Chess Terminology and Gaming Origins

Looking for the perfect rental? Discover top-rated stays loved by guests, rated highest by real guests through authentic reviews. These traveler-loved stays are recognized by the details that matter most and validated by real experiences. Choose confidently from rentals you can trust. Verbo, book now a vacation rental loved by guests . With verbals, last minute deals, you can save over fifty dollars on your spring getaway. So whether it's a mountain escape with friends, a family week at the beach, or sightseeing in a new city, there's still time to get great discounts. Book your next day now. Average savings $72 . Select homes only. What or who was the original algorithm? How did assassins really get their name? And why does English use Arabic From cotton and candy to sugar and saffron, we'll explore the algebra and alchemy of Arabic words in English in this episode of Words Unraveled. Welcome to another Words Unraveled. I'm Rob Watts from the YouTube channel Rob Words. And I'm Jess Zafaris, author of Etymology books, including Useless Etymology. And today we are here to talk about Arabic words in English, with a dash of Persian as well, right? Absolutely. I have to make a confession here. This is a bit of a blind spot for me. Actually, Arabic is a huge blind spot for me. I've never studied it. All that I'm going to say here, that I say with any authority, is uh information that I've found while researching this subject. It's not it's not off the top of my head stuff generally, but Jess, you have studied a bit of Arabic, so I'm gonna need your help. I am by no means an expert either and I I expect and hope to be corrected a good bit here, but I did so I minored in Arabic language in my undergraduate degree, and I spent some time in Morocco studying modern standard Arabic . So although I can't possibly hold a functional conversation beyond saying, yes, I studied Arabic in Morocco. No, I don't understand what you're saying. I do know . I can read the letters on the page and recognize some of them. My understanding that is that Morocco is about the worst place you could learn Arabic, right? Because weirdly, Arabic has got a dozens and dozens of dialects. They're not all necessarily even mutually intelligible, but Moroccan is reputedly the furthest away from the rest of them, right? I was in an area where they were speaking where your average person spoke that Asia. They also spoke French and they could understand modern standard Arabic. So I got around town while learning modern standard Arabic from Jordanian teachers, Jordanian and Syrian teachers, I got around by speaking as many Arabic words as I could in modern modern standard Arabic and filling in the gaps with French, which I knew just a little bit more of. And everyone found that hilarious, but they did understand what I was saying. I didn't understand what they were saying though. We should explain um modern stand ard Arabic is it's sort of an invented version of Arabic that draws upon aspects of all of them, right? That m meaning that it can be understood wherever you are in the Arab speaking world, right? But no person has it as their native language really, do they? You can find much of Islam communicated in modern standard Arabic. It's sort of the the most classical form of similar to classical Arabic, right? Which is it's it is a modern adaptation of classical Arabic. Gotcha. It is, I think, one of the most useful global languages to learn if you wish to engage in a global capacity, because almost anyone from an Arabic speaking country m will probably at least understand what you're going for, right? It's also very easy to learn. It is a mathematical language that makes a lot of sense. And you can learn almost the entire language by memorizing what they, these, these triliteral or tri consonantal roots, which is three core consonants that provide a fundamental meaning, and you add vowels and prefixes and suffixes to those consonants and diacriticals and things to make a ton of other words like kat ab is the triliteral root meaning writing and it gives you words like katabah meaning he wrote or kitab meaning book or maktab meaning office. You have all of the world based on these concepts. And and and you know, we kind of do the same with Latin roots, but by no means in a consistent way. Those three consonants set the tone. They tell you what the what the theme is, and then you build vowels around them. We should mention that there's something interesting, or at least to us going on with consonants and vowels in written Arabic insofar as you do not write the vowels in written Arabic. In most cases. In most cases. Okay. Caveat right there. The A at the front of the definite article is it's a it's a vowel. And then there's this other yet there yes, in most cases. But another example just to just to give you the idea of the triliteral literal or triconsonantal root is dar sa is studying or learning. So darasa is he studied, dar as is lesson or dars is lesson, please forgive my pronunciation everyone who speaks Arabic. Well what I'm hoping is that if there are so many different dialects that if you pronounce it however you like, everyone's just gonna think you're pronouncing it in one of the other dialec.ts Hopefully. So you get away with it. Yeah, well I'm relying on. Ignorant white lady with this much knowledge talking about this much information. Let's do what we do best though. Let's let's talk etymol ogy, get into some words that are in English that come from Arabic. You talked about the vowel sound at the start of the definite article, that that uh sound, as it tends to come out as the definite article. We have a lot of words that still have that Arabic definite article sitting at the at the top. Like alcove, algorithm, algebra, almanac, albacor, alfalfa, alcove. Well, d don't just list them or just tell us about them. Yeah, we're getting them . A lot of those are uh to do with chemistry. A lot of the words that we get in English from Arabic are through sciences , especially math and chemistry. In fact, the word chemistry is probably from a Greek name for Egypt because of Alexandrian chemistry, which was going on there. Ultimately it's like it be it started as the discipline of alchemy, which sounds more mystical now, but wasn't as mystical initially. And eventually that word became chemistry. But the Greek word here probably means it's alchemia , probably means something like it's an Arabic adaptation of a Greek word meaning land of black earth or something, which meant Egypt. That word comes to mean a s science of trying to turn base metals into gold, doesn't it? Which is when we talk about alchemy, it does mean that in English for a while as well, although it has it does have this sort of broader chemistry meaning. But there are also related words to alchemy that also have this definite article in them. I'm thinking of elixir because part of alchemy is also finding the elixir that enables this transmutation of base metals into gold. And that again is al-Ixia , which is um probably actually it's the definite art article and then the ixir bit is perhaps from Greek, a Greek word meaning a a desiccative powder for wounds. That's how the OED has described it. So yeah. But a sort of healing powder. Our notion of alcohol is also a powder, essentially. So it's from El Cool, literally the the coal, which is a fine metallic powder that was originally used to darken the eyelids. We still call coal that stuff that you can use as eyeliner. K- O-H-L coal rather than C-O-A-L, even though they're both dark powders. The substance was originally powdered antimony, which is also a word that's most likely from Arabic, what but was mangled totally beyond recognition in Greek and Latin. Like it doesn't contain any word element that looks like anti or money in Latin or Greek or modern English, but was a gradually a mangling of a word like al of mood or something like that. Alcohol originally referred to distilled substances like antimony that were used in cosmetics, but then evolved to describe any distilled substance and then was narrowed down into distilled strong liquors and then any alcoholic substance. And then another chemical one is alkali as well , which is a little bit more obvious. I th I don't know if to me that just seems like it could have come from Arabic. And it does, it's from Al Kali or I mean how do you pronounce the Q? Is it it's it's it's a sound that's a bit unlike. Throw it farther in the back. And it is closer to our Q sound. Like the deepest you can make that k in your back of your throat. Cully. Cully . I'm working on it. I'm working on it. Anyway, it meant the soda or the ash. And originally an alkali was a salty substance, but now it is um it's a base that can be dissolved in water. That is also ultimately why we use the symbol K for potassium, because the it comes from the Latin kalium meaning potash from the Arabic al-cali , meaning the ashes or the burnt ashes. That's a beautiful one, Jess. Love that. We also get words like borax ultimately from Arabic, which that was a surprise to me. I d this is probably very ignorant of me, but I kind of assumed borax sounded brand name-y. But that word What is it? I it it sounds like a Pokemon to me. So it the word is first shows up in the 14th century as a name for useful minerals, specifically a salt formed from the union of boracic acid and soda. I think borax is something like that now. Um it is a it is a cleaning thing. I think you use it in laundry and things, like the multi-ppurose cleaner and it can be uh an odor controller. I'm well outside of my area of expertise here, so I don't know the differences between all the different sodas. I don't know my baking soda from my uh bicarbonate of soda from I mean honestly th don't ever don't ever eat a cake that I've made, for goodness sake. Um so we're gonna start separating them out into borax as well. We're in trouble. Uhhuh, but the this word is originally from the Arabic Burak. Well, actually, it's probably ultimately Persian. And this might be a good time to point out that we are seeing a good bit of Persian in here. And although they share the same script and a good chunk of voc abulary, Persian and Arabic are from different language families, which is interesting, right? And a lot of Persian words ended up in English because Persian became a prestige language in areas where Arabic was originally spoken and the predominant language geography is everything when it comes to these languages and the fact that they they sit at a a key position between the East and the West would be a very reductive way to put it, but between Asia and Europe in particular. So a lot of trade goes via Persia, which means we get a lot of terms associated with trade via there. A lot of products end up with Persian or Arabic names. In fact, let's talk about some of those 'cause they're they're really big ones when it comes to to borrowings from Arabic. I mean cotton, for example, a word from Arabic, which you look at it and you it just actually I would never have guessed that it was an Arabic word, 'cause I don't associate it with necessarily with Arabia, even though that is where it is being produced when it first comes into Europe and that is precisely why we get that word. But it's from the Arabic you gotta do that k thing but that cotton. Enters English in Middle English, so it enters it in either the twelfth century, so the crusades, you know, are still cracking off. There's a lot of Europeans heading down to to Arabia and and to the to the Middle E ast for the purposes of fighting for Christianity, but in Middle English it is Khortun. And what it originally means is not the the fabric itself in English , but it it means a padding made from it that you put underneath your suit of armour, which is really cool. Isn't that what we call isn't that similar to bombast in English. There is another name for it actually in English, and it's Acton. Acton is another name for the padding underneath your chainmail or under underneath your suit of armour. But actin is actually from exactly the same source as cotton, but the a at the start is from the Arabic definite article. So it's cotton is from Coton, uh sorry pronunciation wrong. Acton is from Al Coton Another interesting one here is ultimately the we call tabby cats. You have a tabby cat, right? I do. She's called tabby, her pattern coat is called tabby ultimately due to an Arabic word. There was a striped silk tafeta, also called tabby, which came via French from the name of a Baghdad neighborhood called A tabi, where rich silks were made. And taf eta is also a Persian word for silk or linen cloth. It literally means like spun or woven woven. Until the 1770s, it was really uncommon to hear the English word tabby used on its own to refer to a feline, most people were still using the full phrase tabby cat. And evidently the word tabby was also used to refer to female cats in particular, similar like tabby and Tom, uh, in association with the woman's name Tabitha, which helped popularize it as a word for cat stuff. Oh sure. So you got Tom and Tabitha. That's so Tabby comes from sorry, a a Tabby, did you say this uh it comes from a a place? A neighborhood where rich silks were made, particularly this stripey pattern. We're talking about commodities brought via Arabia uh Uh through trade, spices are a good one. Saffron, for example, which is it's mostly used as a dye nowadays, but that's again from uh Arabic zaffaran, which is I mean, is what it is. Uh it it' its i i 's crushed stigmas of a flower that give this orangey red colour. In fact before we had the word or cus, exactly, yeah it is. Before we have oranges uh,, and therefore we use that the word for that fruit as our colour. One of the words we're using for that hue is saffron, because we're comparing it with something else we know that is sort of that colour. Yes. And I'm glad you mentioned orange because that also is it's originally from Sanskrit and then travelled through Persian, Arabic, Italian, and Medieval Latin, and then French . And it's often said that we've talked about this before. It's often said that an orange was originally an orange, but it wasn't ever that in English. It was nar anja . And in other languages it was Narange in Arabic, it was Narang in Persian, but the N was dropped before it even came close to hitting English. Yeah, I think one of the likely suspects is Italian unarantia. Yeah, exactly. Which makes more sense. I mean it could have happened in English, but it it didn't. It happened somewhere else. Even in medieval Latin it was Pomme d'Orange, which is apple of orange. Well that this is a funny thing though, because there is a place in France called Orange, and people have heard of William of Orange. But actually the the names are not related, but their spellings are influenced by one another. Presumably there is a sort of folk etymology idea going around that these apples come from this part of France, which is why they're sometimes being called apple of orange. But actually orange is only called that. Anyway, you've got my point. There's a funny journey that apricots went on. It's very much a Latin word, but it traveled through Arabic and then turned into apricot. So they are apricots are literally pre-cooked. Their name is ultimately from the Latin precocum, meaning early ripening fruit. So it's related to the word precocious. Children who are precocious are pre-cooked. Oh yeah, you taught me that. I love that one. Yeah. But the Latin word travelled through Arabic, albarcook as a word for a plum, and then Catalan before it made its way into English as abric ok and then became uh in fact in Midsummer Night's Dream, there's the line feed him with apricots and dewberries. And uh and so it's a it's it's a precocious fruit. Plums and apricots are precocious fruits because they have a habit of growing early when frost is still at risk. So here's an interesting thing. Aubergine means the apricot. Yes. Did you know this? So we've got a vegetable named after a fruit . Sugars and candies all come from Arabic. Sugar and candy might have reached English via Arabic, sukkar and kandi, but the their sweetness ultimately is rooted in in Sanskrit. Candy traveled to Persian as kand, which is a word for cane sugar and then Arabic candy, which became part of the old French phrase sucre candy, sugar candy, before it entering English in the 13th century. And it was a big deal when it was introduced in Britain from the Middle East by returnees from the Crusades a couple centuries earlier, uh, because English had an enormous sweet tooth, as it turned out. And by the 1700s, between that period and the 1700s, the construction of domestic sugar refineries made English one of the largest industrial producers of sugary goods in the entire world . And it was always sugar candy as a a sort of compound to start with, and then eventually we dropped the the sugar. And in America you had particular enthusiasm for that word, but we over here in Britain we stuck with uh sweets, which was an even older word for for sweet things. The English sugar was Portuguese imported treacle and then brown sugar, and then later refined white sugar, depending on the price point with like the age of colonization and whatnot. The guh sound in English sugar is an anomaly. No one knows why we've got a guh sound. All the other words for sugar, it's a q sound in the middle there. But for some reason it became a g from the French word that before had was so was was we know French for sugar is suc r, right? It's a ca sound, but it got softened to a a gh, but there is a precedent for it because the French flacon became flag on in English. So there's something s for some reason we get a bit lazy sometimes with a ca sound and we s soort offten it to a to a g sound. You mentioned that the Spanish for sugar is uh aducar or azucar, I don't know how you say it in in the Americas, but it's a in um Iberian Spanish. So the A at the start of there, once again, we've got the definite article from Arabic rearing its beautiful head. You mentioned that the like G sounds. It is also common for that k sound to be rendered in English when you're trying to transliterate Arabic, as it can be a G, it can be a K. There's also there's a sound that's more like the French R sound that can sometimes be rendered as a G sound as well in English. But even the word Quran is sometimes transliterated into English with a Q or a K, isn't it? There's no consistency on that. We've mentioned that Arabic and Persian are from different language families, right? Persian is in the same is is an Indo-European language like English. Arabic is is a an Indo-Iranian language, an anti-Semitic language. Aaron Powell Isn't that confusing that Persian is not an Indo-Iranian language, given that Persia and Iran that Ross Power There are a few different like some of the distinctions involve involve core grammatical structure and origin that it that are distinct from Indo-European in Persian. And thanks to that there's a lot of intermingling because of the the vocabulary, because of the alphabet and a couple other things. But there are a few additional letters in the Persian alphabet that are not present in Arabic. And something interesting happens here because there's no P sound in Arabic, but there is in Persian. P sounds in Arabic are often replaced with B or F sounds, which is also cool because that happens from Indo-European roots into Indo-European modern words as well. But the biggest and coolest example of that, I think, is that the word farce is originally the Arabic name for Pars, the name of the region in Iran where modern Persian evolved, which is also called Persis in Greek. So Farsi and Persian, which are the same language, are also kind of the same word. Yeah, that's wonderful. I really like it. Right. Another one that's become quite pertinent recently uh is the fact that Palestine is not spelt with a a p sound. It doesn't have a ph sound in Arabic. It has a phu sound in Arabic. Which would connect it to the word philistine, right? Philistine Phil would you actually pronounce it Philistine, not Philistine? That's what they said when I was a when I was in church as a kid. Really? That've genuinely never never heard another human say it like that. Okay. You've just you've just opened up a world to me. I've been a Philistine when it comes to the pronunciation of Philistine. Let's get back to some of the word origins. Uh we haven't talked about coffee yet. The Europeans more or less all take it from Turkish, kaffi, but it's probably enters Turkish from Arabic, pronounced a kafa , something like that with that k sound at the start with the q sound. Kahua at the start. In Arabic. Oh right. Okay. So the the W is pronounced like a wa. Okay, sorry. It's a an ooh sound, but sometimes does a wa. Okay, so that's quite quite quite far off, isn't it? Um word thought to have originally meant wine and then when wine became well alcohol became no longer acceptable because of religious tenet. Then the next stimulant, which was this drink made from beans of a plant that was not called the coffee plant. Uh it had a completely different name, but starts being called by the name that previously wine was being called by. And then the Turks go absolutely crazy for coffee. Um and their word is as close to cafe as you need it to be, really, because that's why the word coffee in many, many European languages does sound a lot like cafe. It probably goes to Italy first and then gets everywhere else, and then France spreads it a lot. But the weird thing that's going on with English is that we've got that oh sound or ah sound if you're speaking general American, coffee um coffee, which is weird and you know not easily explained. It's thought that maybe the Brits picked up the word coffee from a specific dialect of Ottoman Turk where that oh sound was there, but it didn't place that everyone else got the word coffee, that's for sure. And so the for example, the Dutch word for coffee is basically coffee, but it's thought that they must have got that from the English. How uh how caffeinating. We should mention another theory that does do the rounds and that seems very plausible, which is that coffee gets its name from a place in Ethiopia called Kaffa, where coffee has been grown for an awful long time. But that idea is completely divorced from and not really compatible with the Arabic etymology and the idea that it comes from this word meaning wine. So it seems like the people who know what they're talking about favour the Arabic idea over the Ethiopian mountain region idea , but they're both worth a mention. Yeah, absolutely. And and you could see how either could be plausible and it just traveled through one way or another. It's like although chai and tea have variations in almost every other language . It it's debated where exactly English borrowed the word chai from and one idea is from Arabic and one idea is from Russian and there a bunch of others. But like it's the same word in in most languages. Do we briefly mention the whole tea chai thing and the fact that you know countries that got it via the trade routes over the sea tend to call it T or something similar, uh and those that got it via the Silk Road , so overland, which would be via Persia, um, tend to call it something like chai. It's kind of a neolog ism, but wander wort is what they call it as like a wandering word because it it has variations all over the world. Vandervoort. All the best linguistic terms are German. Van der Voort. Another one is is rose, actually, which is probably from an Iranian root, but we got it from Greek ultimately via Latin, via Norman, via Middle English. It's the Greek Rhodon is probably from a an Iranian root. I do worry that if we'd called it by any other name it wouldn't smell as sweet though. Beautiful . Looking for the perfect rental? Discover top -rated stays loved by guests, rated highest by real guests through authentic reviews. These traveler loved stays are recognized by the details that matter most and validated by real experiences. Choose confidently from rentals you can trust. Verbo. Book now a vacation rental loved by guests . And Doug. There's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show. Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this? Your first date? Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Ah! Me to a human, him to a bird. Yeah, the bird looks out of your leg anyways. Get a quote at LibertyMutual.com or with your local agent. Liberty , Liberty, Liberty, Liberty . Etymologically, coffee, tea, these are really big hitters. People like to tell these stories. I enjoy telling these stories. Another one that people like to tell the story of is Assassin. We should go into assassin because it's relevant. Yes. Oh, this is a good one. The word literally means hashish user sort of. So this is the part that people get hung up on because there is a big sort of there. So hashish in, the order of assassins and assassins alone are Western European names for the Nizari Ismaili state, the which is a sect of Shia Muslims who lived in a network of mountain strongholds across Persia and Syria from the 11th to the 13th centuries. Because they were surrounded by enemies, they established a reputation for employing tactics like psychological warfare and covert murders or assassinations of rival leaders. The founder of the sect reportedly called his followers As asiyun, meaning the principled people or the people who are faithful to the foundation of the faith. In the twelfth century, the Fatimid Caliph, a a Fatimid Caliph derogatorily referred to them as Hashishi, meaning Hasish users. He was later assassinated by Nazari agents, some of the people he was sort of mocking. So is it a pun? Kinda. Does that make it a pun? Yeah, kinda. Kinda. It's sort of like an appropriated insult in some s some ways. Yeah. But crusaders and other Western Europeans blended this information into a claim that the Nazari were called Hashishin because they carried out assassinations after smoking or com consuming hashish. And Marco Polo notably journaled about that process in the thirteenth century and he described a young man who was put into a trance by a potion made from hashish and sent to assassinate a target. Beyond these stories, there's no really historical evidence that they used hashish at all, and especially not that they were involved in any ritual assassinations, but nonetheless the word traveled to Europe through these stories. So it does kind of mean that, but also super doesn't. And you can link those words assassin and hashish. You just you just you just can, because the form that it takes in English, assassin, is informed by the word hashish. It's not from that word, but it is definitely involved. Exactly. So it's okay. Because I that you know there's a sort of revisionist thing going on with with assassin the etymology of that in our small little circles where it's it's no longer fashionable to say it's linked to hashish but it is definitely a part of the story that made the word what it is today Precisely. One that you wouldn't expect, um, which also involves a little bit of like folk etymology, shenaniganing, is the word fanfare, which is from Arabic. No way. This is the best idea we have is that it is from the Arabic farfar meaning farfar meaning chatterer and it's like an imitative word and then it entered italian as fanfano and spanish as fanfaron meaning braggart . Originally, this was like someone who was boastful. And so a fenfer of trumpets originally became like a loud, boastful sound. It was of course conflated with words like ban and fair, right? But but there's also if you think about it, if you break down the word logically, like sure fan makes sense in the context of that word, but there's no reason that fair should mean a big loud sound in English. Unless it's like all the fun of the fair and all of the noise of it Aaron Powell That's why we we think of it as being like a a loud celebratory sound is it kind of it made sense, even though it has nothing to do with fan or fairs. So that's a a rationalization of a word from elsewhere. We've gone, okay, well let's just approximate that sound with fan and that sound with fair. Another cool one is amalgam, which you wouldn't necessarily expect to be Arabic and had a way more specific meaning originally. Even in English in the 1400s, it was a blend of mercury with another metal or any soft mass formed by chemical manipulation. And ultimately it is, it is an Arabic word al Malgham, a poultice or an unguent for sores that was especially warm. It was a it was an alchemist's term. That was a word I was trying to think of earlier when we were talking about elixir. that you apply to help healing. I should say the Arabic word might also have been influenced by a Greek word for a softening substance. So it might not originally be from Arabic root-wise, but it was introduced to English thanks to Arabic Yeah, we shouldn't play down the Greek involvement in this it's almost a sort of love triangle with the Persian and the the Arabic really, because they're also being influenced by the Europeans too , in that respect. Yeah. I mean, think about how knowledge would travel between like Alexandria and Persia and Greece at that time. Yeah. And so we have to mention the Turks as well. Turkish. Yes. Ottom.an Turkish Here's one that surprised me when I found out about it. Um, the word admiral is also Yes, I know. Isn't that wild? Well, so what I found amazing about it is that there are actually a lot of different forms that Admiral has taken down the years, and they're based upon different understandings of the etymology of it. So actually, I would say that ah word admiral , as we have it now, with that D in it , is influenced most heavily by Latin, admiralis, where from from which we get admire but that word in Latin is probably influenced by the Arabic em ir, meaning a commander and so you also have in English forms that don't have that D that we now have in admiral, which are rather closer to the Amir idea of admiral. And people have suggested that the al at the end of Admiral is the definite article from Arabic. So it is been like training. So the emir is is commander, and then the Al says commander of what the something. Commander the something. And it was interesting to read what the OED said about that. It said it's not borne out by the textual evidence in either Arabic or Western languages. So basically there's not a record of the term being shortened to emir al without whatever comes after it. But having said that, there were titles like there was Amir al Mumminim , which meant commander of the faithful, which was a title that was assumed by C aliph Omar. But but the point is you can see that you do you can have that Al after the Amir. Yeah, it's unusual. You it would sooner be like bin or something like that. Yeah, I'm not sure about the grammatical implications of it. You mentioned that the D is is Latin influence, right? And the the assumption there is that it's related to like admirable. There were a lot of words in English that were ultimately from Latin words beginning with ad , but didn't have the D because it was dropped in old French, like adventure was aventure and then so okay. You know, I said there were I said there were a lot of different versions of Admiral in English. Well, another one is a French word, ami rod. The reason there's no D in that version of it that does end up in English as Amirod is just that the French drop the D all the time on those versions. It's exactly what you're talking about there. So you can see actually, if you look down to just you know the corpus of of the English language since Middle English when words are coming in from French. Uh you can see so many different spellings of this word, but it's not as arbitrary as vr varied spellings normally are. The different spellings are influenced by understandings of where that word might have come from. Did you know that there it's possible that Mafia has a good chunk of Arabic influence and it might be from an Arabic word. So obviously it is an Italian word. It is it was a eighteen seventy five word for a Sicilian secret society Is it Italian Italian or is it Sicilian or what? Arabic is often considered the ultimate source since the Arab s ruled Sicily for a bunch of the a couple centuries in the Middle Ages. But the actual Arabic word that it would come from is like no one has found a really good contender. So Sicilian is really what we're looking at , but possibly an Arabic Sicilian word. Those islands are all kind of interesting, aren't they? Because Malta's like that. Malta speaks English and its own language, which is a curious mix of Arabic and Italian as well. The source of like mafioso could be the Sicilian mafiusu. And then that could possibly have something to do with the Arabic word marfud, marfud meaning rejected or like outside of society or something along those lines. But the OED's not like, yes, that, you know? Okay. Can we go from mafioso to mattress , which is a word from Arabic. Matra Matra I I can't do the pronunciations, I'm really embarrassing myself with these. But it means that a place where something is thrown, so something is something is thrown down, being the implication, like a carpet or something. Um so a mattress comes from that. It's like a it's a thing that you would lay on the floor to get more comfortable, which is very similar to what sofa originally meant, which is again from Arabic, shufa, although we get it, I think from well, not directly from Turkish, we probably get it from French, I'd have thought. What I like about sofa while we're on it is it's a really good example of a Spanish word that ends with an A but is masculine. Mmm. That means hold on, this can't be a native Spanish word. No, it's not. It's not. It comes from the East. Divan, I believe, is also ultimately Persian and Arabic. The the original sense is almost nothing like you would like a sofa. of poems and then the sense changed in Arabic through like a book of accounts to a custom house to a council chamber and then to a seat that you would put on them. Like like saying like the chair of a a council or something. It's almost the same logic. To be fair, if you were living in the Ottoman Empire and someone offered you a sofa, uh you you must make sure you don't get your hopes up. Because where they're likely to show you is the floor, basically, because the sofa is just a more comfortable bit of the floor to sit on than other bits of the floor. We have mentioned math and science or math terms before, but I think we should briefly touch on them. Oh it's one of the most important things, isn't it? Is the mathematical influence on English. Not least because our numbers are often referred to as Arabic numerals, although Hindu Arabic numerals or or Indian Arabic numerals is a little bit more representative of their origins. But those little digits, the the the symbols that we use to represent our numbers, they do come from Arabic. They're not the same as the ones used in Arabic. Right. They come from what Western Arabic is is the way that it tends to be referred to, but which would be the sort of Arabic that might have found its way to Spain, for example. But yeah, our numerals are from Arabic. Why are our numerals from Arabic? Because they gave us math. Yeah. Exactly. It's the center of the mathematical world. And prior to using Arabic numerals, we're using Roman numerals, which are awful. Just awful. For example, you can't add things together very easily with Roman numerals. You certainly can't multiply things very easily with Roman numerals. You can't put them in little tables in the neat way that you can with Arabic. And that's because Arabic mathematical system is all about the order in which the numbers are placed, right? So if you've got if you want to represent one thousand three hundred and twenty-two, you have one in the thousand column, three in the hundred column, two in the ten column, and two in the unit column. And that actually is a very good framework around which to do mathematical sums, which is great. But none of that works if you are like the Romans and you do not have a certain number, which is z ero. Because you need a placeholder to put in when there isn't anything in the hundreds column or in the tens column. And that's why we get zero, because we borrow the concept from Arabic mathematicians . But where do we get the word from? We get it from sefer , right? We do. And cipher. Arabic sefer, yeah. Which means empty. It basically means empty. Void. The Indian mathematicians are just using a dot, and then that dot turns into a little circle, and that little circle turns into the the zero that we know and love. And if you take that shifar and you pass it through various European languages, working your way up north until eventually you get to English you get zero. Uh but if you take it a little more directly you get the English word cipher. We should mention who's largely responsible for us getting zero. Oh yes. A certain mathematician whose works are resurrected during the Renaissance and the or even earlier than the Renaissance really, during the medieval period, the sort of late medieval period in Europe. His works written in the ninth and tenth centuries, I I think, um, suddenly get re read and everyone in Europe goes, Oh my gosh, this is this is very good way of doing numbers. Um Who's that man? That's Al Hwarismi, the source of the word algorithm. Yeah. Algorithm is a from a Latin rendering of his name. His name being the person from Fwar It's something like that. It's like Da Vinci. Yeah, exactly. Same concept. I love the name of his book. We've mentioned it before on this podcast, but I'm gonna say it again because it's fun. It's called Al Kitab al Muqtasar Fihisab al Jabar Walmukabala, which means in English the compendious book on calculation by completion and balancing. Oh we. Oh oui. We need to use the word compendious more in English. Literally means hanging together. This is this is a compendious friendship. Engel ing together. If you're getting deja vu, yeah, we did discuss this before when we discussed numbers, but it is w it is worth going. You can't talk about Arabic influence on English without going into this stuff again. And you also can't talk about alchemisme without talking about one other mathematical word that he did give us a challenge Algebra. Algebra. What does it literally mean? A reunion of broken parts to the extent that it was also a word for the process of setting broken bones, even in English. Algebra. As a means of solving quadratic equations, I think to start with. You remember quadratic equations from school, but but now we talk about algebra, we talk about letters replacing numbers and and stuff like that. But yeah. It's all from Alcharisme. I don't know it is now, but apparently Italian, Portuguese and Catalan have or have had a medical term algebrista, which would be like algebra ist in English that still means like bone setter or someone who That one man responsible for well definitely responsible for two words, although one of them he wouldn't have known about. And um maybe gets the most credit of any individual for the word zero. Another mathematical term that I don't know if we discussed on our math related episode was Sign, S-I-N-E, the in trinkonometry. It's kind of it's wrong. The Latin word was in Gerardo of Cremona's medieval Latin translation of Arabic G geometry public ations that took the Arabic jibba, meaning the c ord of an arc or the curve of a of a strung bow and arrow, which he confused with ja eb meaning bundle or bosom or fold in a garment, which is also what our word sin us means. It's comparing like foldy, garmenty, curvy things. Sinus means bosom. Yeah, also that. I can see your face bosoms. Hopefully not. You'd have to look way up in there. Anyway. Sinus is used today or today to refer to those passages in our face that plug up every springtime. The meaning of the Latin sinus was much broader. It meant any fold or bend or curve, including boobs. When we talk about a sign cur ve a sign, a sine wave is related to our sinuses. Though it is supposed to be related to the curve of a bow. Another interesting word that we've addressed this before and it's mind blowing every time, I think, is that every sense of the word check comes from the game of chess, which is also from Arabic and Persian. The phrase is Shah Mat, which came into Arabic from Persian with a twist. In Persian, Mat meant to be astonished, and mata meant to die, but mat could also be a dec line form of mata, meaning he died. So in Persian, Shah Mat meant the king or the Shah is astonished or left helpless or stumped. Basically, the king literally can't even uh but when When when shah matt So that's what happens when you when you win chess, right? That's checkmate. So when Shah Mat came into Arabic, it came into English as checkmate. That mat was mistranslat ed so that it could came to mean the king died. Like checkmate, the word check comes from the game of chess, which is very ancient. The English name of the game was from the old French Eschess, meaning chessmen, plural of Eshek meaning that the name of the game itself, which came by way of Latin from the Persian Shah or King. And then the original name of the game in in Sanskrit was Shataronga, which referred to the the four subdivisions. It had it had like different armies back then, horses, elephants, chariots, and foot foot soldiers, and sha mat was what you said when you won, just like checkmate today . And then the word checkier was old French for check in chess, which was adopted into English as exchequer, originally a word for a chess board. Exchequer and the word check or check uh Q U E or C K, which is the slip of paper you use to move money around, evidently came to be associated with finance and government because in Norman England people did their accounting on a cloth divided into squares like a ch essboard. And then other uses of check, like ticking something off of a list or asking for the check at a restaurant, also appear to have come from this process because counters were placed in certain squares on the cloth to note that the corresponding items had been counted or verified. Yeah, I think there's also like a less literal transference possible uh between the idea of the ex checker and the idea of checking, right? As in, you know, calculating something is a way of checking it. And therefore, if you've checked it, you give it a check mark to show that it's been checked. Uh but I do prefer the the idea of putting counters on the board. There is another game that we should mention before we we're done. And that is the game of hazard. Ah yes. Which is a game that I don't think anyone plays anymore, but it's a game that was being played 800 years ago. Uh and the the name of it came from French, which had the word hasar. It's just a dice game, right? Like a chance based it's a dice game. It's got a load of arbitrary rules that make it a little sort of, you know you,'ve got to get this number, uh, but if you get this number and this number, it means this, and you know, it's it's a sort of complex one where I suppose you're you're relying a lot on luck, which is why the French word for luck