Crusades
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Cultural Exchange
The crusaders encountered many things in the Orient that they did not yet know. Often they did not invent their own words for new things, but adopted the already existing Arabic word. Many terms show the influence of Arabic on the English language:
| ORANGE برتقال |
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fruit, originally from South and East Asia, known in Sanskrit as naranga, which became the Arabic naranj. |
| ALCOHOL (الكُحُـــــــــول.) |
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an extraction process from a mineral, European chemists began to refer to anything involving extraction/distillation as alcohol. |
| ALCHEMY and CHEMISTRY (الكيميـــــــــاء.) |
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put together |
| ALGEBRA (الجبــر) |
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a mathematical discipline |
| ARTICHOKE |  |
variety of a species of thistle cultivated as food. |
| CANDY (from قندي) |
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“hard sweets made by boiling cane sugar” |
| COFFEE (قهوة) |
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for long snubbed by Europeans as the “wine of the infidels”—that is, many centuries before the age of Starbucks and instant coffee! |
| COTTON (قُطْـــــــــن) |
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soft, fluffy staple fiber used for textiles |
| MATTRESS (مطـــــــــــــــــــرح.) |
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large, usually rectangular pad where you can lie and sleep |
part 2
| SOFA (الصُفــــــــة)< |
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cushioned item of furniture for seating multiple people | raised, carpeted platform on which people sat. |
| SUGAR (سكر) |
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Sanskrit (śarkarā), meaning "ground or candied sugar" | |
| CIPHER (صِفـــــــــــــــــــــــــــر) |
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Arabic word for zero صفر (sifr) | not easily understood, so used for encrypted code |
| ELIXIR (الإكسيــــــــــــــر) |
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like a syrup | |
| SODA (صـــــــــودا.) |
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chemical compounds containing sodium | |
| ADMIRAL (أميــــــــر الرحلة) |
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commander of the fleet | |
| ARSENAL ( دار الصناعــــــــــــــــة ) |
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manufacturing house where weapons for the navy are made | |
| MAGAZINE ( مجلة) |
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store house | |
| ASSASSIN (حشَّــــــــــــــاشين”) |
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hitman, murderer |
Arabic, Latin or Greek?
Some words originated in Greek, were translated into Arabic ad found their way into the English language:
Sort the loan words after their original language:
| Arabic | guitar | alcohol | cipher | algebra | safran | tariff | tambourine | artichocke | safari |
| Greekh | philosophy | tragedy | Maths | democracy | monologue | ||||
| Latin | cherry | wine | process | jurist | peach | chamber | street |
Sort the following Arabic loand words after topics:
| Spice / Fruit Beverages |
coffee | alcohol | lemonade | safran | muskat | orange | sugar | peach |
| Textiles | cotton | damast | jacket | Kittel | Mütze | |||
| Furniture | Mattress | sofa | mosaik | diwan | baldachin | |||
| Music | Lute<br<(German: Laute) | guitar | tambourine | fanfare trumpet | ||||
| Science | cipher | algebra | elixir | azure | algorithm | risk |
Vocabulary
crusader = Kreuzzügler, Kreuzritter
crusade = Kreuzzug
crusade = religious war to free the Holy Land (= Jerusalem, Palestine)
Why - because pilgrims wanted to visit the place where Jesus had lived.
