Dictionary Of Arabic Loanwords In The Languages Of Central And East Africa

Dictionary of Arabic Loanwords in the Languages of Central and East Africa analyzes around 3000 Arabic loanwords in more than 50 languages in the area, and completes the work started in a previous similar work on West Africa.

The main purpose of this dictionary is twofold. On the one hand, it provides the scholar of African studies with a tool to identify the possible Portuguese origin of terms present in African languages and, on the other, it offers those who are interested in Portuguese culture an overview of the presence of its lexicon in African languages. No doubt the Portuguese were among the first Europeans to explore the world outside of Europe, and as such they were also the first to introduce that world to European concepts and words.This book is the result of a long and detailed work on texts in African languages, as also shown by the rich bibliography in the dictionary.

The Arabic script in Africa contains sixteen papers on the past and present use of Arabic script to write African languages. These writing traditions, which are sometimes collectively referred to as Ajami, are discussed for single or multiple languages, with examples from all major linguistic phyla of Africa but one (Khoisan), and from all geographic areas of Africa (North, West, Central, East, and South Africa), as well as a paper on the Ajami heritage in the Americas. The papers analyze (ethno-) historical, literary, (socio-) linguistic, and in particular grammatological aspects of these previously understudied writing traditions and exemplify their range and scope, providing new data for the comparative study of writing systems, literacy in Africa, and the history of (Islam in) Africa.

Originally published in 1975, the studies in this volume examine the range of factors which mediate the development of social processes in both town and country: as well as migration there is the ebb and flow of beliefs, ideologies and educational and occupational opportunities. It considers the fundamental economic and political bases of migrations in the form of colonialism or multi-national controls of various kinds, international commodity markets of supply and demand, and the distinct development policies adopted by independent governments. The editor’s introduction discusses old and new models of migration; the origins of rural inequalities in development; the degree of continuity of language and belief systems between town and country and the persistence of rural links in urban settlements.

"This landmark publication in comparative linguistics is the first comprehensive work to address the general issue of what kinds of words tend to be borrowed from other languages. The authors have assembled a unique database of over 70,000 words from 40 languages from around the world, 18,000 of which are loanwords. This database allows the authors to make empirically founded generalizations about general tendencies of word exchange among languages." --Book Jacket.

One of the main cultural consequences of the contacts between Islam and the West has been the borrowing of hundreds of words, mostly of Arabic but also of other important languages of the Islamic world, such as Persian, Turkish, Berber, etc. by Western languages. Such loanwords are particularly abundant and relevant in the case of the Iberian Peninsula because of the presence of Islamic states in it for many centuries; their study is very revealing when it comes to assess the impact of those states in the emergence and shaping of Western civilization. Some famous Arabic scholars, above all R. Dozy, have tackled this task in the past, followed by other attempts at increasing and improving his pioneering work; however, the progresses achieved during the last quarter of the 20th c., in such fields as Andalusi and Andalusi Romance dialectology and lexicology made it necessary to update all the available information on this topic and to offer it in English.

Covering the political, social and historical background of each language, Dictionary of Languages offers a unique insight into human culture and communication. Every language with official status is included, as well as all those that have a written literature and 175 'minor' languages with special historical or anthropological interest. We see how, with the rapidly increasing uniformity of our culture as media's influence spreads, more languages have become extinct or are under threat of extinction. The text is highlighted by maps and charts of scripts, while proverbs, anecdotes and quotations reveal the features that make a language unique.