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 dialects. Indeed, so deep do they run that Federico Corriente refers to hostility he has experienced from those who do not care to acknowledge how much modern vocabulary is derived from the Arabic. He correctly emphasises his position simply as the scholar who investigates and records demonstrable etymological facts, not as one taking sides in any of the innumerable wider debates and conflicts which have arisen and which still bedevil such matters. The period of Al‐Andalus “…in addition to having been an important chapter of the shared history of Islam and the West, is also an extremely interesting lesson in sociology and sociolinguistics, as the people of the Iberian Peninsula, whatever their religion and tongue, not only shared the fruit of the progress brought about by the highest civilization of its time, but also a good deal of the Arabic language which supported it”.
The result is in this volume a work of scholarly precision and exhaustive detail. The introduction provides almost seventy pages of The Grammar of Arabic Loanwords in Ibero‐Romance in obviously considerable detail and in terms comprehensible only to specialist scholars in linguistics. The core of the book is, of course, an A‐Z List of Arabic and Allied Loanwords in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician and Kindred Dialects. In almost five hundred pages it proceeds from “aaçat elgebar” (“an unassimilated astronomical term”, “the giant's spear” or what we would call Orion's Belt) to “zurumi”. Many of the terms listed prove, perhaps not unexpectedly, to be highly specific technical names of plants and other physical items. It is worth quoting the final entry to illustrate the nature of the entries:
zurumi (Cs.) “a vairiety of grape in Andalusia”: prob. < Ar. jurumi, qualifying in Al?idrisi such fruits as bananas, pomegranates, figs and grapes, after DS I:188, but neither is its connotation clear, nor do And. botanists mention that variety of grape.
If that is one of many very specific terms, other more general words are also, of course, to be found. “Alcatraz” cross refers to “alcartaz” and, more commonly to “alcatràs” for the albatross; this entry carries detailed phonetic discussion which also tells us the word was assimilated into English via “algatross”: my Shorter OED suggests the name was then derived by mistaken association with the Latin “Albus” (white). “Algebra” is derived from “the setting of broken bones” “Alcázar” cross‐refers to “alcácer”. In this latter case the meaning and use of the term in Spanish and Portuguese is assumed and the entry concentrates solely on its derivation, apparently going back through Arabic to the Latin “castra”. This is typical of the entire dictionary where not only is specialised terminology used throughout but the reader's familiarity with both the language and the major etymological Spanish and Portuguese dictionaries is assumed. Within the A‐Z arrangement there are thorough cross‐references from all forms of a word in any of the Iberian languages back to a single chosen entry term.
An appendix lists False Arabic Loanwords, words previously thought to be derived from Arabic but now proved to be from other sources. The surprise among these is the greeting “hola” which I would never have thought to have been of Arabic origin but which had been surmised to derive from “**wallah” “by God”. That supposition is here disproved.
The second appendix is a List of Other Foreign Words arranged by source language, from Akkadian to Ugaritic and including seven Celtic words. In each case the reference is back to an entry in the main dictionary. Finally, a highly detailed 16‐page bibliography indicates the range and depth of scholarship underlying this dictionary, not least in the two‐and‐a‐half pages of references to publications by Federico Corriente himself. He is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Saragossa University and has, as indicated, published widely in his field of the grammar and lexicon of Andalusi Arabic, Arabic loanwords in Ibero‐Romance languages, and on the stanzaic poetry of Al‐Andalus.
This is, therefore, a very detailed and very specialist work which will be of use and interest to scholars of the Arabic and Iberian languages themselves, and to linguistic scholars more widely. It makes no concession to non‐specialist readers – that is avowedly not its purpose – in either its coverage or its terminology. Great progress has been made in the last century in the study of Arabic in Iberian languages, and this progress is recorded here in all its technical linguistic detail.
