Dictionary of Arabic and Allied Loanwords: Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician and Kindred Dialects

The interaction between Islam and the Western world is both a historical topic so vast as to need multi‐volume examination of its own, and a current topic so fraught as to be beyond the scope of this review. What is historical fact is that from 711 to 1492 major Islamic states existed across the Iberian Peninsula. Their influence, not only on contemporary civilization in the Peninsula for seven hundred years, but also so embedded as to be discernible still, was inevitably widespread and fundamental.

Linguistically the influences still run deep in the Iberian languages: Castilian, Catalan, Portuguese, Galician and numerous...