilingualism was widespread, falling off only in the twelfth century. The golden age of Moorish culture in Spain lasted a little over a hundred years, from 929, when ‘Abd al-Rahman III pacified and united the conflicting factions of Andalucia, to 1031, when the Umayyad caliphate collapsed. This period was characterized by the growth of the region’s towns: as Spain was ‘Arabized’, there were significant advances in legal practice, the writing of history and poetry, decorative art, astronomy, mathematics and medicine, and these were concentrated in urban communities. One historian of Islamic Spain notes that, of the large number of Arabic words in modern Spanish, ‘Very many are connected with commerce, and with … travelling, weighing and measuring, and keeping order in the markets and in the town generally.’ A well-known example is aduana, meaning a customs house, which stems from the Arabic diwan. ‘Another sphere with many words is house-building; the words are mostly for parts of the house or its furnishings which indicate a degree of comfort beyond the bare necessities.’25 One example that springs to mind is alcoba, which can be traced back to the Arabic al-qubba, meaning ‘the vaulted room’, and is the source of the English alcove. Place names also testify to the Arab influence. Besides Gibraltar – from Jabal Tariq, ‘the mountain of Tariq’ – examples include Trafalgar, from al-taraf al-agharr (‘the handsome cape’), and Guadalquivir, from the Arabic for ‘the great river’.

  In all, modern Spanish contains about 4,000 Arabic loanwords, such as gandul meaning ‘lazy’ and baladi meaning ‘insignificant’.26 One of the more conspicuous examples is the formal second-person pronoun, usted, which derives from ustadh, a courteous term of address in Arabic. In The Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith mentions the alcavala, a Spanish property tax which takes its name from the Arabic al-qabalah, meaning a duty, levy or liability. Those words learnt by English-speakers were often associated with Spain, but the culture in which they originated was an Arab one. Arsenal entered English from Italian, but stems from an Arabic word for a workshop; the paths taken by sirocco and talisman are similar, while calibre, acquired from French, can be traced to the Arabic qalib, a mould used for casting metal.