The typhoon storm was written tufão in 1540 in Portuguese, touffon in 1588 in English, and tuffon in 1610 in English – all very close to the Arabic tūfān. The Koran uses this word for The Deluge in Sura29:Verse14 and the medieval Arabic dictionaries define tūfān also as "overwhelming rain" (http://www.Baheth.infoArchived 29 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine). The English word-form was later affected by the ancient Greek mythological demon Typhon – see typhon @ CNRTL.fr. It was perhaps also affected by a Chinese word tai feng. "Sometimes [typhoon is] claimed as a Chinese word meaning 'a great wind' [tai feng]... but this seems to be a late mystification." – Yule & Burnell. Other early records for the typhoon word in English include the following: tufan (1614), tuffon (1615), tufon (1625), tuffon (1626), tuffon (1665), tuffin (1674), tuffoon (1699), tuffoon (1721), tuffoon (1727), tuffoon (1745), tay-fun (1771), tiffoon (1773), tuffoon (1780), typhawn (1793), tuffoon (1802), ty-foong (1806), touffan (1811), typhoon (1819), toofan (1826), toofaun (1826), tiffoon (1831), typhoon (1832), typhoon (1840), tyfoon (1848), tufan (1850), typhoon (1851) – ref: NED; also Yule & Burnell. The first known record of the word-form "typhoon" in English is in 1819 in the classically educated poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who never went to the Indies or China. Turkish navy admiral Sidi Ali Reis (died 1563) travelled on Arab ships on the Indian Ocean in the 1550s and wrote in Turkish: "We left the port of Guador [in today's Pakistan] and again steered for Yemen. We had been at sea for several days... when suddenly from the west arose a great storm known as fil tofani [where fil = "elephant" in Arabic and Turkish].... As compared to these awful tempests, the foul weather in the Mediterranean and Black Sea is mere child's play and their towering billows are as drops of water compared to those of the Indian Sea." – ref.
The Canon of Medicine of Ibn Sina (died 1037) has Arabic mūmiyā | mūmiyāyī = "medicinal bitumen". This is written in Latin as mumia in Gerard of Cremona's late 12th century translation of Ibn Sina's book. Among the first records in Latin is mumia = "medicinal bitumen" in the Arabic-to-Latin medical translator Constantinus Africanus (died c. 1087) (ref). Bitumen here means viscous tar found naturally in the ground with some sand or other minerals naturally mixed in to some degree. As offspring from the medieval Latin, the following is an example in an English medical book in 1475: "Make a plastir of bole and sandragon and mummie and sumac and of gum arabike" – MED. Another English example, this dated 1425, spelling modernised: "Another emplaister [plaster dressing] to the same, Take mummie, glue..bole armoniak, aloes, and half an ounce mastic" – MED. In later-medieval Europe this medicinal mummie was an import from the Eastern Mediterranean with much of it coming ultimately from Iran and Yemen – Histoire du Commerce du Levant au Moyen-âge, by W. Heyd, year 1886, Volume 2 pages 635–636. Studies on the embalming methods used by the ancient Egyptians to embalm and preserve the famous Egyptian mummies show: (1) the methods used were quite variable and (2) bituminous material was used in many cases and (3) wood tar or cedar oil was used in other cases and contributed to preserving the corpse in a black or near-black color in the long term – A History of Egyptian Mummies, by J.T. Pettigrew, year 1834, Chapter VI: On Embalming, especially pages 70–71. From the corpse's bituminous or tarry material and its black color, the term mūmiyā came to be applied to the whole corpse. This transfer of meaning started in Egypt. Abdallatif al-Baghdadi (died 1231) in his description of Egypt says a black bituminous matter taken from ancient embalmed corpses is available for purchase in Egypt under the name mūmiyā, and he says it is purchased to be used medicinally in the same way as the ordinary mūmiyā – ref. The medicines book of Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) says that one of the sources of medicinal mūmiyā is the mūmiyā that is taken from old embalmed corpses found in the burial tombs in Egypt – ref. That kind of medicinal mumia, taken from ancient embalmed corpses of Egypt, made its way into medieval Latin medicines books as well – e.g. in Pandectarum Medicinae of Matthaeus Silvaticus, year 1317. Today's Arabic mūmiyāʾ means "mummy".
Muslin meaning fine lightweight cotton fabric made in Mosul has it earliest record in European languages in the Latin writer Andreas Alpagus Bellunensis (died c. 1522), an Italian who lived in Damascus for decades. He spelled the fabric name as mussoli in Latin – he is quoted in Yule & Burnell (1903). Another early record is in the German traveller Leonhard Rauwolf, who travelled round the Levant in 1573–1575 and published a 350-page narrative of his visit. When talking about muslin in Aleppo, Rauwolf says the stuff is brought to Aleppo from Mosul, it is made from cotton, and the Arabs call it "Mossellini" – ref German 1582 edition (page 93) (Cf an English translation 1693 (page 62)). But Rauwolf's wordform Mossellini looks like it's the Italian merchants' wordform, because the Arabic wordform was mūsilī with no letter 'n' (Dozy 1869, Lammens 1890, CNRTL.fr), and -ini in Italian is a diminutive. Italian speakers dominated the commerce between Aleppo and Western Europe at that time. William Biddulph, an English traveller in Aleppo writing in 1609, says "muslina" is a type of cloth brought to Aleppo from Mosul, but he says it is made from linen – NED. The English word "shash" | "sash" entered English from Arabic shāsh at about the same time as muslin. The Arabic shāsh was a long ribbon of lightweight muslin wrapped to form a turban. It was many meters long. It could be of cotton or linen. A large part of the market for fine lightweight muslin in the Middle East in those days was for shāsh turbans. The Thousand and One Nights tales has Arabic وإلى رأسه شاش موصلي = "and on his head a shāsh mūsilī ". John Florio's Italian dictionary in 1611 has Italian mussolo defined as "a kind of head-attire or turbant that the Persians wear" – ref. Later in the 17th century and still today in Italian mussola = "muslin". Italian today also has mussolina = "fine muslin".
al-mostafa.info
The 11th century Book of Precious Stones by Al-Biruni is online in Arabic at مكتبة-المصطفى.com. Search text for مارقشيثا and مرقشيثا.
Different dictionaries report different origins for "massicot". The origin reported here is the one in massicot @ CNRTL.fr, massicot @ Random House Dictionary, marzacotto @ TLIO.ovi.cnr.it, marzacotto @ treccani.it, mazacote @ RAE.es. The modern English name massicot came from the 15th century French massicot which came from the 14th century Italian mazzacotto (1303), Italian maççacocti (1312), Italian marzacotto (1355), which in Italian in the 14th century was a glaze for earthenware, not necessarily lead-based – TLIO (in Italian). Medieval Arabic writers having مسحقونيا masḥaqūniyā | مسحوقونيا masḥūqūniyā as a glaze for earthenware include Ibn Ahmad Ibn Yusuf Al-Khwarizmi (lived c. 980) (Ref), Al-Biruni (died 1048) (Ref), and Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) (Ref). The derivation of the European word from the Arabic word is complicated, and involves the fact that the European word has records in the 13th and 14th centuries in Latin in Italy in the wordform massacumia (and in France in Latin in the 14th century as massacumia, and in Spain in Spanish in the 13th century as maçaconia). For details see English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #100: Massicot.
In India, from October to April the winds blow from the northeast, while from April to October they blow approximately from the southwest (with heavy rains arriving in June); see monsoon of India. The first governor of Portuguese India, Afonso de Albuquerque (died 1515), often mentions the monsoon winds in his letters. He usually spells it mouçam. E.g. in a letter on 8 November 1514 he writes of trade goods which were "am de partyr nesta mouçam d abryll" = "to depart at this April's monsoon" – ref. The Portuguese ç is pronounced s. Mouçam is phonetically close to the Arabic mawsim. Diogo do Couto lived in Portuguese India in the 1560s, and consistently spelled it moução (ref: Yule & Burnell), which is close to the Arabic form as well -- the letter ã of Portuguese is 'a' with nasalization and is etymologically an 'an'. Portuguese usually replaces 'an' with ã. From the Portuguese word, an Italian traveler in India in the 1560s, Cesare Federici, writing in Italian, spelled it moson (ref: Yule & Burnell). But in Portuguese India during the 16th century the dominant wordform became monção, from causes not understood. English sailors in the late 16th century in India adopted it with spelling monson, from monção. In year 1442, Persian historian and ambassador Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi sailed to India from the Persian Gulf, starting at the port of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. He sailed back home again in 1444. He wrote in Persian a 45-page narrative of his trip. The following is a quote from a published English translation, plus three of his Persian words have been put in brackets together with alternative translation: "The favorable time for departing by sea [to India from the Persian Gulf]... is the beginning or middle of the monsoon [= موسم mawsim = sailing season]... The end of the monsoon [= آخر موسم ākher mawsim = last part of the sailing season] is the season [= زمان zamān = time] when tempests [= طوفان tūfān[tˤwfaːn] (listenⓘ) = violent sea-storm] and attacks from pirates are to be dreaded.... The time for navigation having passed, every one who would put to sea at this season was alone responsible for his death, since he voluntarily placed himself in peril." – ref: Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi in Persian (on page 344) and in English translation. An admiral in the Turkish navy, Seydi Ali Reis, traveled with Arabs on the Indian Ocean in the mid 1550s. He started out from the Iraqi port of Basra. Writing in Turkish in 1556, he says that when he was in Basra he had to wait for almost half a year for the arrival of what he called the mowsim = "sailing season" – ref, alt link. A century later, French traveller Jean de Thévenot set sail to India from Basra. Thévenot had lived in the Middle East for about five years previously and could speak Arabic. He wrote: "I set out from Balsora [i.e. Basra] on the sixth of November 1665.... The proper season for sailing on the Indian Sea is called mousson or monson by corruption from [Arabic] moussem. The season wherein there is a constant Trade Wind upon that Sea begins commonly at the end of October and lasts to the end of April." – ref: in French, in English translation. Arabic mawsim is from Arabic root wasem = "to mark" and Arabic grammar prefix m-. It is not hard to find mawsim in medieval Arabic in the sense of "season, time of year". E.g. botanist Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) has المطر الموسمي al-matar al-mawsemī = "seasonal rain" (in a climate having rainy and rainless seasons) and he also has الموسم بمكة al-mawsem be-meka = "pilgrimage season" – ref. More historical details in Yule & Burnett, NED, Dozy, CNRTL.fr.
The Canon of Medicine of Ibn Sina (died 1037) has Arabic mūmiyā | mūmiyāyī = "medicinal bitumen". This is written in Latin as mumia in Gerard of Cremona's late 12th century translation of Ibn Sina's book. Among the first records in Latin is mumia = "medicinal bitumen" in the Arabic-to-Latin medical translator Constantinus Africanus (died c. 1087) (ref). Bitumen here means viscous tar found naturally in the ground with some sand or other minerals naturally mixed in to some degree. As offspring from the medieval Latin, the following is an example in an English medical book in 1475: "Make a plastir of bole and sandragon and mummie and sumac and of gum arabike" – MED. Another English example, this dated 1425, spelling modernised: "Another emplaister [plaster dressing] to the same, Take mummie, glue..bole armoniak, aloes, and half an ounce mastic" – MED. In later-medieval Europe this medicinal mummie was an import from the Eastern Mediterranean with much of it coming ultimately from Iran and Yemen – Histoire du Commerce du Levant au Moyen-âge, by W. Heyd, year 1886, Volume 2 pages 635–636. Studies on the embalming methods used by the ancient Egyptians to embalm and preserve the famous Egyptian mummies show: (1) the methods used were quite variable and (2) bituminous material was used in many cases and (3) wood tar or cedar oil was used in other cases and contributed to preserving the corpse in a black or near-black color in the long term – A History of Egyptian Mummies, by J.T. Pettigrew, year 1834, Chapter VI: On Embalming, especially pages 70–71. From the corpse's bituminous or tarry material and its black color, the term mūmiyā came to be applied to the whole corpse. This transfer of meaning started in Egypt. Abdallatif al-Baghdadi (died 1231) in his description of Egypt says a black bituminous matter taken from ancient embalmed corpses is available for purchase in Egypt under the name mūmiyā, and he says it is purchased to be used medicinally in the same way as the ordinary mūmiyā – ref. The medicines book of Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) says that one of the sources of medicinal mūmiyā is the mūmiyā that is taken from old embalmed corpses found in the burial tombs in Egypt – ref. That kind of medicinal mumia, taken from ancient embalmed corpses of Egypt, made its way into medieval Latin medicines books as well – e.g. in Pandectarum Medicinae of Matthaeus Silvaticus, year 1317. Today's Arabic mūmiyāʾ means "mummy".
A number of large dictionaries were written in Arabic during medieval times. Searchable copies of nearly all of the main medieval Arabic dictionaries are online at Baheth.info and/or AlWaraq.net. One of the most esteemed of the dictionaries is Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari's "Al-Sihah" which is dated around and shortly after year 1000. The biggest is Ibn Manzur's "Lisan Al-Arab" which is dated 1290 but most of its contents were taken from a variety of earlier sources, including 9th- and 10th-century sources. Often Ibn Manzur names his source then quotes from it. Therefore, if the reader recognizes the name of Ibn Manzur's source, a date considerably earlier than 1290 can often be assigned to what is said. A list giving the year of death of a number of individuals who Ibn Manzur quotes from is in Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, volume 1, page xxx (year 1863). Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon contains much of the main contents of the medieval Arabic dictionaries in English translation. At AlWaraq.net, in addition to searchable copies of medieval Arabic dictionaries, there are searchable copies of a large number of medieval Arabic texts on various subjects.
A number of distinct scale-insect species yield comparable but distinct red dyes. Kermes in English today refers to one of these, but the medieval Arabic name qirmiz usually referred to a different one of these -- the one now called in English "Armenian cochineal", obtained from insects of the genus Porphyrophora (different from the genus Kermes). Some examples of medieval Arabic writers who mention al-qirmiz and whose works are online in Arabic in text-searchable format at AlWaraq.net: Ibn Duraid (died 933), Ibn Abd Rabbih (died 940), Al-Istakhri (died c. 957), Al-Biruni (died 1048), Ibn Sida (died 1066). Additional medieval history is in "The Insect Dyes of Western and West-Central Asia", by R.A. Donkin, year 1977, 33 pages. In the later medieval centuries in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin, today's Kermes dye was usually called grain or grana | granum. Kermes-like red dyes, including Armenian cochineal and Polish cochineal, were called in late medieval Italian chermisi | cremisi, which begot late medieval Latin chermes | kermes. The Latin and Italian spelling che- was pronounced KE-. One of the earliest scientific writers in Europe to use the Latin word chermes in the specifically restricted sense of today's Kermes was Pietro Andrea Mattioli in the 1540s (example in Latin). The word-form kermes entered English and French in the 16th century from the Italian-Latin chermes. More details about kermes are at English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #59: Crimson and Kermes.
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A number of large dictionaries were written in Arabic during medieval times. Searchable copies of nearly all of the main medieval Arabic dictionaries are online at Baheth.info and/or AlWaraq.net. One of the most esteemed of the dictionaries is Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari's "Al-Sihah" which is dated around and shortly after year 1000. The biggest is Ibn Manzur's "Lisan Al-Arab" which is dated 1290 but most of its contents were taken from a variety of earlier sources, including 9th- and 10th-century sources. Often Ibn Manzur names his source then quotes from it. Therefore, if the reader recognizes the name of Ibn Manzur's source, a date considerably earlier than 1290 can often be assigned to what is said. A list giving the year of death of a number of individuals who Ibn Manzur quotes from is in Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, volume 1, page xxx (year 1863). Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon contains much of the main contents of the medieval Arabic dictionaries in English translation. At AlWaraq.net, in addition to searchable copies of medieval Arabic dictionaries, there are searchable copies of a large number of medieval Arabic texts on various subjects.
A number of distinct scale-insect species yield comparable but distinct red dyes. Kermes in English today refers to one of these, but the medieval Arabic name qirmiz usually referred to a different one of these -- the one now called in English "Armenian cochineal", obtained from insects of the genus Porphyrophora (different from the genus Kermes). Some examples of medieval Arabic writers who mention al-qirmiz and whose works are online in Arabic in text-searchable format at AlWaraq.net: Ibn Duraid (died 933), Ibn Abd Rabbih (died 940), Al-Istakhri (died c. 957), Al-Biruni (died 1048), Ibn Sida (died 1066). Additional medieval history is in "The Insect Dyes of Western and West-Central Asia", by R.A. Donkin, year 1977, 33 pages. In the later medieval centuries in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin, today's Kermes dye was usually called grain or grana | granum. Kermes-like red dyes, including Armenian cochineal and Polish cochineal, were called in late medieval Italian chermisi | cremisi, which begot late medieval Latin chermes | kermes. The Latin and Italian spelling che- was pronounced KE-. One of the earliest scientific writers in Europe to use the Latin word chermes in the specifically restricted sense of today's Kermes was Pietro Andrea Mattioli in the 1540s (example in Latin). The word-form kermes entered English and French in the 16th century from the Italian-Latin chermes. More details about kermes are at English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #59: Crimson and Kermes.
English traveller in the Middle East year 1615: "They put between the eyelids and the eye a certain black powder with a fine long pencil, made of a mineral called alcohole, which... do better set forth the whiteness of the eye." – ref. Similar travellers' reports in English are in ref: Algeria 1738, ref: Yemen 1794, and ref: Egypt 1877.
A servant of Ibn Badis (died 1062) used لكّ lakk | lukk = "lac" as an ingredient in making red ink, where it acted as a binder and as a red tincture – ref (pages 19 and 23), ref (pages 30 and 32). Ibn Sina's Canon around year 1025 said lak was a resinous exudation from a plant – ref. Ibn Baklarish in his book Mustaʿīnī dated around year 1100 said lakk could refer to either the resin from a tree or the crimson colorant from the lac scale insect – Reinhart Dozy, year 1869. Dozy says the Arabs used lac foremostly as a red colorant. Simon of Genoa in the 1290s said in Latin: "Lacca is a red gum from which a dye is made.... The Arabs call it lech" – ref. The word is in Latin as lacca in the early 9th century in a book about making colorants, where the lacca is used as a coloring ingredient – namely this is the book Compositiones Variae, which survives today in a physical manuscript dated early 9th century as a physical manuscript – Compositiones Variae text; ref for its date. Lacca is similarly in Latin in the Mappae Clavicula, a book about making colorants dated during and before the 12th century. Today's Italian, Spanish & Portuguese lacca | laca meaning lac and lacquer go back to medieval dates in those languages. Spanish laca and Catalan laca have records at around 1250 – CORDE, Diccionari.cat. French lacque dates from about 1400 and French also has lac, lache, and lacca with late medieval dates meaning lac and lacquer – Dictionnaire du Moyen Français. The English lac and lacquer are given 16th-century start dates in English, but English has at least two 15th-century records in the form lacca in Latin-to-English medical translations – Middle English Dictionary. When the Europeans sailed to India in the 16th century, they met the word lākh spoken by the Indians meaning the lac resin, and they imported the lac directly from India to Europe. Since the word was already in Portuguese, Latin, French, and English before they sailed, it is incorrect or disputable to say (as some dictionaries do) that the word "lac" came to English directly from India. Compare American Heritage Dictionary against Random House Dictionary on this issue at Lac @ TheFreeDictionary.com.
Europeans got all their sandarac resin from the Arab lands, primarily from Morocco, and the Arabic word سندروس sandarūs is almost certainly the source for the European sandarac resin word. The 11th-century Arabic encyclopedia The Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sina uses the word sandarūs to mean a tree resin – ref: سندروس ... هو صمغ شجرة. A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (year 1914) says: "New Latinsandaracha Arabum represents Arabic sandarus (Dozy, from P. de Alcalá 1505), also sandalus (Freytag, from Golius); but the Arabic word cannot be native Arabic" – ref: NED. Simon of Genoa in Latin in the late 13th century said sandaracha means arsenic sulfide, yellow or red but he added that in Arabic the word means varnishing resin – ref (in Latin). In the vernacular languages in the West the sandarac resin word appears to begin in the early to mid-16th century in Spanish and Italian (see Merrifield year 1849), from which it was borrowed a century later into English (ref: NED). Pedro de Alcala a.k.a. Petri Hispani (1505) said Spanish barnis (varnish) is sandaros in Arabic – ref. Andrés Laguna (died 1559) said Spanish grassa, "no different from juniper resin", is called "sandaraca" in Arabic – ref1, ref2 – which was not quite correct because the word in Arabic texts was sandarūs. The Arabic word sandarūs might have come down from ancient Greek sandaracha. The Greek word and also the classical and medieval Latin sandaraca meant red arsenic sulfide and red lead and it was employed as a red pigment. Sandarac resin has a light yellow color. Ibn Al-Baitar (died 1248) said sandarūs is a "yellow resin" – ref. But possibly the Arabic sandarūs might have started out referring to some other tree resin with a red color (see e.g.). In some of today's English dictionaries, the resin-word sandarac is derived from the medieval and classical Latin sandaraca (without Arabic intermediation) which is okay with regard to the word's form but not okay with regard to the semantics because the medieval Latin sandaraca was not a resin.
Two instances in medieval Arabic of اللامي al-lāmī meaning a resin are in Henri Lammens year 1890, page 288. The earliest known record in a European language is Latin gumi elemi composed about 1450 and published in 1488 in Compendium Aromatariorum by Saladinus of Ascoli in southeastern Italy – Ref. Another early record is gumi elimi in a medical book by Giovanni da Vigo in Rome in Latin in 1517 – ref: CNRTL.fr. These records can be taken to indicate that the word-transfer to Europe was through Italian sea merchants on the Mediterranean. The word was rare in Arabic both medievally and later. The elemi resin of the Arabs probably came from Ethiopia. One of Lammens' medieval Arabic sources said al-lāmī comes "from Yemen or from the Indies". But Yemen was likely just a waystation or transit-point for goods brought across the Indian Ocean at the time, and the goods transiting through Yemen from the Indian Ocean could come from Ethiopia as well as from the Indies. In Europe around 1700 it was said by Nicholas Lemery and others that "true" elemi comes from Ethiopia and Yemen and a different elemi comes from America – Ref, ref. During the 19th century the principal elemi in commerce in Europe was "Manila elemi", from a tree native in the Philippines – Ref. A derived chemical name is elemicin.
In the Persian language in the mid 11th century the writer Nasir Khusraw used the Persian word for lemon, لیمو līmu – ref: Nasir Khusraw, section on Tripoli: in Persian, in English translation, pages 6-7. In Arabic the records for the word lemon are hard to find until the 12th century. A very early instance in Arabic is in a chapter about the geography of Pakistan in the geography book of Al-Istakhri (died about 957; lived in Iran; probably visited Pakistan personally). Al-Istakhri's book says: "the people of this land [Balād al-Sind = Pakistan] have a fruit the size of a small apple called al-līmūna, which is bitter, very acidic" – ref. The geography book of Ibn Hawqal (died c. 988) replicates the same statement – ref.
"Luffa" in Etymologisches Wörterbuch der botanischen Pflanzennamen, by Helmut Genaust year 1996. The first known occurrence of the plantname "Luffa" in a Western language is in the botanist Johann Veslingius, who visited Egypt in 1628 and afterwards published drawings and a description of the Luffa aegyptiaca plant. Veslingius wrote that the plant was in cultivation around Cairo, was called "Luff | Luffa" in Arabic, and was used both as an edible cucumber and as a scrubber. Veslingius called it Luffa Arabum and "Egyptian Cucumber" – De Plantis Aegyptiis, by Johann Veslingius, year 1638 page 48 (in Latin). In 1706 the botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort introduced the formal botany genus name "Luffa". He referred to Veslingius's earlier description and reiterated that Luffa Arabum is a plant from Egypt in the cucumber family – Tournefort year 1706 in French. In 1761 the botanist Peter Forsskål visited Egypt and noted that the luffa plant was called ليف Līf in Arabic – Flora Aegyptiaco-Arabica, by Peter Forskal, year 1775, page LXXV (in Latin). In Arabic the name lūf has also designated some other plants unrelated to the luffa. In today's Arabic the luffa plant is more usually called ليف līf, which associates with the common Arabic word līf = "fiber" and alludes to the use of the luffa as a fibrous scrubber and not as a vegetable.
A History of Arabian Music to the 13th Century, by Henry George Farmer, year 1929, 230 pages. See ʿūd in the book's Page Index (the book's merit is as a collection into English of many short extracts from different medieval Arabic documents). Most medieval Arabic music-making involved human singing, and al-ʿaūd was usually a preferred supporting instrument.
Reported in An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, by Walter W. Skeat, year 1888. Downloadable.
Magazeni = "magazine, i.e. storehouse" has several records in the 13th century in Italy in Latin, including 1234 in Venice – Raja Tazi 1998. Raja Tazi notes that the seaport of Venice at that time was in regular trading with the Arabic seaports of Ceuta, Béjaïa, Tunis, Oran, etc. The same was true of the seaport of Marseille, where the first record of magazenum (1228) occurs in a context of commerce by Marseille citizens in North African seaports – CNRTL.fr. Records in Catalan begin 1255 – magatzem @ Diccionari.cat. Regarding the Catalan magatzem = "magazine", its 'tz' is like the way that 'zz' is pronounced in the Italian magazzino, like how English "pizza" is pronounced "peetza". The spelling magazzino in Italian is on record from the first half of the 14th century (seaport of Pisa year 1318 has magazeno – TLIO). In Sicily the word is found in the seaport of Palermo in 1287 as machasseno and in seaport of Messina in 1284 as mahazenis – ref: Arabismi Medievali di Sicilia by Girolamo Caracausi, year 1983 on page 272 and page 273. Those and other early evidences imply that the word magazine came to the seaports of Italy and Provence and Catalonia directly from North Africa, and did not come from Spain and Portugal, did not come from the Spanish word almacen | almazen = "magazine". This point has been made in Origin and spread of Oriental words in European languages, by Arnald Steiger, year 1963.
Ibn Sina's medical encyclopedia has an entry for مارقشيتا mārqashītā. It was noted by Martin Levey, year 1962, footnote 174 that part of what Ibn Sina says about mārqashītā closely echoes what's said about marqashīthā in the so-called "Stone Book of Aristotle" (also called "The Lapidary of Aristotle"), a minerals book dated 9th century in Arabic. The "Stone Book of Aristotle", which is downloadable in Arabic at Archive.org, has overall many clear influences from Syriac. Modern dictionaries of the historical Syriac language, citing early medieval Syriac sources, have marq(a)shita (also maqashitha) meaning iron sulfides, marcasite and pyrite – ref, ref, ref. The Arabic marqashita does not look native in Arabic. The word's early records in Syriac can be taken as good evidence that the word entered Arabic through Syriac. Many of the stone names in the so-called "Stone Book of Aristotle" are considered to be of Iranian origin and that can be true of marqashita too – Mineralogy & Crystallography: On the History of these Sciences through 1919 (pages 30–31).
Different dictionaries report different origins for "massicot". The origin reported here is the one in massicot @ CNRTL.fr, massicot @ Random House Dictionary, marzacotto @ TLIO.ovi.cnr.it, marzacotto @ treccani.it, mazacote @ RAE.es. The modern English name massicot came from the 15th century French massicot which came from the 14th century Italian mazzacotto (1303), Italian maççacocti (1312), Italian marzacotto (1355), which in Italian in the 14th century was a glaze for earthenware, not necessarily lead-based – TLIO (in Italian). Medieval Arabic writers having مسحقونيا masḥaqūniyā | مسحوقونيا masḥūqūniyā as a glaze for earthenware include Ibn Ahmad Ibn Yusuf Al-Khwarizmi (lived c. 980) (Ref), Al-Biruni (died 1048) (Ref), and Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) (Ref). The derivation of the European word from the Arabic word is complicated, and involves the fact that the European word has records in the 13th and 14th centuries in Latin in Italy in the wordform massacumia (and in France in Latin in the 14th century as massacumia, and in Spain in Spanish in the 13th century as maçaconia). For details see English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #100: Massicot.
In standard Arabic today مطرح matrah means "location"; it does not mean mattress or rug or suchlike. But in medieval Arabic there is lots of documentation that, in addition to meaning "location", it had a meaning of a rug or padded fabric for lying on. A handful of medieval Arabic examples are given in Reinhart Dozy, year 1869 including from the writers Al-Tha'alabi (died 1038), Ibn Hayyan (died 1075), and Al-Qazwini (died 1283). The Cairo Geniza records of the 11th and 12th centuries contain many instances of Arabic matrah meaning a padded fabric for sleeping on – A Mediterranean Society: Volume IV, Daily Life, by S.D. Goitein, year 1967. A reason for confidence that the medieval European mattress word came from Arabic is that the word was sometimes spelled with al- prefixed in European languages. Some examples of that are given in Dozy's book and one additional example is the year 1291 Latin almatracium @ DuCange. The letter 'c' in the Latin almatracium | mataracium was pronounced as sound /s/. Medieval Latin also had almatracum | materacum where the 'c' was pronounced as sound /k/. The 'h' of the Arabic matrah is strongly aspirated. Especially when it occurs at the end of a word, there is nothing close to it in the Latinate languages (nor in English). It is denoted sound / ħ/. It was converted to /k/ in Catalan almatrac and /s/ in Italian materasso. In the European languages the word's earliest known records are in Catalan-Latin in legal notarizations spelled almatrazt (circa 1085), almatraf (year 1122), and almatrac (year 1134); more about those early instances is in the book La Terminologia Tèxtil a la Documentació Llatina de la Catalunya Altomedieval, by Laura Trias Ferri, year 2012. The mattress word in later-medieval Europe usually meant a somewhat padded underblanket, not a deep stuffed mattress, not a "featherbed". Sets of medieval examples are online at MED (in English), DMF (in French), TLIO (in Italian), Caracausi (in Sicilian), Gual Camarena (Catalan and Spanish), almadraque @ CORDE (in Spanish), Benecke Müller (in German), Matthias Lexer (in German), and Du Cange (in Latin) (Latin wordforms in Du Cange include matracium, matratium, matratum, mataratium, materatium, materacium, almatracum). In the early records in European languages in some cases the padding material was cotton fluff, which in those days was an import from Arabic lands and was a preferred material for padding fabrics. Example: year 1232 Italian-Latin materacum bombesi where bombesi = "cotton fluff". Example: year 1298 Italian una materazza... piene di bambagia = "a mattress filled with cotton lint". The Arabs slept on padded blankets which were rolled up and put away during the day, and spread out on the floor at bedtime; "they did not have beds properly speaking in the fashion of us French" – Devic year 1876; "everyone passing through the Middle East can understand how a word for a throw can lead to a word for a bed" – Lammens year 1890.
In India, from October to April the winds blow from the northeast, while from April to October they blow approximately from the southwest (with heavy rains arriving in June); see monsoon of India. The first governor of Portuguese India, Afonso de Albuquerque (died 1515), often mentions the monsoon winds in his letters. He usually spells it mouçam. E.g. in a letter on 8 November 1514 he writes of trade goods which were "am de partyr nesta mouçam d abryll" = "to depart at this April's monsoon" – ref. The Portuguese ç is pronounced s. Mouçam is phonetically close to the Arabic mawsim. Diogo do Couto lived in Portuguese India in the 1560s, and consistently spelled it moução (ref: Yule & Burnell), which is close to the Arabic form as well -- the letter ã of Portuguese is 'a' with nasalization and is etymologically an 'an'. Portuguese usually replaces 'an' with ã. From the Portuguese word, an Italian traveler in India in the 1560s, Cesare Federici, writing in Italian, spelled it moson (ref: Yule & Burnell). But in Portuguese India during the 16th century the dominant wordform became monção, from causes not understood. English sailors in the late 16th century in India adopted it with spelling monson, from monção. In year 1442, Persian historian and ambassador Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi sailed to India from the Persian Gulf, starting at the port of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. He sailed back home again in 1444. He wrote in Persian a 45-page narrative of his trip. The following is a quote from a published English translation, plus three of his Persian words have been put in brackets together with alternative translation: "The favorable time for departing by sea [to India from the Persian Gulf]... is the beginning or middle of the monsoon [= موسم mawsim = sailing season]... The end of the monsoon [= آخر موسم ākher mawsim = last part of the sailing season] is the season [= زمان zamān = time] when tempests [= طوفان tūfān[tˤwfaːn] (listenⓘ) = violent sea-storm] and attacks from pirates are to be dreaded.... The time for navigation having passed, every one who would put to sea at this season was alone responsible for his death, since he voluntarily placed himself in peril." – ref: Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi in Persian (on page 344) and in English translation. An admiral in the Turkish navy, Seydi Ali Reis, traveled with Arabs on the Indian Ocean in the mid 1550s. He started out from the Iraqi port of Basra. Writing in Turkish in 1556, he says that when he was in Basra he had to wait for almost half a year for the arrival of what he called the mowsim = "sailing season" – ref, alt link. A century later, French traveller Jean de Thévenot set sail to India from Basra. Thévenot had lived in the Middle East for about five years previously and could speak Arabic. He wrote: "I set out from Balsora [i.e. Basra] on the sixth of November 1665.... The proper season for sailing on the Indian Sea is called mousson or monson by corruption from [Arabic] moussem. The season wherein there is a constant Trade Wind upon that Sea begins commonly at the end of October and lasts to the end of April." – ref: in French, in English translation. Arabic mawsim is from Arabic root wasem = "to mark" and Arabic grammar prefix m-. It is not hard to find mawsim in medieval Arabic in the sense of "season, time of year". E.g. botanist Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) has المطر الموسمي al-matar al-mawsemī = "seasonal rain" (in a climate having rainy and rainless seasons) and he also has الموسم بمكة al-mawsem be-meka = "pilgrimage season" – ref. More historical details in Yule & Burnett, NED, Dozy, CNRTL.fr.
The typhoon storm was written tufão in 1540 in Portuguese, touffon in 1588 in English, and tuffon in 1610 in English – all very close to the Arabic tūfān. The Koran uses this word for The Deluge in Sura29:Verse14 and the medieval Arabic dictionaries define tūfān also as "overwhelming rain" (http://www.Baheth.infoArchived 29 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine). The English word-form was later affected by the ancient Greek mythological demon Typhon – see typhon @ CNRTL.fr. It was perhaps also affected by a Chinese word tai feng. "Sometimes [typhoon is] claimed as a Chinese word meaning 'a great wind' [tai feng]... but this seems to be a late mystification." – Yule & Burnell. Other early records for the typhoon word in English include the following: tufan (1614), tuffon (1615), tufon (1625), tuffon (1626), tuffon (1665), tuffin (1674), tuffoon (1699), tuffoon (1721), tuffoon (1727), tuffoon (1745), tay-fun (1771), tiffoon (1773), tuffoon (1780), typhawn (1793), tuffoon (1802), ty-foong (1806), touffan (1811), typhoon (1819), toofan (1826), toofaun (1826), tiffoon (1831), typhoon (1832), typhoon (1840), tyfoon (1848), tufan (1850), typhoon (1851) – ref: NED; also Yule & Burnell. The first known record of the word-form "typhoon" in English is in 1819 in the classically educated poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who never went to the Indies or China. Turkish navy admiral Sidi Ali Reis (died 1563) travelled on Arab ships on the Indian Ocean in the 1550s and wrote in Turkish: "We left the port of Guador [in today's Pakistan] and again steered for Yemen. We had been at sea for several days... when suddenly from the west arose a great storm known as fil tofani [where fil = "elephant" in Arabic and Turkish].... As compared to these awful tempests, the foul weather in the Mediterranean and Black Sea is mere child's play and their towering billows are as drops of water compared to those of the Indian Sea." – ref.
The Canon of Medicine of Ibn Sina (died 1037) has Arabic mūmiyā | mūmiyāyī = "medicinal bitumen". This is written in Latin as mumia in Gerard of Cremona's late 12th century translation of Ibn Sina's book. Among the first records in Latin is mumia = "medicinal bitumen" in the Arabic-to-Latin medical translator Constantinus Africanus (died c. 1087) (ref). Bitumen here means viscous tar found naturally in the ground with some sand or other minerals naturally mixed in to some degree. As offspring from the medieval Latin, the following is an example in an English medical book in 1475: "Make a plastir of bole and sandragon and mummie and sumac and of gum arabike" – MED. Another English example, this dated 1425, spelling modernised: "Another emplaister [plaster dressing] to the same, Take mummie, glue..bole armoniak, aloes, and half an ounce mastic" – MED. In later-medieval Europe this medicinal mummie was an import from the Eastern Mediterranean with much of it coming ultimately from Iran and Yemen – Histoire du Commerce du Levant au Moyen-âge, by W. Heyd, year 1886, Volume 2 pages 635–636. Studies on the embalming methods used by the ancient Egyptians to embalm and preserve the famous Egyptian mummies show: (1) the methods used were quite variable and (2) bituminous material was used in many cases and (3) wood tar or cedar oil was used in other cases and contributed to preserving the corpse in a black or near-black color in the long term – A History of Egyptian Mummies, by J.T. Pettigrew, year 1834, Chapter VI: On Embalming, especially pages 70–71. From the corpse's bituminous or tarry material and its black color, the term mūmiyā came to be applied to the whole corpse. This transfer of meaning started in Egypt. Abdallatif al-Baghdadi (died 1231) in his description of Egypt says a black bituminous matter taken from ancient embalmed corpses is available for purchase in Egypt under the name mūmiyā, and he says it is purchased to be used medicinally in the same way as the ordinary mūmiyā – ref. The medicines book of Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) says that one of the sources of medicinal mūmiyā is the mūmiyā that is taken from old embalmed corpses found in the burial tombs in Egypt – ref. That kind of medicinal mumia, taken from ancient embalmed corpses of Egypt, made its way into medieval Latin medicines books as well – e.g. in Pandectarum Medicinae of Matthaeus Silvaticus, year 1317. Today's Arabic mūmiyāʾ means "mummy".
The post-medieval evolution of Mummy's meaning in English is documented in NED.
Muslin meaning fine lightweight cotton fabric made in Mosul has it earliest record in European languages in the Latin writer Andreas Alpagus Bellunensis (died c. 1522), an Italian who lived in Damascus for decades. He spelled the fabric name as mussoli in Latin – he is quoted in Yule & Burnell (1903). Another early record is in the German traveller Leonhard Rauwolf, who travelled round the Levant in 1573–1575 and published a 350-page narrative of his visit. When talking about muslin in Aleppo, Rauwolf says the stuff is brought to Aleppo from Mosul, it is made from cotton, and the Arabs call it "Mossellini" – ref German 1582 edition (page 93) (Cf an English translation 1693 (page 62)). But Rauwolf's wordform Mossellini looks like it's the Italian merchants' wordform, because the Arabic wordform was mūsilī with no letter 'n' (Dozy 1869, Lammens 1890, CNRTL.fr), and -ini in Italian is a diminutive. Italian speakers dominated the commerce between Aleppo and Western Europe at that time. William Biddulph, an English traveller in Aleppo writing in 1609, says "muslina" is a type of cloth brought to Aleppo from Mosul, but he says it is made from linen – NED. The English word "shash" | "sash" entered English from Arabic shāsh at about the same time as muslin. The Arabic shāsh was a long ribbon of lightweight muslin wrapped to form a turban. It was many meters long. It could be of cotton or linen. A large part of the market for fine lightweight muslin in the Middle East in those days was for shāsh turbans. The Thousand and One Nights tales has Arabic وإلى رأسه شاش موصلي = "and on his head a shāsh mūsilī ". John Florio's Italian dictionary in 1611 has Italian mussolo defined as "a kind of head-attire or turbant that the Persians wear" – ref. Later in the 17th century and still today in Italian mussola = "muslin". Italian today also has mussolina = "fine muslin".
The early history of the lilac plant in Western Europe is in the book The Lilac: a monograph, by Susan Delano McKelvey, year 1928, on pages 204–209. The species of lilac that was first grown in Western Europe is the Common Lilac (Syringa vulgaris). It was first introduced to Western Europe at or before 1563 by an ambassador of Austria stationed in Istanbul, ambassador Ogier de Busbecq. Busbecq sent specimens of the plant to the professional botanist Petrus Andreas Matthiolus, who at that time was employed by the Austrian rulers. The first published instance of the name is in a botany book by Matthiolus in 1565 in Latin. Matthiolus in 1565 said Austria's ambassador "Busbeke" brought the plant from Istanbul (Constantinople) under the name LILAC(Ref). Busbecq was stationed in Istanbul from 1556 to 1563. He is credited with being among the earliest to bring to western Europe several kinds of ornamental flowering plants, which he had found in cultivation in Istanbul. Busbecq said: "The Turks are passionately fond of flowers" (Ref). Busbecq planted lilacs at his house in Vienna in Austria in 1563, and it is possible that during the period 1557-1563 an associate of Busbecq in Istanbul may have distributed some lilacs to the West for planting. Those plantings are the earliest known lilacs to grow in any European gardens outside the Balkans – Ref, ref. The botanist Carolus Clusius lived in Vienna from 1573 to 1588 in the employment of the Austrian rulers. Lilac is in a botany book by Clusius in 1576, where Clusius says the plant has come from the Turks (Ref) and in a second edition in 1601 Clusius says the plant was brought from Istanbul specifically (Ref). The earliest known instance of lilac in French is in a Latin-to-French translation of Matthiolus's book in 1572 (Ref). The next known in French is in 1605 (Ref). The earliest known in English is in 1596 in the botanist John Gerarde, who mentions Matthiolus by name in connection with the plant ("Lylac Mathioli") (Ref). John Gerarde at that time had the plant growing in London. A book of Gerarde's in 1597 has a good drawing of a lilac branch and has a criticism of Matthiolus's plant description (ref: pages 1213-1215). Some of today's English dictionaries continue to say erroneously that the word lilac entered Western Europe by transfer from Arabic to Spanish (with no date given). Therefore, it is worth mentioning that today's Spanish dictionaries say the Spanish lila = "lilac" has been borrowed from the French (e.g. Diccionario RAE), which is to say that Spanish researchers have found no record in Spanish until some time after the records begin in French. The large Spanish database CORDE, although not all-inclusive, has no record in Spanish until 1772.
The common lilac tree is popular in gardens in Russia and Canada. It will not bloom under cultivation in most Arabic-speaking locales because the winters are not cold enough; the tree requires a length of cold weather to set the buds for bloom – Refs: The Lilac: a monograph, by Susan Delano McKelvey, year 1928 on pages 212-215 and 230; and Lilacs: the genus Syringa, by John L. Fiala, year 1988, on pages 5, 13 and 15–18. The tree is native in upland areas of the Balkans, where it blooms with light-violet color, and it has not been demonstrated to be native anywhere else – same refs. In world history, the earliest recorded notice of the tree comes from 16th century Istanbul, where it was grown as an ornamental, and from where it was brought to northwestern Europe for the same purpose in the later 16th. The Balkans were part of the Turkish Empire at the time. However, the western European botanists at the time imagined that the Turks in Istanbul must have gotten the new tree species from somewhere in the Orient. It was not until more than two centuries later (beginning in 1828) that Western botanists discovered and confirmed it was native in the Balkans, and afterwards the earlier misperception was shaken off only gradually – "A visit to the home of the lilac", by Edgar Anderson, year 1935, pages 2 and 4. The tree does not have a known record in Arabic until two centuries after the records begin in English and French; fr:Ellious Bocthor (died 1821), an Egyptian who lived in northern France, seems to be the author of the first known record in Arabic – see e.g. Dozy, year 1869 page 297. The lilac tree is called люляк leulyak ("lewl-yak") in today's Bulgarian and liliac ("leel-yak") in today's Romanian. In Turkish, it is called leylak today, and it was called leylak or "lilac" in Turkish in the 16th century. The Turkish was the direct source of the Western European word (details above). It is possible that the 16th century Turkish tree-name leylak was originally sourced from the southern Balkans, since the tree itself certainly was. The quantity of writings from late medieval and 16th century Balkans languages is small, and it is small also in Turkish. For that reason and other reasons, evidence is not available to determine where the Turkish name came from.
A servant of Ibn Badis (died 1062) used لكّ lakk | lukk = "lac" as an ingredient in making red ink, where it acted as a binder and as a red tincture – ref (pages 19 and 23), ref (pages 30 and 32). Ibn Sina's Canon around year 1025 said lak was a resinous exudation from a plant – ref. Ibn Baklarish in his book Mustaʿīnī dated around year 1100 said lakk could refer to either the resin from a tree or the crimson colorant from the lac scale insect – Reinhart Dozy, year 1869. Dozy says the Arabs used lac foremostly as a red colorant. Simon of Genoa in the 1290s said in Latin: "Lacca is a red gum from which a dye is made.... The Arabs call it lech" – ref. The word is in Latin as lacca in the early 9th century in a book about making colorants, where the lacca is used as a coloring ingredient – namely this is the book Compositiones Variae, which survives today in a physical manuscript dated early 9th century as a physical manuscript – Compositiones Variae text; ref for its date. Lacca is similarly in Latin in the Mappae Clavicula, a book about making colorants dated during and before the 12th century. Today's Italian, Spanish & Portuguese lacca | laca meaning lac and lacquer go back to medieval dates in those languages. Spanish laca and Catalan laca have records at around 1250 – CORDE, Diccionari.cat. French lacque dates from about 1400 and French also has lac, lache, and lacca with late medieval dates meaning lac and lacquer – Dictionnaire du Moyen Français. The English lac and lacquer are given 16th-century start dates in English, but English has at least two 15th-century records in the form lacca in Latin-to-English medical translations – Middle English Dictionary. When the Europeans sailed to India in the 16th century, they met the word lākh spoken by the Indians meaning the lac resin, and they imported the lac directly from India to Europe. Since the word was already in Portuguese, Latin, French, and English before they sailed, it is incorrect or disputable to say (as some dictionaries do) that the word "lac" came to English directly from India. Compare American Heritage Dictionary against Random House Dictionary on this issue at Lac @ TheFreeDictionary.com.
In standard Arabic today مطرح matrah means "location"; it does not mean mattress or rug or suchlike. But in medieval Arabic there is lots of documentation that, in addition to meaning "location", it had a meaning of a rug or padded fabric for lying on. A handful of medieval Arabic examples are given in Reinhart Dozy, year 1869 including from the writers Al-Tha'alabi (died 1038), Ibn Hayyan (died 1075), and Al-Qazwini (died 1283). The Cairo Geniza records of the 11th and 12th centuries contain many instances of Arabic matrah meaning a padded fabric for sleeping on – A Mediterranean Society: Volume IV, Daily Life, by S.D. Goitein, year 1967. A reason for confidence that the medieval European mattress word came from Arabic is that the word was sometimes spelled with al- prefixed in European languages. Some examples of that are given in Dozy's book and one additional example is the year 1291 Latin almatracium @ DuCange. The letter 'c' in the Latin almatracium | mataracium was pronounced as sound /s/. Medieval Latin also had almatracum | materacum where the 'c' was pronounced as sound /k/. The 'h' of the Arabic matrah is strongly aspirated. Especially when it occurs at the end of a word, there is nothing close to it in the Latinate languages (nor in English). It is denoted sound / ħ/. It was converted to /k/ in Catalan almatrac and /s/ in Italian materasso. In the European languages the word's earliest known records are in Catalan-Latin in legal notarizations spelled almatrazt (circa 1085), almatraf (year 1122), and almatrac (year 1134); more about those early instances is in the book La Terminologia Tèxtil a la Documentació Llatina de la Catalunya Altomedieval, by Laura Trias Ferri, year 2012. The mattress word in later-medieval Europe usually meant a somewhat padded underblanket, not a deep stuffed mattress, not a "featherbed". Sets of medieval examples are online at MED (in English), DMF (in French), TLIO (in Italian), Caracausi (in Sicilian), Gual Camarena (Catalan and Spanish), almadraque @ CORDE (in Spanish), Benecke Müller (in German), Matthias Lexer (in German), and Du Cange (in Latin) (Latin wordforms in Du Cange include matracium, matratium, matratum, mataratium, materatium, materacium, almatracum). In the early records in European languages in some cases the padding material was cotton fluff, which in those days was an import from Arabic lands and was a preferred material for padding fabrics. Example: year 1232 Italian-Latin materacum bombesi where bombesi = "cotton fluff". Example: year 1298 Italian una materazza... piene di bambagia = "a mattress filled with cotton lint". The Arabs slept on padded blankets which were rolled up and put away during the day, and spread out on the floor at bedtime; "they did not have beds properly speaking in the fashion of us French" – Devic year 1876; "everyone passing through the Middle East can understand how a word for a throw can lead to a word for a bed" – Lammens year 1890.
aub.edu.lb
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A servant of Ibn Badis (died 1062) used لكّ lakk | lukk = "lac" as an ingredient in making red ink, where it acted as a binder and as a red tincture – ref (pages 19 and 23), ref (pages 30 and 32). Ibn Sina's Canon around year 1025 said lak was a resinous exudation from a plant – ref. Ibn Baklarish in his book Mustaʿīnī dated around year 1100 said lakk could refer to either the resin from a tree or the crimson colorant from the lac scale insect – Reinhart Dozy, year 1869. Dozy says the Arabs used lac foremostly as a red colorant. Simon of Genoa in the 1290s said in Latin: "Lacca is a red gum from which a dye is made.... The Arabs call it lech" – ref. The word is in Latin as lacca in the early 9th century in a book about making colorants, where the lacca is used as a coloring ingredient – namely this is the book Compositiones Variae, which survives today in a physical manuscript dated early 9th century as a physical manuscript – Compositiones Variae text; ref for its date. Lacca is similarly in Latin in the Mappae Clavicula, a book about making colorants dated during and before the 12th century. Today's Italian, Spanish & Portuguese lacca | laca meaning lac and lacquer go back to medieval dates in those languages. Spanish laca and Catalan laca have records at around 1250 – CORDE, Diccionari.cat. French lacque dates from about 1400 and French also has lac, lache, and lacca with late medieval dates meaning lac and lacquer – Dictionnaire du Moyen Français. The English lac and lacquer are given 16th-century start dates in English, but English has at least two 15th-century records in the form lacca in Latin-to-English medical translations – Middle English Dictionary. When the Europeans sailed to India in the 16th century, they met the word lākh spoken by the Indians meaning the lac resin, and they imported the lac directly from India to Europe. Since the word was already in Portuguese, Latin, French, and English before they sailed, it is incorrect or disputable to say (as some dictionaries do) that the word "lac" came to English directly from India. Compare American Heritage Dictionary against Random House Dictionary on this issue at Lac @ TheFreeDictionary.com.
Europeans got all their sandarac resin from the Arab lands, primarily from Morocco, and the Arabic word سندروس sandarūs is almost certainly the source for the European sandarac resin word. The 11th-century Arabic encyclopedia The Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sina uses the word sandarūs to mean a tree resin – ref: سندروس ... هو صمغ شجرة. A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (year 1914) says: "New Latinsandaracha Arabum represents Arabic sandarus (Dozy, from P. de Alcalá 1505), also sandalus (Freytag, from Golius); but the Arabic word cannot be native Arabic" – ref: NED. Simon of Genoa in Latin in the late 13th century said sandaracha means arsenic sulfide, yellow or red but he added that in Arabic the word means varnishing resin – ref (in Latin). In the vernacular languages in the West the sandarac resin word appears to begin in the early to mid-16th century in Spanish and Italian (see Merrifield year 1849), from which it was borrowed a century later into English (ref: NED). Pedro de Alcala a.k.a. Petri Hispani (1505) said Spanish barnis (varnish) is sandaros in Arabic – ref. Andrés Laguna (died 1559) said Spanish grassa, "no different from juniper resin", is called "sandaraca" in Arabic – ref1, ref2 – which was not quite correct because the word in Arabic texts was sandarūs. The Arabic word sandarūs might have come down from ancient Greek sandaracha. The Greek word and also the classical and medieval Latin sandaraca meant red arsenic sulfide and red lead and it was employed as a red pigment. Sandarac resin has a light yellow color. Ibn Al-Baitar (died 1248) said sandarūs is a "yellow resin" – ref. But possibly the Arabic sandarūs might have started out referring to some other tree resin with a red color (see e.g.). In some of today's English dictionaries, the resin-word sandarac is derived from the medieval and classical Latin sandaraca (without Arabic intermediation) which is okay with regard to the word's form but not okay with regard to the semantics because the medieval Latin sandaraca was not a resin.
Ibn Sina's medical encyclopedia has an entry for مارقشيتا mārqashītā. It was noted by Martin Levey, year 1962, footnote 174 that part of what Ibn Sina says about mārqashītā closely echoes what's said about marqashīthā in the so-called "Stone Book of Aristotle" (also called "The Lapidary of Aristotle"), a minerals book dated 9th century in Arabic. The "Stone Book of Aristotle", which is downloadable in Arabic at Archive.org, has overall many clear influences from Syriac. Modern dictionaries of the historical Syriac language, citing early medieval Syriac sources, have marq(a)shita (also maqashitha) meaning iron sulfides, marcasite and pyrite – ref, ref, ref. The Arabic marqashita does not look native in Arabic. The word's early records in Syriac can be taken as good evidence that the word entered Arabic through Syriac. Many of the stone names in the so-called "Stone Book of Aristotle" are considered to be of Iranian origin and that can be true of marqashita too – Mineralogy & Crystallography: On the History of these Sciences through 1919 (pages 30–31).
The Canon of Medicine of Ibn Sina (died 1037) has Arabic mūmiyā | mūmiyāyī = "medicinal bitumen". This is written in Latin as mumia in Gerard of Cremona's late 12th century translation of Ibn Sina's book. Among the first records in Latin is mumia = "medicinal bitumen" in the Arabic-to-Latin medical translator Constantinus Africanus (died c. 1087) (ref). Bitumen here means viscous tar found naturally in the ground with some sand or other minerals naturally mixed in to some degree. As offspring from the medieval Latin, the following is an example in an English medical book in 1475: "Make a plastir of bole and sandragon and mummie and sumac and of gum arabike" – MED. Another English example, this dated 1425, spelling modernised: "Another emplaister [plaster dressing] to the same, Take mummie, glue..bole armoniak, aloes, and half an ounce mastic" – MED. In later-medieval Europe this medicinal mummie was an import from the Eastern Mediterranean with much of it coming ultimately from Iran and Yemen – Histoire du Commerce du Levant au Moyen-âge, by W. Heyd, year 1886, Volume 2 pages 635–636. Studies on the embalming methods used by the ancient Egyptians to embalm and preserve the famous Egyptian mummies show: (1) the methods used were quite variable and (2) bituminous material was used in many cases and (3) wood tar or cedar oil was used in other cases and contributed to preserving the corpse in a black or near-black color in the long term – A History of Egyptian Mummies, by J.T. Pettigrew, year 1834, Chapter VI: On Embalming, especially pages 70–71. From the corpse's bituminous or tarry material and its black color, the term mūmiyā came to be applied to the whole corpse. This transfer of meaning started in Egypt. Abdallatif al-Baghdadi (died 1231) in his description of Egypt says a black bituminous matter taken from ancient embalmed corpses is available for purchase in Egypt under the name mūmiyā, and he says it is purchased to be used medicinally in the same way as the ordinary mūmiyā – ref. The medicines book of Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) says that one of the sources of medicinal mūmiyā is the mūmiyā that is taken from old embalmed corpses found in the burial tombs in Egypt – ref. That kind of medicinal mumia, taken from ancient embalmed corpses of Egypt, made its way into medieval Latin medicines books as well – e.g. in Pandectarum Medicinae of Matthaeus Silvaticus, year 1317. Today's Arabic mūmiyāʾ means "mummy".
baheth.info
A number of large dictionaries were written in Arabic during medieval times. Searchable copies of nearly all of the main medieval Arabic dictionaries are online at Baheth.info and/or AlWaraq.net. One of the most esteemed of the dictionaries is Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari's "Al-Sihah" which is dated around and shortly after year 1000. The biggest is Ibn Manzur's "Lisan Al-Arab" which is dated 1290 but most of its contents were taken from a variety of earlier sources, including 9th- and 10th-century sources. Often Ibn Manzur names his source then quotes from it. Therefore, if the reader recognizes the name of Ibn Manzur's source, a date considerably earlier than 1290 can often be assigned to what is said. A list giving the year of death of a number of individuals who Ibn Manzur quotes from is in Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, volume 1, page xxx (year 1863). Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon contains much of the main contents of the medieval Arabic dictionaries in English translation. At AlWaraq.net, in addition to searchable copies of medieval Arabic dictionaries, there are searchable copies of a large number of medieval Arabic texts on various subjects.
A number of distinct scale-insect species yield comparable but distinct red dyes. Kermes in English today refers to one of these, but the medieval Arabic name qirmiz usually referred to a different one of these -- the one now called in English "Armenian cochineal", obtained from insects of the genus Porphyrophora (different from the genus Kermes). Some examples of medieval Arabic writers who mention al-qirmiz and whose works are online in Arabic in text-searchable format at AlWaraq.net: Ibn Duraid (died 933), Ibn Abd Rabbih (died 940), Al-Istakhri (died c. 957), Al-Biruni (died 1048), Ibn Sida (died 1066). Additional medieval history is in "The Insect Dyes of Western and West-Central Asia", by R.A. Donkin, year 1977, 33 pages. In the later medieval centuries in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin, today's Kermes dye was usually called grain or grana | granum. Kermes-like red dyes, including Armenian cochineal and Polish cochineal, were called in late medieval Italian chermisi | cremisi, which begot late medieval Latin chermes | kermes. The Latin and Italian spelling che- was pronounced KE-. One of the earliest scientific writers in Europe to use the Latin word chermes in the specifically restricted sense of today's Kermes was Pietro Andrea Mattioli in the 1540s (example in Latin). The word-form kermes entered English and French in the 16th century from the Italian-Latin chermes. More details about kermes are at English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #59: Crimson and Kermes.
Europeans got all their sandarac resin from the Arab lands, primarily from Morocco, and the Arabic word سندروس sandarūs is almost certainly the source for the European sandarac resin word. The 11th-century Arabic encyclopedia The Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sina uses the word sandarūs to mean a tree resin – ref: سندروس ... هو صمغ شجرة. A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (year 1914) says: "New Latinsandaracha Arabum represents Arabic sandarus (Dozy, from P. de Alcalá 1505), also sandalus (Freytag, from Golius); but the Arabic word cannot be native Arabic" – ref: NED. Simon of Genoa in Latin in the late 13th century said sandaracha means arsenic sulfide, yellow or red but he added that in Arabic the word means varnishing resin – ref (in Latin). In the vernacular languages in the West the sandarac resin word appears to begin in the early to mid-16th century in Spanish and Italian (see Merrifield year 1849), from which it was borrowed a century later into English (ref: NED). Pedro de Alcala a.k.a. Petri Hispani (1505) said Spanish barnis (varnish) is sandaros in Arabic – ref. Andrés Laguna (died 1559) said Spanish grassa, "no different from juniper resin", is called "sandaraca" in Arabic – ref1, ref2 – which was not quite correct because the word in Arabic texts was sandarūs. The Arabic word sandarūs might have come down from ancient Greek sandaracha. The Greek word and also the classical and medieval Latin sandaraca meant red arsenic sulfide and red lead and it was employed as a red pigment. Sandarac resin has a light yellow color. Ibn Al-Baitar (died 1248) said sandarūs is a "yellow resin" – ref. But possibly the Arabic sandarūs might have started out referring to some other tree resin with a red color (see e.g.). In some of today's English dictionaries, the resin-word sandarac is derived from the medieval and classical Latin sandaraca (without Arabic intermediation) which is okay with regard to the word's form but not okay with regard to the semantics because the medieval Latin sandaraca was not a resin.
Two instances in medieval Arabic of اللامي al-lāmī meaning a resin are in Henri Lammens year 1890, page 288. The earliest known record in a European language is Latin gumi elemi composed about 1450 and published in 1488 in Compendium Aromatariorum by Saladinus of Ascoli in southeastern Italy – Ref. Another early record is gumi elimi in a medical book by Giovanni da Vigo in Rome in Latin in 1517 – ref: CNRTL.fr. These records can be taken to indicate that the word-transfer to Europe was through Italian sea merchants on the Mediterranean. The word was rare in Arabic both medievally and later. The elemi resin of the Arabs probably came from Ethiopia. One of Lammens' medieval Arabic sources said al-lāmī comes "from Yemen or from the Indies". But Yemen was likely just a waystation or transit-point for goods brought across the Indian Ocean at the time, and the goods transiting through Yemen from the Indian Ocean could come from Ethiopia as well as from the Indies. In Europe around 1700 it was said by Nicholas Lemery and others that "true" elemi comes from Ethiopia and Yemen and a different elemi comes from America – Ref, ref. During the 19th century the principal elemi in commerce in Europe was "Manila elemi", from a tree native in the Philippines – Ref. A derived chemical name is elemicin.
"Luffa" in Etymologisches Wörterbuch der botanischen Pflanzennamen, by Helmut Genaust year 1996. The first known occurrence of the plantname "Luffa" in a Western language is in the botanist Johann Veslingius, who visited Egypt in 1628 and afterwards published drawings and a description of the Luffa aegyptiaca plant. Veslingius wrote that the plant was in cultivation around Cairo, was called "Luff | Luffa" in Arabic, and was used both as an edible cucumber and as a scrubber. Veslingius called it Luffa Arabum and "Egyptian Cucumber" – De Plantis Aegyptiis, by Johann Veslingius, year 1638 page 48 (in Latin). In 1706 the botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort introduced the formal botany genus name "Luffa". He referred to Veslingius's earlier description and reiterated that Luffa Arabum is a plant from Egypt in the cucumber family – Tournefort year 1706 in French. In 1761 the botanist Peter Forsskål visited Egypt and noted that the luffa plant was called ليف Līf in Arabic – Flora Aegyptiaco-Arabica, by Peter Forskal, year 1775, page LXXV (in Latin). In Arabic the name lūf has also designated some other plants unrelated to the luffa. In today's Arabic the luffa plant is more usually called ليف līf, which associates with the common Arabic word līf = "fiber" and alludes to the use of the luffa as a fibrous scrubber and not as a vegetable.
Magazeni = "magazine, i.e. storehouse" has several records in the 13th century in Italy in Latin, including 1234 in Venice – Raja Tazi 1998. Raja Tazi notes that the seaport of Venice at that time was in regular trading with the Arabic seaports of Ceuta, Béjaïa, Tunis, Oran, etc. The same was true of the seaport of Marseille, where the first record of magazenum (1228) occurs in a context of commerce by Marseille citizens in North African seaports – CNRTL.fr. Records in Catalan begin 1255 – magatzem @ Diccionari.cat. Regarding the Catalan magatzem = "magazine", its 'tz' is like the way that 'zz' is pronounced in the Italian magazzino, like how English "pizza" is pronounced "peetza". The spelling magazzino in Italian is on record from the first half of the 14th century (seaport of Pisa year 1318 has magazeno – TLIO). In Sicily the word is found in the seaport of Palermo in 1287 as machasseno and in seaport of Messina in 1284 as mahazenis – ref: Arabismi Medievali di Sicilia by Girolamo Caracausi, year 1983 on page 272 and page 273. Those and other early evidences imply that the word magazine came to the seaports of Italy and Provence and Catalonia directly from North Africa, and did not come from Spain and Portugal, did not come from the Spanish word almacen | almazen = "magazine". This point has been made in Origin and spread of Oriental words in European languages, by Arnald Steiger, year 1963.
Latin marchasita is in the medical book Liber Canonis Medicinae of Ibn Sina (died 1037) translated from Arabic to Latin by Gerard of Cremona (died c. 1187) – Ref. That translation is cited at marcassite @ CNRTL.fr as the earliest-known of the word in a European language.Latin marchasita | markasita is in the minerals book Liber de Aluminibus et Salibus, which is an Arabic-to-Latin translation with an estimated date in Latin about 1200. Its Arabic author is unknown but he was influenced by a minerals book by Al-Razi (died c. 930). This medieval Arabic text and medieval Latin translation are published in Das Buch der Alaune und Salze, year 1935, curated by Julius Ruska; the text's section G §39 has Arabic مرقشيثا marqashīthā translated as Latin markasita; see also marchasita in section G §71 Latin.
In standard Arabic today مطرح matrah means "location"; it does not mean mattress or rug or suchlike. But in medieval Arabic there is lots of documentation that, in addition to meaning "location", it had a meaning of a rug or padded fabric for lying on. A handful of medieval Arabic examples are given in Reinhart Dozy, year 1869 including from the writers Al-Tha'alabi (died 1038), Ibn Hayyan (died 1075), and Al-Qazwini (died 1283). The Cairo Geniza records of the 11th and 12th centuries contain many instances of Arabic matrah meaning a padded fabric for sleeping on – A Mediterranean Society: Volume IV, Daily Life, by S.D. Goitein, year 1967. A reason for confidence that the medieval European mattress word came from Arabic is that the word was sometimes spelled with al- prefixed in European languages. Some examples of that are given in Dozy's book and one additional example is the year 1291 Latin almatracium @ DuCange. The letter 'c' in the Latin almatracium | mataracium was pronounced as sound /s/. Medieval Latin also had almatracum | materacum where the 'c' was pronounced as sound /k/. The 'h' of the Arabic matrah is strongly aspirated. Especially when it occurs at the end of a word, there is nothing close to it in the Latinate languages (nor in English). It is denoted sound / ħ/. It was converted to /k/ in Catalan almatrac and /s/ in Italian materasso. In the European languages the word's earliest known records are in Catalan-Latin in legal notarizations spelled almatrazt (circa 1085), almatraf (year 1122), and almatrac (year 1134); more about those early instances is in the book La Terminologia Tèxtil a la Documentació Llatina de la Catalunya Altomedieval, by Laura Trias Ferri, year 2012. The mattress word in later-medieval Europe usually meant a somewhat padded underblanket, not a deep stuffed mattress, not a "featherbed". Sets of medieval examples are online at MED (in English), DMF (in French), TLIO (in Italian), Caracausi (in Sicilian), Gual Camarena (Catalan and Spanish), almadraque @ CORDE (in Spanish), Benecke Müller (in German), Matthias Lexer (in German), and Du Cange (in Latin) (Latin wordforms in Du Cange include matracium, matratium, matratum, mataratium, materatium, materacium, almatracum). In the early records in European languages in some cases the padding material was cotton fluff, which in those days was an import from Arabic lands and was a preferred material for padding fabrics. Example: year 1232 Italian-Latin materacum bombesi where bombesi = "cotton fluff". Example: year 1298 Italian una materazza... piene di bambagia = "a mattress filled with cotton lint". The Arabs slept on padded blankets which were rolled up and put away during the day, and spread out on the floor at bedtime; "they did not have beds properly speaking in the fashion of us French" – Devic year 1876; "everyone passing through the Middle East can understand how a word for a throw can lead to a word for a bed" – Lammens year 1890.
In India, from October to April the winds blow from the northeast, while from April to October they blow approximately from the southwest (with heavy rains arriving in June); see monsoon of India. The first governor of Portuguese India, Afonso de Albuquerque (died 1515), often mentions the monsoon winds in his letters. He usually spells it mouçam. E.g. in a letter on 8 November 1514 he writes of trade goods which were "am de partyr nesta mouçam d abryll" = "to depart at this April's monsoon" – ref. The Portuguese ç is pronounced s. Mouçam is phonetically close to the Arabic mawsim. Diogo do Couto lived in Portuguese India in the 1560s, and consistently spelled it moução (ref: Yule & Burnell), which is close to the Arabic form as well -- the letter ã of Portuguese is 'a' with nasalization and is etymologically an 'an'. Portuguese usually replaces 'an' with ã. From the Portuguese word, an Italian traveler in India in the 1560s, Cesare Federici, writing in Italian, spelled it moson (ref: Yule & Burnell). But in Portuguese India during the 16th century the dominant wordform became monção, from causes not understood. English sailors in the late 16th century in India adopted it with spelling monson, from monção. In year 1442, Persian historian and ambassador Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi sailed to India from the Persian Gulf, starting at the port of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. He sailed back home again in 1444. He wrote in Persian a 45-page narrative of his trip. The following is a quote from a published English translation, plus three of his Persian words have been put in brackets together with alternative translation: "The favorable time for departing by sea [to India from the Persian Gulf]... is the beginning or middle of the monsoon [= موسم mawsim = sailing season]... The end of the monsoon [= آخر موسم ākher mawsim = last part of the sailing season] is the season [= زمان zamān = time] when tempests [= طوفان tūfān[tˤwfaːn] (listenⓘ) = violent sea-storm] and attacks from pirates are to be dreaded.... The time for navigation having passed, every one who would put to sea at this season was alone responsible for his death, since he voluntarily placed himself in peril." – ref: Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi in Persian (on page 344) and in English translation. An admiral in the Turkish navy, Seydi Ali Reis, traveled with Arabs on the Indian Ocean in the mid 1550s. He started out from the Iraqi port of Basra. Writing in Turkish in 1556, he says that when he was in Basra he had to wait for almost half a year for the arrival of what he called the mowsim = "sailing season" – ref, alt link. A century later, French traveller Jean de Thévenot set sail to India from Basra. Thévenot had lived in the Middle East for about five years previously and could speak Arabic. He wrote: "I set out from Balsora [i.e. Basra] on the sixth of November 1665.... The proper season for sailing on the Indian Sea is called mousson or monson by corruption from [Arabic] moussem. The season wherein there is a constant Trade Wind upon that Sea begins commonly at the end of October and lasts to the end of April." – ref: in French, in English translation. Arabic mawsim is from Arabic root wasem = "to mark" and Arabic grammar prefix m-. It is not hard to find mawsim in medieval Arabic in the sense of "season, time of year". E.g. botanist Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) has المطر الموسمي al-matar al-mawsemī = "seasonal rain" (in a climate having rainy and rainless seasons) and he also has الموسم بمكة al-mawsem be-meka = "pilgrimage season" – ref. More historical details in Yule & Burnett, NED, Dozy, CNRTL.fr.
The Canon of Medicine of Ibn Sina (died 1037) has Arabic mūmiyā | mūmiyāyī = "medicinal bitumen". This is written in Latin as mumia in Gerard of Cremona's late 12th century translation of Ibn Sina's book. Among the first records in Latin is mumia = "medicinal bitumen" in the Arabic-to-Latin medical translator Constantinus Africanus (died c. 1087) (ref). Bitumen here means viscous tar found naturally in the ground with some sand or other minerals naturally mixed in to some degree. As offspring from the medieval Latin, the following is an example in an English medical book in 1475: "Make a plastir of bole and sandragon and mummie and sumac and of gum arabike" – MED. Another English example, this dated 1425, spelling modernised: "Another emplaister [plaster dressing] to the same, Take mummie, glue..bole armoniak, aloes, and half an ounce mastic" – MED. In later-medieval Europe this medicinal mummie was an import from the Eastern Mediterranean with much of it coming ultimately from Iran and Yemen – Histoire du Commerce du Levant au Moyen-âge, by W. Heyd, year 1886, Volume 2 pages 635–636. Studies on the embalming methods used by the ancient Egyptians to embalm and preserve the famous Egyptian mummies show: (1) the methods used were quite variable and (2) bituminous material was used in many cases and (3) wood tar or cedar oil was used in other cases and contributed to preserving the corpse in a black or near-black color in the long term – A History of Egyptian Mummies, by J.T. Pettigrew, year 1834, Chapter VI: On Embalming, especially pages 70–71. From the corpse's bituminous or tarry material and its black color, the term mūmiyā came to be applied to the whole corpse. This transfer of meaning started in Egypt. Abdallatif al-Baghdadi (died 1231) in his description of Egypt says a black bituminous matter taken from ancient embalmed corpses is available for purchase in Egypt under the name mūmiyā, and he says it is purchased to be used medicinally in the same way as the ordinary mūmiyā – ref. The medicines book of Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) says that one of the sources of medicinal mūmiyā is the mūmiyā that is taken from old embalmed corpses found in the burial tombs in Egypt – ref. That kind of medicinal mumia, taken from ancient embalmed corpses of Egypt, made its way into medieval Latin medicines books as well – e.g. in Pandectarum Medicinae of Matthaeus Silvaticus, year 1317. Today's Arabic mūmiyāʾ means "mummy".
Muslin meaning fine lightweight cotton fabric made in Mosul has it earliest record in European languages in the Latin writer Andreas Alpagus Bellunensis (died c. 1522), an Italian who lived in Damascus for decades. He spelled the fabric name as mussoli in Latin – he is quoted in Yule & Burnell (1903). Another early record is in the German traveller Leonhard Rauwolf, who travelled round the Levant in 1573–1575 and published a 350-page narrative of his visit. When talking about muslin in Aleppo, Rauwolf says the stuff is brought to Aleppo from Mosul, it is made from cotton, and the Arabs call it "Mossellini" – ref German 1582 edition (page 93) (Cf an English translation 1693 (page 62)). But Rauwolf's wordform Mossellini looks like it's the Italian merchants' wordform, because the Arabic wordform was mūsilī with no letter 'n' (Dozy 1869, Lammens 1890, CNRTL.fr), and -ini in Italian is a diminutive. Italian speakers dominated the commerce between Aleppo and Western Europe at that time. William Biddulph, an English traveller in Aleppo writing in 1609, says "muslina" is a type of cloth brought to Aleppo from Mosul, but he says it is made from linen – NED. The English word "shash" | "sash" entered English from Arabic shāsh at about the same time as muslin. The Arabic shāsh was a long ribbon of lightweight muslin wrapped to form a turban. It was many meters long. It could be of cotton or linen. A large part of the market for fine lightweight muslin in the Middle East in those days was for shāsh turbans. The Thousand and One Nights tales has Arabic وإلى رأسه شاش موصلي = "and on his head a shāsh mūsilī ". John Florio's Italian dictionary in 1611 has Italian mussolo defined as "a kind of head-attire or turbant that the Persians wear" – ref. Later in the 17th century and still today in Italian mussola = "muslin". Italian today also has mussolina = "fine muslin".
The early history of the lilac plant in Western Europe is in the book The Lilac: a monograph, by Susan Delano McKelvey, year 1928, on pages 204–209. The species of lilac that was first grown in Western Europe is the Common Lilac (Syringa vulgaris). It was first introduced to Western Europe at or before 1563 by an ambassador of Austria stationed in Istanbul, ambassador Ogier de Busbecq. Busbecq sent specimens of the plant to the professional botanist Petrus Andreas Matthiolus, who at that time was employed by the Austrian rulers. The first published instance of the name is in a botany book by Matthiolus in 1565 in Latin. Matthiolus in 1565 said Austria's ambassador "Busbeke" brought the plant from Istanbul (Constantinople) under the name LILAC(Ref). Busbecq was stationed in Istanbul from 1556 to 1563. He is credited with being among the earliest to bring to western Europe several kinds of ornamental flowering plants, which he had found in cultivation in Istanbul. Busbecq said: "The Turks are passionately fond of flowers" (Ref). Busbecq planted lilacs at his house in Vienna in Austria in 1563, and it is possible that during the period 1557-1563 an associate of Busbecq in Istanbul may have distributed some lilacs to the West for planting. Those plantings are the earliest known lilacs to grow in any European gardens outside the Balkans – Ref, ref. The botanist Carolus Clusius lived in Vienna from 1573 to 1588 in the employment of the Austrian rulers. Lilac is in a botany book by Clusius in 1576, where Clusius says the plant has come from the Turks (Ref) and in a second edition in 1601 Clusius says the plant was brought from Istanbul specifically (Ref). The earliest known instance of lilac in French is in a Latin-to-French translation of Matthiolus's book in 1572 (Ref). The next known in French is in 1605 (Ref). The earliest known in English is in 1596 in the botanist John Gerarde, who mentions Matthiolus by name in connection with the plant ("Lylac Mathioli") (Ref). John Gerarde at that time had the plant growing in London. A book of Gerarde's in 1597 has a good drawing of a lilac branch and has a criticism of Matthiolus's plant description (ref: pages 1213-1215). Some of today's English dictionaries continue to say erroneously that the word lilac entered Western Europe by transfer from Arabic to Spanish (with no date given). Therefore, it is worth mentioning that today's Spanish dictionaries say the Spanish lila = "lilac" has been borrowed from the French (e.g. Diccionario RAE), which is to say that Spanish researchers have found no record in Spanish until some time after the records begin in French. The large Spanish database CORDE, although not all-inclusive, has no record in Spanish until 1772.
The common lilac tree is popular in gardens in Russia and Canada. It will not bloom under cultivation in most Arabic-speaking locales because the winters are not cold enough; the tree requires a length of cold weather to set the buds for bloom – Refs: The Lilac: a monograph, by Susan Delano McKelvey, year 1928 on pages 212-215 and 230; and Lilacs: the genus Syringa, by John L. Fiala, year 1988, on pages 5, 13 and 15–18. The tree is native in upland areas of the Balkans, where it blooms with light-violet color, and it has not been demonstrated to be native anywhere else – same refs. In world history, the earliest recorded notice of the tree comes from 16th century Istanbul, where it was grown as an ornamental, and from where it was brought to northwestern Europe for the same purpose in the later 16th. The Balkans were part of the Turkish Empire at the time. However, the western European botanists at the time imagined that the Turks in Istanbul must have gotten the new tree species from somewhere in the Orient. It was not until more than two centuries later (beginning in 1828) that Western botanists discovered and confirmed it was native in the Balkans, and afterwards the earlier misperception was shaken off only gradually – "A visit to the home of the lilac", by Edgar Anderson, year 1935, pages 2 and 4. The tree does not have a known record in Arabic until two centuries after the records begin in English and French; fr:Ellious Bocthor (died 1821), an Egyptian who lived in northern France, seems to be the author of the first known record in Arabic – see e.g. Dozy, year 1869 page 297. The lilac tree is called люляк leulyak ("lewl-yak") in today's Bulgarian and liliac ("leel-yak") in today's Romanian. In Turkish, it is called leylak today, and it was called leylak or "lilac" in Turkish in the 16th century. The Turkish was the direct source of the Western European word (details above). It is possible that the 16th century Turkish tree-name leylak was originally sourced from the southern Balkans, since the tree itself certainly was. The quantity of writings from late medieval and 16th century Balkans languages is small, and it is small also in Turkish. For that reason and other reasons, evidence is not available to determine where the Turkish name came from.
There is a Spanish almacabra = "Islamic graveyard" – Diccionario RAE. Almacabra is rare. Its earliest known record is 1554 (two centuries after the earliest French macabre). Almocavar has records from centuries earlier in medieval Portuguese, beginning in Portuguese Latin in 1137 – Iberoromanische Arabismen, by Y. Kiegel-Keicher, year 2005 on page 138.
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A number of distinct scale-insect species yield comparable but distinct red dyes. Kermes in English today refers to one of these, but the medieval Arabic name qirmiz usually referred to a different one of these -- the one now called in English "Armenian cochineal", obtained from insects of the genus Porphyrophora (different from the genus Kermes). Some examples of medieval Arabic writers who mention al-qirmiz and whose works are online in Arabic in text-searchable format at AlWaraq.net: Ibn Duraid (died 933), Ibn Abd Rabbih (died 940), Al-Istakhri (died c. 957), Al-Biruni (died 1048), Ibn Sida (died 1066). Additional medieval history is in "The Insect Dyes of Western and West-Central Asia", by R.A. Donkin, year 1977, 33 pages. In the later medieval centuries in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin, today's Kermes dye was usually called grain or grana | granum. Kermes-like red dyes, including Armenian cochineal and Polish cochineal, were called in late medieval Italian chermisi | cremisi, which begot late medieval Latin chermes | kermes. The Latin and Italian spelling che- was pronounced KE-. One of the earliest scientific writers in Europe to use the Latin word chermes in the specifically restricted sense of today's Kermes was Pietro Andrea Mattioli in the 1540s (example in Latin). The word-form kermes entered English and French in the 16th century from the Italian-Latin chermes. More details about kermes are at English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #59: Crimson and Kermes.
Magazeni = "magazine, i.e. storehouse" has several records in the 13th century in Italy in Latin, including 1234 in Venice – Raja Tazi 1998. Raja Tazi notes that the seaport of Venice at that time was in regular trading with the Arabic seaports of Ceuta, Béjaïa, Tunis, Oran, etc. The same was true of the seaport of Marseille, where the first record of magazenum (1228) occurs in a context of commerce by Marseille citizens in North African seaports – CNRTL.fr. Records in Catalan begin 1255 – magatzem @ Diccionari.cat. Regarding the Catalan magatzem = "magazine", its 'tz' is like the way that 'zz' is pronounced in the Italian magazzino, like how English "pizza" is pronounced "peetza". The spelling magazzino in Italian is on record from the first half of the 14th century (seaport of Pisa year 1318 has magazeno – TLIO). In Sicily the word is found in the seaport of Palermo in 1287 as machasseno and in seaport of Messina in 1284 as mahazenis – ref: Arabismi Medievali di Sicilia by Girolamo Caracausi, year 1983 on page 272 and page 273. Those and other early evidences imply that the word magazine came to the seaports of Italy and Provence and Catalonia directly from North Africa, and did not come from Spain and Portugal, did not come from the Spanish word almacen | almazen = "magazine". This point has been made in Origin and spread of Oriental words in European languages, by Arnald Steiger, year 1963.
Different dictionaries report different origins for "massicot". The origin reported here is the one in massicot @ CNRTL.fr, massicot @ Random House Dictionary, marzacotto @ TLIO.ovi.cnr.it, marzacotto @ treccani.it, mazacote @ RAE.es. The modern English name massicot came from the 15th century French massicot which came from the 14th century Italian mazzacotto (1303), Italian maççacocti (1312), Italian marzacotto (1355), which in Italian in the 14th century was a glaze for earthenware, not necessarily lead-based – TLIO (in Italian). Medieval Arabic writers having مسحقونيا masḥaqūniyā | مسحوقونيا masḥūqūniyā as a glaze for earthenware include Ibn Ahmad Ibn Yusuf Al-Khwarizmi (lived c. 980) (Ref), Al-Biruni (died 1048) (Ref), and Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) (Ref). The derivation of the European word from the Arabic word is complicated, and involves the fact that the European word has records in the 13th and 14th centuries in Latin in Italy in the wordform massacumia (and in France in Latin in the 14th century as massacumia, and in Spain in Spanish in the 13th century as maçaconia). For details see English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #100: Massicot.
In standard Arabic today مطرح matrah means "location"; it does not mean mattress or rug or suchlike. But in medieval Arabic there is lots of documentation that, in addition to meaning "location", it had a meaning of a rug or padded fabric for lying on. A handful of medieval Arabic examples are given in Reinhart Dozy, year 1869 including from the writers Al-Tha'alabi (died 1038), Ibn Hayyan (died 1075), and Al-Qazwini (died 1283). The Cairo Geniza records of the 11th and 12th centuries contain many instances of Arabic matrah meaning a padded fabric for sleeping on – A Mediterranean Society: Volume IV, Daily Life, by S.D. Goitein, year 1967. A reason for confidence that the medieval European mattress word came from Arabic is that the word was sometimes spelled with al- prefixed in European languages. Some examples of that are given in Dozy's book and one additional example is the year 1291 Latin almatracium @ DuCange. The letter 'c' in the Latin almatracium | mataracium was pronounced as sound /s/. Medieval Latin also had almatracum | materacum where the 'c' was pronounced as sound /k/. The 'h' of the Arabic matrah is strongly aspirated. Especially when it occurs at the end of a word, there is nothing close to it in the Latinate languages (nor in English). It is denoted sound / ħ/. It was converted to /k/ in Catalan almatrac and /s/ in Italian materasso. In the European languages the word's earliest known records are in Catalan-Latin in legal notarizations spelled almatrazt (circa 1085), almatraf (year 1122), and almatrac (year 1134); more about those early instances is in the book La Terminologia Tèxtil a la Documentació Llatina de la Catalunya Altomedieval, by Laura Trias Ferri, year 2012. The mattress word in later-medieval Europe usually meant a somewhat padded underblanket, not a deep stuffed mattress, not a "featherbed". Sets of medieval examples are online at MED (in English), DMF (in French), TLIO (in Italian), Caracausi (in Sicilian), Gual Camarena (Catalan and Spanish), almadraque @ CORDE (in Spanish), Benecke Müller (in German), Matthias Lexer (in German), and Du Cange (in Latin) (Latin wordforms in Du Cange include matracium, matratium, matratum, mataratium, materatium, materacium, almatracum). In the early records in European languages in some cases the padding material was cotton fluff, which in those days was an import from Arabic lands and was a preferred material for padding fabrics. Example: year 1232 Italian-Latin materacum bombesi where bombesi = "cotton fluff". Example: year 1298 Italian una materazza... piene di bambagia = "a mattress filled with cotton lint". The Arabs slept on padded blankets which were rolled up and put away during the day, and spread out on the floor at bedtime; "they did not have beds properly speaking in the fashion of us French" – Devic year 1876; "everyone passing through the Middle East can understand how a word for a throw can lead to a word for a bed" – Lammens year 1890.
Two instances in medieval Arabic of اللامي al-lāmī meaning a resin are in Henri Lammens year 1890, page 288. The earliest known record in a European language is Latin gumi elemi composed about 1450 and published in 1488 in Compendium Aromatariorum by Saladinus of Ascoli in southeastern Italy – Ref. Another early record is gumi elimi in a medical book by Giovanni da Vigo in Rome in Latin in 1517 – ref: CNRTL.fr. These records can be taken to indicate that the word-transfer to Europe was through Italian sea merchants on the Mediterranean. The word was rare in Arabic both medievally and later. The elemi resin of the Arabs probably came from Ethiopia. One of Lammens' medieval Arabic sources said al-lāmī comes "from Yemen or from the Indies". But Yemen was likely just a waystation or transit-point for goods brought across the Indian Ocean at the time, and the goods transiting through Yemen from the Indian Ocean could come from Ethiopia as well as from the Indies. In Europe around 1700 it was said by Nicholas Lemery and others that "true" elemi comes from Ethiopia and Yemen and a different elemi comes from America – Ref, ref. During the 19th century the principal elemi in commerce in Europe was "Manila elemi", from a tree native in the Philippines – Ref. A derived chemical name is elemicin.
Magazeni = "magazine, i.e. storehouse" has several records in the 13th century in Italy in Latin, including 1234 in Venice – Raja Tazi 1998. Raja Tazi notes that the seaport of Venice at that time was in regular trading with the Arabic seaports of Ceuta, Béjaïa, Tunis, Oran, etc. The same was true of the seaport of Marseille, where the first record of magazenum (1228) occurs in a context of commerce by Marseille citizens in North African seaports – CNRTL.fr. Records in Catalan begin 1255 – magatzem @ Diccionari.cat. Regarding the Catalan magatzem = "magazine", its 'tz' is like the way that 'zz' is pronounced in the Italian magazzino, like how English "pizza" is pronounced "peetza". The spelling magazzino in Italian is on record from the first half of the 14th century (seaport of Pisa year 1318 has magazeno – TLIO). In Sicily the word is found in the seaport of Palermo in 1287 as machasseno and in seaport of Messina in 1284 as mahazenis – ref: Arabismi Medievali di Sicilia by Girolamo Caracausi, year 1983 on page 272 and page 273. Those and other early evidences imply that the word magazine came to the seaports of Italy and Provence and Catalonia directly from North Africa, and did not come from Spain and Portugal, did not come from the Spanish word almacen | almazen = "magazine". This point has been made in Origin and spread of Oriental words in European languages, by Arnald Steiger, year 1963.
Latin marchasita is in the medical book Liber Canonis Medicinae of Ibn Sina (died 1037) translated from Arabic to Latin by Gerard of Cremona (died c. 1187) – Ref. That translation is cited at marcassite @ CNRTL.fr as the earliest-known of the word in a European language.Latin marchasita | markasita is in the minerals book Liber de Aluminibus et Salibus, which is an Arabic-to-Latin translation with an estimated date in Latin about 1200. Its Arabic author is unknown but he was influenced by a minerals book by Al-Razi (died c. 930). This medieval Arabic text and medieval Latin translation are published in Das Buch der Alaune und Salze, year 1935, curated by Julius Ruska; the text's section G §39 has Arabic مرقشيثا marqashīthā translated as Latin markasita; see also marchasita in section G §71 Latin.
Different dictionaries report different origins for "massicot". The origin reported here is the one in massicot @ CNRTL.fr, massicot @ Random House Dictionary, marzacotto @ TLIO.ovi.cnr.it, marzacotto @ treccani.it, mazacote @ RAE.es. The modern English name massicot came from the 15th century French massicot which came from the 14th century Italian mazzacotto (1303), Italian maççacocti (1312), Italian marzacotto (1355), which in Italian in the 14th century was a glaze for earthenware, not necessarily lead-based – TLIO (in Italian). Medieval Arabic writers having مسحقونيا masḥaqūniyā | مسحوقونيا masḥūqūniyā as a glaze for earthenware include Ibn Ahmad Ibn Yusuf Al-Khwarizmi (lived c. 980) (Ref), Al-Biruni (died 1048) (Ref), and Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) (Ref). The derivation of the European word from the Arabic word is complicated, and involves the fact that the European word has records in the 13th and 14th centuries in Latin in Italy in the wordform massacumia (and in France in Latin in the 14th century as massacumia, and in Spain in Spanish in the 13th century as maçaconia). For details see English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #100: Massicot.
In India, from October to April the winds blow from the northeast, while from April to October they blow approximately from the southwest (with heavy rains arriving in June); see monsoon of India. The first governor of Portuguese India, Afonso de Albuquerque (died 1515), often mentions the monsoon winds in his letters. He usually spells it mouçam. E.g. in a letter on 8 November 1514 he writes of trade goods which were "am de partyr nesta mouçam d abryll" = "to depart at this April's monsoon" – ref. The Portuguese ç is pronounced s. Mouçam is phonetically close to the Arabic mawsim. Diogo do Couto lived in Portuguese India in the 1560s, and consistently spelled it moução (ref: Yule & Burnell), which is close to the Arabic form as well -- the letter ã of Portuguese is 'a' with nasalization and is etymologically an 'an'. Portuguese usually replaces 'an' with ã. From the Portuguese word, an Italian traveler in India in the 1560s, Cesare Federici, writing in Italian, spelled it moson (ref: Yule & Burnell). But in Portuguese India during the 16th century the dominant wordform became monção, from causes not understood. English sailors in the late 16th century in India adopted it with spelling monson, from monção. In year 1442, Persian historian and ambassador Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi sailed to India from the Persian Gulf, starting at the port of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. He sailed back home again in 1444. He wrote in Persian a 45-page narrative of his trip. The following is a quote from a published English translation, plus three of his Persian words have been put in brackets together with alternative translation: "The favorable time for departing by sea [to India from the Persian Gulf]... is the beginning or middle of the monsoon [= موسم mawsim = sailing season]... The end of the monsoon [= آخر موسم ākher mawsim = last part of the sailing season] is the season [= زمان zamān = time] when tempests [= طوفان tūfān[tˤwfaːn] (listenⓘ) = violent sea-storm] and attacks from pirates are to be dreaded.... The time for navigation having passed, every one who would put to sea at this season was alone responsible for his death, since he voluntarily placed himself in peril." – ref: Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi in Persian (on page 344) and in English translation. An admiral in the Turkish navy, Seydi Ali Reis, traveled with Arabs on the Indian Ocean in the mid 1550s. He started out from the Iraqi port of Basra. Writing in Turkish in 1556, he says that when he was in Basra he had to wait for almost half a year for the arrival of what he called the mowsim = "sailing season" – ref, alt link. A century later, French traveller Jean de Thévenot set sail to India from Basra. Thévenot had lived in the Middle East for about five years previously and could speak Arabic. He wrote: "I set out from Balsora [i.e. Basra] on the sixth of November 1665.... The proper season for sailing on the Indian Sea is called mousson or monson by corruption from [Arabic] moussem. The season wherein there is a constant Trade Wind upon that Sea begins commonly at the end of October and lasts to the end of April." – ref: in French, in English translation. Arabic mawsim is from Arabic root wasem = "to mark" and Arabic grammar prefix m-. It is not hard to find mawsim in medieval Arabic in the sense of "season, time of year". E.g. botanist Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) has المطر الموسمي al-matar al-mawsemī = "seasonal rain" (in a climate having rainy and rainless seasons) and he also has الموسم بمكة al-mawsem be-meka = "pilgrimage season" – ref. More historical details in Yule & Burnett, NED, Dozy, CNRTL.fr.
The typhoon storm was written tufão in 1540 in Portuguese, touffon in 1588 in English, and tuffon in 1610 in English – all very close to the Arabic tūfān. The Koran uses this word for The Deluge in Sura29:Verse14 and the medieval Arabic dictionaries define tūfān also as "overwhelming rain" (http://www.Baheth.infoArchived 29 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine). The English word-form was later affected by the ancient Greek mythological demon Typhon – see typhon @ CNRTL.fr. It was perhaps also affected by a Chinese word tai feng. "Sometimes [typhoon is] claimed as a Chinese word meaning 'a great wind' [tai feng]... but this seems to be a late mystification." – Yule & Burnell. Other early records for the typhoon word in English include the following: tufan (1614), tuffon (1615), tufon (1625), tuffon (1626), tuffon (1665), tuffin (1674), tuffoon (1699), tuffoon (1721), tuffoon (1727), tuffoon (1745), tay-fun (1771), tiffoon (1773), tuffoon (1780), typhawn (1793), tuffoon (1802), ty-foong (1806), touffan (1811), typhoon (1819), toofan (1826), toofaun (1826), tiffoon (1831), typhoon (1832), typhoon (1840), tyfoon (1848), tufan (1850), typhoon (1851) – ref: NED; also Yule & Burnell. The first known record of the word-form "typhoon" in English is in 1819 in the classically educated poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who never went to the Indies or China. Turkish navy admiral Sidi Ali Reis (died 1563) travelled on Arab ships on the Indian Ocean in the 1550s and wrote in Turkish: "We left the port of Guador [in today's Pakistan] and again steered for Yemen. We had been at sea for several days... when suddenly from the west arose a great storm known as fil tofani [where fil = "elephant" in Arabic and Turkish].... As compared to these awful tempests, the foul weather in the Mediterranean and Black Sea is mere child's play and their towering billows are as drops of water compared to those of the Indian Sea." – ref.
The early history of the lilac plant in Western Europe is in the book The Lilac: a monograph, by Susan Delano McKelvey, year 1928, on pages 204–209. The species of lilac that was first grown in Western Europe is the Common Lilac (Syringa vulgaris). It was first introduced to Western Europe at or before 1563 by an ambassador of Austria stationed in Istanbul, ambassador Ogier de Busbecq. Busbecq sent specimens of the plant to the professional botanist Petrus Andreas Matthiolus, who at that time was employed by the Austrian rulers. The first published instance of the name is in a botany book by Matthiolus in 1565 in Latin. Matthiolus in 1565 said Austria's ambassador "Busbeke" brought the plant from Istanbul (Constantinople) under the name LILAC(Ref). Busbecq was stationed in Istanbul from 1556 to 1563. He is credited with being among the earliest to bring to western Europe several kinds of ornamental flowering plants, which he had found in cultivation in Istanbul. Busbecq said: "The Turks are passionately fond of flowers" (Ref). Busbecq planted lilacs at his house in Vienna in Austria in 1563, and it is possible that during the period 1557-1563 an associate of Busbecq in Istanbul may have distributed some lilacs to the West for planting. Those plantings are the earliest known lilacs to grow in any European gardens outside the Balkans – Ref, ref. The botanist Carolus Clusius lived in Vienna from 1573 to 1588 in the employment of the Austrian rulers. Lilac is in a botany book by Clusius in 1576, where Clusius says the plant has come from the Turks (Ref) and in a second edition in 1601 Clusius says the plant was brought from Istanbul specifically (Ref). The earliest known instance of lilac in French is in a Latin-to-French translation of Matthiolus's book in 1572 (Ref). The next known in French is in 1605 (Ref). The earliest known in English is in 1596 in the botanist John Gerarde, who mentions Matthiolus by name in connection with the plant ("Lylac Mathioli") (Ref). John Gerarde at that time had the plant growing in London. A book of Gerarde's in 1597 has a good drawing of a lilac branch and has a criticism of Matthiolus's plant description (ref: pages 1213-1215). Some of today's English dictionaries continue to say erroneously that the word lilac entered Western Europe by transfer from Arabic to Spanish (with no date given). Therefore, it is worth mentioning that today's Spanish dictionaries say the Spanish lila = "lilac" has been borrowed from the French (e.g. Diccionario RAE), which is to say that Spanish researchers have found no record in Spanish until some time after the records begin in French. The large Spanish database CORDE, although not all-inclusive, has no record in Spanish until 1772.
Quoted from Word Origins by John Ayto (year 2005). Likewise reported at CNRTL.fr.
In India, from October to April the winds blow from the northeast, while from April to October they blow approximately from the southwest (with heavy rains arriving in June); see monsoon of India. The first governor of Portuguese India, Afonso de Albuquerque (died 1515), often mentions the monsoon winds in his letters. He usually spells it mouçam. E.g. in a letter on 8 November 1514 he writes of trade goods which were "am de partyr nesta mouçam d abryll" = "to depart at this April's monsoon" – ref. The Portuguese ç is pronounced s. Mouçam is phonetically close to the Arabic mawsim. Diogo do Couto lived in Portuguese India in the 1560s, and consistently spelled it moução (ref: Yule & Burnell), which is close to the Arabic form as well -- the letter ã of Portuguese is 'a' with nasalization and is etymologically an 'an'. Portuguese usually replaces 'an' with ã. From the Portuguese word, an Italian traveler in India in the 1560s, Cesare Federici, writing in Italian, spelled it moson (ref: Yule & Burnell). But in Portuguese India during the 16th century the dominant wordform became monção, from causes not understood. English sailors in the late 16th century in India adopted it with spelling monson, from monção. In year 1442, Persian historian and ambassador Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi sailed to India from the Persian Gulf, starting at the port of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. He sailed back home again in 1444. He wrote in Persian a 45-page narrative of his trip. The following is a quote from a published English translation, plus three of his Persian words have been put in brackets together with alternative translation: "The favorable time for departing by sea [to India from the Persian Gulf]... is the beginning or middle of the monsoon [= موسم mawsim = sailing season]... The end of the monsoon [= آخر موسم ākher mawsim = last part of the sailing season] is the season [= زمان zamān = time] when tempests [= طوفان tūfān[tˤwfaːn] (listenⓘ) = violent sea-storm] and attacks from pirates are to be dreaded.... The time for navigation having passed, every one who would put to sea at this season was alone responsible for his death, since he voluntarily placed himself in peril." – ref: Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi in Persian (on page 344) and in English translation. An admiral in the Turkish navy, Seydi Ali Reis, traveled with Arabs on the Indian Ocean in the mid 1550s. He started out from the Iraqi port of Basra. Writing in Turkish in 1556, he says that when he was in Basra he had to wait for almost half a year for the arrival of what he called the mowsim = "sailing season" – ref, alt link. A century later, French traveller Jean de Thévenot set sail to India from Basra. Thévenot had lived in the Middle East for about five years previously and could speak Arabic. He wrote: "I set out from Balsora [i.e. Basra] on the sixth of November 1665.... The proper season for sailing on the Indian Sea is called mousson or monson by corruption from [Arabic] moussem. The season wherein there is a constant Trade Wind upon that Sea begins commonly at the end of October and lasts to the end of April." – ref: in French, in English translation. Arabic mawsim is from Arabic root wasem = "to mark" and Arabic grammar prefix m-. It is not hard to find mawsim in medieval Arabic in the sense of "season, time of year". E.g. botanist Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) has المطر الموسمي al-matar al-mawsemī = "seasonal rain" (in a climate having rainy and rainless seasons) and he also has الموسم بمكة al-mawsem be-meka = "pilgrimage season" – ref. More historical details in Yule & Burnett, NED, Dozy, CNRTL.fr.
diccionari.cat
A servant of Ibn Badis (died 1062) used لكّ lakk | lukk = "lac" as an ingredient in making red ink, where it acted as a binder and as a red tincture – ref (pages 19 and 23), ref (pages 30 and 32). Ibn Sina's Canon around year 1025 said lak was a resinous exudation from a plant – ref. Ibn Baklarish in his book Mustaʿīnī dated around year 1100 said lakk could refer to either the resin from a tree or the crimson colorant from the lac scale insect – Reinhart Dozy, year 1869. Dozy says the Arabs used lac foremostly as a red colorant. Simon of Genoa in the 1290s said in Latin: "Lacca is a red gum from which a dye is made.... The Arabs call it lech" – ref. The word is in Latin as lacca in the early 9th century in a book about making colorants, where the lacca is used as a coloring ingredient – namely this is the book Compositiones Variae, which survives today in a physical manuscript dated early 9th century as a physical manuscript – Compositiones Variae text; ref for its date. Lacca is similarly in Latin in the Mappae Clavicula, a book about making colorants dated during and before the 12th century. Today's Italian, Spanish & Portuguese lacca | laca meaning lac and lacquer go back to medieval dates in those languages. Spanish laca and Catalan laca have records at around 1250 – CORDE, Diccionari.cat. French lacque dates from about 1400 and French also has lac, lache, and lacca with late medieval dates meaning lac and lacquer – Dictionnaire du Moyen Français. The English lac and lacquer are given 16th-century start dates in English, but English has at least two 15th-century records in the form lacca in Latin-to-English medical translations – Middle English Dictionary. When the Europeans sailed to India in the 16th century, they met the word lākh spoken by the Indians meaning the lac resin, and they imported the lac directly from India to Europe. Since the word was already in Portuguese, Latin, French, and English before they sailed, it is incorrect or disputable to say (as some dictionaries do) that the word "lac" came to English directly from India. Compare American Heritage Dictionary against Random House Dictionary on this issue at Lac @ TheFreeDictionary.com.
Magazeni = "magazine, i.e. storehouse" has several records in the 13th century in Italy in Latin, including 1234 in Venice – Raja Tazi 1998. Raja Tazi notes that the seaport of Venice at that time was in regular trading with the Arabic seaports of Ceuta, Béjaïa, Tunis, Oran, etc. The same was true of the seaport of Marseille, where the first record of magazenum (1228) occurs in a context of commerce by Marseille citizens in North African seaports – CNRTL.fr. Records in Catalan begin 1255 – magatzem @ Diccionari.cat. Regarding the Catalan magatzem = "magazine", its 'tz' is like the way that 'zz' is pronounced in the Italian magazzino, like how English "pizza" is pronounced "peetza". The spelling magazzino in Italian is on record from the first half of the 14th century (seaport of Pisa year 1318 has magazeno – TLIO). In Sicily the word is found in the seaport of Palermo in 1287 as machasseno and in seaport of Messina in 1284 as mahazenis – ref: Arabismi Medievali di Sicilia by Girolamo Caracausi, year 1983 on page 272 and page 273. Those and other early evidences imply that the word magazine came to the seaports of Italy and Provence and Catalonia directly from North Africa, and did not come from Spain and Portugal, did not come from the Spanish word almacen | almazen = "magazine". This point has been made in Origin and spread of Oriental words in European languages, by Arnald Steiger, year 1963.
Different dictionaries report different origins for "massicot". The origin reported here is the one in massicot @ CNRTL.fr, massicot @ Random House Dictionary, marzacotto @ TLIO.ovi.cnr.it, marzacotto @ treccani.it, mazacote @ RAE.es. The modern English name massicot came from the 15th century French massicot which came from the 14th century Italian mazzacotto (1303), Italian maççacocti (1312), Italian marzacotto (1355), which in Italian in the 14th century was a glaze for earthenware, not necessarily lead-based – TLIO (in Italian). Medieval Arabic writers having مسحقونيا masḥaqūniyā | مسحوقونيا masḥūqūniyā as a glaze for earthenware include Ibn Ahmad Ibn Yusuf Al-Khwarizmi (lived c. 980) (Ref), Al-Biruni (died 1048) (Ref), and Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) (Ref). The derivation of the European word from the Arabic word is complicated, and involves the fact that the European word has records in the 13th and 14th centuries in Latin in Italy in the wordform massacumia (and in France in Latin in the 14th century as massacumia, and in Spain in Spanish in the 13th century as maçaconia). For details see English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #100: Massicot.
Latin marchasita is in the medical book Liber Canonis Medicinae of Ibn Sina (died 1037) translated from Arabic to Latin by Gerard of Cremona (died c. 1187) – Ref. That translation is cited at marcassite @ CNRTL.fr as the earliest-known of the word in a European language.Latin marchasita | markasita is in the minerals book Liber de Aluminibus et Salibus, which is an Arabic-to-Latin translation with an estimated date in Latin about 1200. Its Arabic author is unknown but he was influenced by a minerals book by Al-Razi (died c. 930). This medieval Arabic text and medieval Latin translation are published in Das Buch der Alaune und Salze, year 1935, curated by Julius Ruska; the text's section G §39 has Arabic مرقشيثا marqashīthā translated as Latin markasita; see also marchasita in section G §71 Latin.
digitale-sammlungen.de
daten.digitale-sammlungen.de
The Canon of Medicine of Ibn Sina (died 1037) has Arabic mūmiyā | mūmiyāyī = "medicinal bitumen". This is written in Latin as mumia in Gerard of Cremona's late 12th century translation of Ibn Sina's book. Among the first records in Latin is mumia = "medicinal bitumen" in the Arabic-to-Latin medical translator Constantinus Africanus (died c. 1087) (ref). Bitumen here means viscous tar found naturally in the ground with some sand or other minerals naturally mixed in to some degree. As offspring from the medieval Latin, the following is an example in an English medical book in 1475: "Make a plastir of bole and sandragon and mummie and sumac and of gum arabike" – MED. Another English example, this dated 1425, spelling modernised: "Another emplaister [plaster dressing] to the same, Take mummie, glue..bole armoniak, aloes, and half an ounce mastic" – MED. In later-medieval Europe this medicinal mummie was an import from the Eastern Mediterranean with much of it coming ultimately from Iran and Yemen – Histoire du Commerce du Levant au Moyen-âge, by W. Heyd, year 1886, Volume 2 pages 635–636. Studies on the embalming methods used by the ancient Egyptians to embalm and preserve the famous Egyptian mummies show: (1) the methods used were quite variable and (2) bituminous material was used in many cases and (3) wood tar or cedar oil was used in other cases and contributed to preserving the corpse in a black or near-black color in the long term – A History of Egyptian Mummies, by J.T. Pettigrew, year 1834, Chapter VI: On Embalming, especially pages 70–71. From the corpse's bituminous or tarry material and its black color, the term mūmiyā came to be applied to the whole corpse. This transfer of meaning started in Egypt. Abdallatif al-Baghdadi (died 1231) in his description of Egypt says a black bituminous matter taken from ancient embalmed corpses is available for purchase in Egypt under the name mūmiyā, and he says it is purchased to be used medicinally in the same way as the ordinary mūmiyā – ref. The medicines book of Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) says that one of the sources of medicinal mūmiyā is the mūmiyā that is taken from old embalmed corpses found in the burial tombs in Egypt – ref. That kind of medicinal mumia, taken from ancient embalmed corpses of Egypt, made its way into medieval Latin medicines books as well – e.g. in Pandectarum Medicinae of Matthaeus Silvaticus, year 1317. Today's Arabic mūmiyāʾ means "mummy".
ganjoor.net
In the Persian language in the mid 11th century the writer Nasir Khusraw used the Persian word for lemon, لیمو līmu – ref: Nasir Khusraw, section on Tripoli: in Persian, in English translation, pages 6-7. In Arabic the records for the word lemon are hard to find until the 12th century. A very early instance in Arabic is in a chapter about the geography of Pakistan in the geography book of Al-Istakhri (died about 957; lived in Iran; probably visited Pakistan personally). Al-Istakhri's book says: "the people of this land [Balād al-Sind = Pakistan] have a fruit the size of a small apple called al-līmūna, which is bitter, very acidic" – ref. The geography book of Ibn Hawqal (died c. 988) replicates the same statement – ref.
harvard.edu
arnoldia.arboretum.harvard.edu
The common lilac tree is popular in gardens in Russia and Canada. It will not bloom under cultivation in most Arabic-speaking locales because the winters are not cold enough; the tree requires a length of cold weather to set the buds for bloom – Refs: The Lilac: a monograph, by Susan Delano McKelvey, year 1928 on pages 212-215 and 230; and Lilacs: the genus Syringa, by John L. Fiala, year 1988, on pages 5, 13 and 15–18. The tree is native in upland areas of the Balkans, where it blooms with light-violet color, and it has not been demonstrated to be native anywhere else – same refs. In world history, the earliest recorded notice of the tree comes from 16th century Istanbul, where it was grown as an ornamental, and from where it was brought to northwestern Europe for the same purpose in the later 16th. The Balkans were part of the Turkish Empire at the time. However, the western European botanists at the time imagined that the Turks in Istanbul must have gotten the new tree species from somewhere in the Orient. It was not until more than two centuries later (beginning in 1828) that Western botanists discovered and confirmed it was native in the Balkans, and afterwards the earlier misperception was shaken off only gradually – "A visit to the home of the lilac", by Edgar Anderson, year 1935, pages 2 and 4. The tree does not have a known record in Arabic until two centuries after the records begin in English and French; fr:Ellious Bocthor (died 1821), an Egyptian who lived in northern France, seems to be the author of the first known record in Arabic – see e.g. Dozy, year 1869 page 297. The lilac tree is called люляк leulyak ("lewl-yak") in today's Bulgarian and liliac ("leel-yak") in today's Romanian. In Turkish, it is called leylak today, and it was called leylak or "lilac" in Turkish in the 16th century. The Turkish was the direct source of the Western European word (details above). It is possible that the 16th century Turkish tree-name leylak was originally sourced from the southern Balkans, since the tree itself certainly was. The quantity of writings from late medieval and 16th century Balkans languages is small, and it is small also in Turkish. For that reason and other reasons, evidence is not available to determine where the Turkish name came from.
islamicmanuscripts.info
A servant of Ibn Badis (died 1062) used لكّ lakk | lukk = "lac" as an ingredient in making red ink, where it acted as a binder and as a red tincture – ref (pages 19 and 23), ref (pages 30 and 32). Ibn Sina's Canon around year 1025 said lak was a resinous exudation from a plant – ref. Ibn Baklarish in his book Mustaʿīnī dated around year 1100 said lakk could refer to either the resin from a tree or the crimson colorant from the lac scale insect – Reinhart Dozy, year 1869. Dozy says the Arabs used lac foremostly as a red colorant. Simon of Genoa in the 1290s said in Latin: "Lacca is a red gum from which a dye is made.... The Arabs call it lech" – ref. The word is in Latin as lacca in the early 9th century in a book about making colorants, where the lacca is used as a coloring ingredient – namely this is the book Compositiones Variae, which survives today in a physical manuscript dated early 9th century as a physical manuscript – Compositiones Variae text; ref for its date. Lacca is similarly in Latin in the Mappae Clavicula, a book about making colorants dated during and before the 12th century. Today's Italian, Spanish & Portuguese lacca | laca meaning lac and lacquer go back to medieval dates in those languages. Spanish laca and Catalan laca have records at around 1250 – CORDE, Diccionari.cat. French lacque dates from about 1400 and French also has lac, lache, and lacca with late medieval dates meaning lac and lacquer – Dictionnaire du Moyen Français. The English lac and lacquer are given 16th-century start dates in English, but English has at least two 15th-century records in the form lacca in Latin-to-English medical translations – Middle English Dictionary. When the Europeans sailed to India in the 16th century, they met the word lākh spoken by the Indians meaning the lac resin, and they imported the lac directly from India to Europe. Since the word was already in Portuguese, Latin, French, and English before they sailed, it is incorrect or disputable to say (as some dictionaries do) that the word "lac" came to English directly from India. Compare American Heritage Dictionary against Random House Dictionary on this issue at Lac @ TheFreeDictionary.com.
Ibn Sina's medical encyclopedia has an entry for مارقشيتا mārqashītā. It was noted by Martin Levey, year 1962, footnote 174 that part of what Ibn Sina says about mārqashītā closely echoes what's said about marqashīthā in the so-called "Stone Book of Aristotle" (also called "The Lapidary of Aristotle"), a minerals book dated 9th century in Arabic. The "Stone Book of Aristotle", which is downloadable in Arabic at Archive.org, has overall many clear influences from Syriac. Modern dictionaries of the historical Syriac language, citing early medieval Syriac sources, have marq(a)shita (also maqashitha) meaning iron sulfides, marcasite and pyrite – ref, ref, ref. The Arabic marqashita does not look native in Arabic. The word's early records in Syriac can be taken as good evidence that the word entered Arabic through Syriac. Many of the stone names in the so-called "Stone Book of Aristotle" are considered to be of Iranian origin and that can be true of marqashita too – Mineralogy & Crystallography: On the History of these Sciences through 1919 (pages 30–31).
jstor.org
A number of distinct scale-insect species yield comparable but distinct red dyes. Kermes in English today refers to one of these, but the medieval Arabic name qirmiz usually referred to a different one of these -- the one now called in English "Armenian cochineal", obtained from insects of the genus Porphyrophora (different from the genus Kermes). Some examples of medieval Arabic writers who mention al-qirmiz and whose works are online in Arabic in text-searchable format at AlWaraq.net: Ibn Duraid (died 933), Ibn Abd Rabbih (died 940), Al-Istakhri (died c. 957), Al-Biruni (died 1048), Ibn Sida (died 1066). Additional medieval history is in "The Insect Dyes of Western and West-Central Asia", by R.A. Donkin, year 1977, 33 pages. In the later medieval centuries in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin, today's Kermes dye was usually called grain or grana | granum. Kermes-like red dyes, including Armenian cochineal and Polish cochineal, were called in late medieval Italian chermisi | cremisi, which begot late medieval Latin chermes | kermes. The Latin and Italian spelling che- was pronounced KE-. One of the earliest scientific writers in Europe to use the Latin word chermes in the specifically restricted sense of today's Kermes was Pietro Andrea Mattioli in the 1540s (example in Latin). The word-form kermes entered English and French in the 16th century from the Italian-Latin chermes. More details about kermes are at English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #59: Crimson and Kermes.
A servant of Ibn Badis (died 1062) used لكّ lakk | lukk = "lac" as an ingredient in making red ink, where it acted as a binder and as a red tincture – ref (pages 19 and 23), ref (pages 30 and 32). Ibn Sina's Canon around year 1025 said lak was a resinous exudation from a plant – ref. Ibn Baklarish in his book Mustaʿīnī dated around year 1100 said lakk could refer to either the resin from a tree or the crimson colorant from the lac scale insect – Reinhart Dozy, year 1869. Dozy says the Arabs used lac foremostly as a red colorant. Simon of Genoa in the 1290s said in Latin: "Lacca is a red gum from which a dye is made.... The Arabs call it lech" – ref. The word is in Latin as lacca in the early 9th century in a book about making colorants, where the lacca is used as a coloring ingredient – namely this is the book Compositiones Variae, which survives today in a physical manuscript dated early 9th century as a physical manuscript – Compositiones Variae text; ref for its date. Lacca is similarly in Latin in the Mappae Clavicula, a book about making colorants dated during and before the 12th century. Today's Italian, Spanish & Portuguese lacca | laca meaning lac and lacquer go back to medieval dates in those languages. Spanish laca and Catalan laca have records at around 1250 – CORDE, Diccionari.cat. French lacque dates from about 1400 and French also has lac, lache, and lacca with late medieval dates meaning lac and lacquer – Dictionnaire du Moyen Français. The English lac and lacquer are given 16th-century start dates in English, but English has at least two 15th-century records in the form lacca in Latin-to-English medical translations – Middle English Dictionary. When the Europeans sailed to India in the 16th century, they met the word lākh spoken by the Indians meaning the lac resin, and they imported the lac directly from India to Europe. Since the word was already in Portuguese, Latin, French, and English before they sailed, it is incorrect or disputable to say (as some dictionaries do) that the word "lac" came to English directly from India. Compare American Heritage Dictionary against Random House Dictionary on this issue at Lac @ TheFreeDictionary.com.
The typhoon storm was written tufão in 1540 in Portuguese, touffon in 1588 in English, and tuffon in 1610 in English – all very close to the Arabic tūfān. The Koran uses this word for The Deluge in Sura29:Verse14 and the medieval Arabic dictionaries define tūfān also as "overwhelming rain" (http://www.Baheth.infoArchived 29 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine). The English word-form was later affected by the ancient Greek mythological demon Typhon – see typhon @ CNRTL.fr. It was perhaps also affected by a Chinese word tai feng. "Sometimes [typhoon is] claimed as a Chinese word meaning 'a great wind' [tai feng]... but this seems to be a late mystification." – Yule & Burnell. Other early records for the typhoon word in English include the following: tufan (1614), tuffon (1615), tufon (1625), tuffon (1626), tuffon (1665), tuffin (1674), tuffoon (1699), tuffoon (1721), tuffoon (1727), tuffoon (1745), tay-fun (1771), tiffoon (1773), tuffoon (1780), typhawn (1793), tuffoon (1802), ty-foong (1806), touffan (1811), typhoon (1819), toofan (1826), toofaun (1826), tiffoon (1831), typhoon (1832), typhoon (1840), tyfoon (1848), tufan (1850), typhoon (1851) – ref: NED; also Yule & Burnell. The first known record of the word-form "typhoon" in English is in 1819 in the classically educated poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who never went to the Indies or China. Turkish navy admiral Sidi Ali Reis (died 1563) travelled on Arab ships on the Indian Ocean in the 1550s and wrote in Turkish: "We left the port of Guador [in today's Pakistan] and again steered for Yemen. We had been at sea for several days... when suddenly from the west arose a great storm known as fil tofani [where fil = "elephant" in Arabic and Turkish].... As compared to these awful tempests, the foul weather in the Mediterranean and Black Sea is mere child's play and their towering billows are as drops of water compared to those of the Indian Sea." – ref.
onelook.com
Colcothar, Tutty, and Zarnich are three obsolete English names originating in medieval Arabic alchemy. They have been replaced by the modern names iron oxide, zinc oxide, and arsenic sulfide, respectively. Marcasite meaning iron sulfide has survived in modern science because the word was redefined in the mid-19th century to designate a certain narrow type of iron sulfide. The older, broader meaning of marcasite dates from late medieval centuries in English (examples). Today the most common type of iron sulfide is usually called by the name pyrite. But jewelry made from pyrite is still called "marcasite jewelry", a term that got established in English in the 18th century.
pbm.com
Muslin meaning fine lightweight cotton fabric made in Mosul has it earliest record in European languages in the Latin writer Andreas Alpagus Bellunensis (died c. 1522), an Italian who lived in Damascus for decades. He spelled the fabric name as mussoli in Latin – he is quoted in Yule & Burnell (1903). Another early record is in the German traveller Leonhard Rauwolf, who travelled round the Levant in 1573–1575 and published a 350-page narrative of his visit. When talking about muslin in Aleppo, Rauwolf says the stuff is brought to Aleppo from Mosul, it is made from cotton, and the Arabs call it "Mossellini" – ref German 1582 edition (page 93) (Cf an English translation 1693 (page 62)). But Rauwolf's wordform Mossellini looks like it's the Italian merchants' wordform, because the Arabic wordform was mūsilī with no letter 'n' (Dozy 1869, Lammens 1890, CNRTL.fr), and -ini in Italian is a diminutive. Italian speakers dominated the commerce between Aleppo and Western Europe at that time. William Biddulph, an English traveller in Aleppo writing in 1609, says "muslina" is a type of cloth brought to Aleppo from Mosul, but he says it is made from linen – NED. The English word "shash" | "sash" entered English from Arabic shāsh at about the same time as muslin. The Arabic shāsh was a long ribbon of lightweight muslin wrapped to form a turban. It was many meters long. It could be of cotton or linen. A large part of the market for fine lightweight muslin in the Middle East in those days was for shāsh turbans. The Thousand and One Nights tales has Arabic وإلى رأسه شاش موصلي = "and on his head a shāsh mūsilī ". John Florio's Italian dictionary in 1611 has Italian mussolo defined as "a kind of head-attire or turbant that the Persians wear" – ref. Later in the 17th century and still today in Italian mussola = "muslin". Italian today also has mussolina = "fine muslin".
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Different dictionaries report different origins for "massicot". The origin reported here is the one in massicot @ CNRTL.fr, massicot @ Random House Dictionary, marzacotto @ TLIO.ovi.cnr.it, marzacotto @ treccani.it, mazacote @ RAE.es. The modern English name massicot came from the 15th century French massicot which came from the 14th century Italian mazzacotto (1303), Italian maççacocti (1312), Italian marzacotto (1355), which in Italian in the 14th century was a glaze for earthenware, not necessarily lead-based – TLIO (in Italian). Medieval Arabic writers having مسحقونيا masḥaqūniyā | مسحوقونيا masḥūqūniyā as a glaze for earthenware include Ibn Ahmad Ibn Yusuf Al-Khwarizmi (lived c. 980) (Ref), Al-Biruni (died 1048) (Ref), and Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) (Ref). The derivation of the European word from the Arabic word is complicated, and involves the fact that the European word has records in the 13th and 14th centuries in Latin in Italy in the wordform massacumia (and in France in Latin in the 14th century as massacumia, and in Spain in Spanish in the 13th century as maçaconia). For details see English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #100: Massicot.
The early history of the lilac plant in Western Europe is in the book The Lilac: a monograph, by Susan Delano McKelvey, year 1928, on pages 204–209. The species of lilac that was first grown in Western Europe is the Common Lilac (Syringa vulgaris). It was first introduced to Western Europe at or before 1563 by an ambassador of Austria stationed in Istanbul, ambassador Ogier de Busbecq. Busbecq sent specimens of the plant to the professional botanist Petrus Andreas Matthiolus, who at that time was employed by the Austrian rulers. The first published instance of the name is in a botany book by Matthiolus in 1565 in Latin. Matthiolus in 1565 said Austria's ambassador "Busbeke" brought the plant from Istanbul (Constantinople) under the name LILAC(Ref). Busbecq was stationed in Istanbul from 1556 to 1563. He is credited with being among the earliest to bring to western Europe several kinds of ornamental flowering plants, which he had found in cultivation in Istanbul. Busbecq said: "The Turks are passionately fond of flowers" (Ref). Busbecq planted lilacs at his house in Vienna in Austria in 1563, and it is possible that during the period 1557-1563 an associate of Busbecq in Istanbul may have distributed some lilacs to the West for planting. Those plantings are the earliest known lilacs to grow in any European gardens outside the Balkans – Ref, ref. The botanist Carolus Clusius lived in Vienna from 1573 to 1588 in the employment of the Austrian rulers. Lilac is in a botany book by Clusius in 1576, where Clusius says the plant has come from the Turks (Ref) and in a second edition in 1601 Clusius says the plant was brought from Istanbul specifically (Ref). The earliest known instance of lilac in French is in a Latin-to-French translation of Matthiolus's book in 1572 (Ref). The next known in French is in 1605 (Ref). The earliest known in English is in 1596 in the botanist John Gerarde, who mentions Matthiolus by name in connection with the plant ("Lylac Mathioli") (Ref). John Gerarde at that time had the plant growing in London. A book of Gerarde's in 1597 has a good drawing of a lilac branch and has a criticism of Matthiolus's plant description (ref: pages 1213-1215). Some of today's English dictionaries continue to say erroneously that the word lilac entered Western Europe by transfer from Arabic to Spanish (with no date given). Therefore, it is worth mentioning that today's Spanish dictionaries say the Spanish lila = "lilac" has been borrowed from the French (e.g. Diccionario RAE), which is to say that Spanish researchers have found no record in Spanish until some time after the records begin in French. The large Spanish database CORDE, although not all-inclusive, has no record in Spanish until 1772.
There is a Spanish almacabra = "Islamic graveyard" – Diccionario RAE. Almacabra is rare. Its earliest known record is 1554 (two centuries after the earliest French macabre). Almocavar has records from centuries earlier in medieval Portuguese, beginning in Portuguese Latin in 1137 – Iberoromanische Arabismen, by Y. Kiegel-Keicher, year 2005 on page 138.
In Spanish, amasar is the usual word for "to knead" but Spanish also has a lesser-used form masar = "to knead" – Diccionario RAE.
corpus.rae.es
A servant of Ibn Badis (died 1062) used لكّ lakk | lukk = "lac" as an ingredient in making red ink, where it acted as a binder and as a red tincture – ref (pages 19 and 23), ref (pages 30 and 32). Ibn Sina's Canon around year 1025 said lak was a resinous exudation from a plant – ref. Ibn Baklarish in his book Mustaʿīnī dated around year 1100 said lakk could refer to either the resin from a tree or the crimson colorant from the lac scale insect – Reinhart Dozy, year 1869. Dozy says the Arabs used lac foremostly as a red colorant. Simon of Genoa in the 1290s said in Latin: "Lacca is a red gum from which a dye is made.... The Arabs call it lech" – ref. The word is in Latin as lacca in the early 9th century in a book about making colorants, where the lacca is used as a coloring ingredient – namely this is the book Compositiones Variae, which survives today in a physical manuscript dated early 9th century as a physical manuscript – Compositiones Variae text; ref for its date. Lacca is similarly in Latin in the Mappae Clavicula, a book about making colorants dated during and before the 12th century. Today's Italian, Spanish & Portuguese lacca | laca meaning lac and lacquer go back to medieval dates in those languages. Spanish laca and Catalan laca have records at around 1250 – CORDE, Diccionari.cat. French lacque dates from about 1400 and French also has lac, lache, and lacca with late medieval dates meaning lac and lacquer – Dictionnaire du Moyen Français. The English lac and lacquer are given 16th-century start dates in English, but English has at least two 15th-century records in the form lacca in Latin-to-English medical translations – Middle English Dictionary. When the Europeans sailed to India in the 16th century, they met the word lākh spoken by the Indians meaning the lac resin, and they imported the lac directly from India to Europe. Since the word was already in Portuguese, Latin, French, and English before they sailed, it is incorrect or disputable to say (as some dictionaries do) that the word "lac" came to English directly from India. Compare American Heritage Dictionary against Random House Dictionary on this issue at Lac @ TheFreeDictionary.com.
In standard Arabic today مطرح matrah means "location"; it does not mean mattress or rug or suchlike. But in medieval Arabic there is lots of documentation that, in addition to meaning "location", it had a meaning of a rug or padded fabric for lying on. A handful of medieval Arabic examples are given in Reinhart Dozy, year 1869 including from the writers Al-Tha'alabi (died 1038), Ibn Hayyan (died 1075), and Al-Qazwini (died 1283). The Cairo Geniza records of the 11th and 12th centuries contain many instances of Arabic matrah meaning a padded fabric for sleeping on – A Mediterranean Society: Volume IV, Daily Life, by S.D. Goitein, year 1967. A reason for confidence that the medieval European mattress word came from Arabic is that the word was sometimes spelled with al- prefixed in European languages. Some examples of that are given in Dozy's book and one additional example is the year 1291 Latin almatracium @ DuCange. The letter 'c' in the Latin almatracium | mataracium was pronounced as sound /s/. Medieval Latin also had almatracum | materacum where the 'c' was pronounced as sound /k/. The 'h' of the Arabic matrah is strongly aspirated. Especially when it occurs at the end of a word, there is nothing close to it in the Latinate languages (nor in English). It is denoted sound / ħ/. It was converted to /k/ in Catalan almatrac and /s/ in Italian materasso. In the European languages the word's earliest known records are in Catalan-Latin in legal notarizations spelled almatrazt (circa 1085), almatraf (year 1122), and almatrac (year 1134); more about those early instances is in the book La Terminologia Tèxtil a la Documentació Llatina de la Catalunya Altomedieval, by Laura Trias Ferri, year 2012. The mattress word in later-medieval Europe usually meant a somewhat padded underblanket, not a deep stuffed mattress, not a "featherbed". Sets of medieval examples are online at MED (in English), DMF (in French), TLIO (in Italian), Caracausi (in Sicilian), Gual Camarena (Catalan and Spanish), almadraque @ CORDE (in Spanish), Benecke Müller (in German), Matthias Lexer (in German), and Du Cange (in Latin) (Latin wordforms in Du Cange include matracium, matratium, matratum, mataratium, materatium, materacium, almatracum). In the early records in European languages in some cases the padding material was cotton fluff, which in those days was an import from Arabic lands and was a preferred material for padding fabrics. Example: year 1232 Italian-Latin materacum bombesi where bombesi = "cotton fluff". Example: year 1298 Italian una materazza... piene di bambagia = "a mattress filled with cotton lint". The Arabs slept on padded blankets which were rolled up and put away during the day, and spread out on the floor at bedtime; "they did not have beds properly speaking in the fashion of us French" – Devic year 1876; "everyone passing through the Middle East can understand how a word for a throw can lead to a word for a bed" – Lammens year 1890.
The early history of the lilac plant in Western Europe is in the book The Lilac: a monograph, by Susan Delano McKelvey, year 1928, on pages 204–209. The species of lilac that was first grown in Western Europe is the Common Lilac (Syringa vulgaris). It was first introduced to Western Europe at or before 1563 by an ambassador of Austria stationed in Istanbul, ambassador Ogier de Busbecq. Busbecq sent specimens of the plant to the professional botanist Petrus Andreas Matthiolus, who at that time was employed by the Austrian rulers. The first published instance of the name is in a botany book by Matthiolus in 1565 in Latin. Matthiolus in 1565 said Austria's ambassador "Busbeke" brought the plant from Istanbul (Constantinople) under the name LILAC(Ref). Busbecq was stationed in Istanbul from 1556 to 1563. He is credited with being among the earliest to bring to western Europe several kinds of ornamental flowering plants, which he had found in cultivation in Istanbul. Busbecq said: "The Turks are passionately fond of flowers" (Ref). Busbecq planted lilacs at his house in Vienna in Austria in 1563, and it is possible that during the period 1557-1563 an associate of Busbecq in Istanbul may have distributed some lilacs to the West for planting. Those plantings are the earliest known lilacs to grow in any European gardens outside the Balkans – Ref, ref. The botanist Carolus Clusius lived in Vienna from 1573 to 1588 in the employment of the Austrian rulers. Lilac is in a botany book by Clusius in 1576, where Clusius says the plant has come from the Turks (Ref) and in a second edition in 1601 Clusius says the plant was brought from Istanbul specifically (Ref). The earliest known instance of lilac in French is in a Latin-to-French translation of Matthiolus's book in 1572 (Ref). The next known in French is in 1605 (Ref). The earliest known in English is in 1596 in the botanist John Gerarde, who mentions Matthiolus by name in connection with the plant ("Lylac Mathioli") (Ref). John Gerarde at that time had the plant growing in London. A book of Gerarde's in 1597 has a good drawing of a lilac branch and has a criticism of Matthiolus's plant description (ref: pages 1213-1215). Some of today's English dictionaries continue to say erroneously that the word lilac entered Western Europe by transfer from Arabic to Spanish (with no date given). Therefore, it is worth mentioning that today's Spanish dictionaries say the Spanish lila = "lilac" has been borrowed from the French (e.g. Diccionario RAE), which is to say that Spanish researchers have found no record in Spanish until some time after the records begin in French. The large Spanish database CORDE, although not all-inclusive, has no record in Spanish until 1772.
In standard Arabic today مطرح matrah means "location"; it does not mean mattress or rug or suchlike. But in medieval Arabic there is lots of documentation that, in addition to meaning "location", it had a meaning of a rug or padded fabric for lying on. A handful of medieval Arabic examples are given in Reinhart Dozy, year 1869 including from the writers Al-Tha'alabi (died 1038), Ibn Hayyan (died 1075), and Al-Qazwini (died 1283). The Cairo Geniza records of the 11th and 12th centuries contain many instances of Arabic matrah meaning a padded fabric for sleeping on – A Mediterranean Society: Volume IV, Daily Life, by S.D. Goitein, year 1967. A reason for confidence that the medieval European mattress word came from Arabic is that the word was sometimes spelled with al- prefixed in European languages. Some examples of that are given in Dozy's book and one additional example is the year 1291 Latin almatracium @ DuCange. The letter 'c' in the Latin almatracium | mataracium was pronounced as sound /s/. Medieval Latin also had almatracum | materacum where the 'c' was pronounced as sound /k/. The 'h' of the Arabic matrah is strongly aspirated. Especially when it occurs at the end of a word, there is nothing close to it in the Latinate languages (nor in English). It is denoted sound / ħ/. It was converted to /k/ in Catalan almatrac and /s/ in Italian materasso. In the European languages the word's earliest known records are in Catalan-Latin in legal notarizations spelled almatrazt (circa 1085), almatraf (year 1122), and almatrac (year 1134); more about those early instances is in the book La Terminologia Tèxtil a la Documentació Llatina de la Catalunya Altomedieval, by Laura Trias Ferri, year 2012. The mattress word in later-medieval Europe usually meant a somewhat padded underblanket, not a deep stuffed mattress, not a "featherbed". Sets of medieval examples are online at MED (in English), DMF (in French), TLIO (in Italian), Caracausi (in Sicilian), Gual Camarena (Catalan and Spanish), almadraque @ CORDE (in Spanish), Benecke Müller (in German), Matthias Lexer (in German), and Du Cange (in Latin) (Latin wordforms in Du Cange include matracium, matratium, matratum, mataratium, materatium, materacium, almatracum). In the early records in European languages in some cases the padding material was cotton fluff, which in those days was an import from Arabic lands and was a preferred material for padding fabrics. Example: year 1232 Italian-Latin materacum bombesi where bombesi = "cotton fluff". Example: year 1298 Italian una materazza... piene di bambagia = "a mattress filled with cotton lint". The Arabs slept on padded blankets which were rolled up and put away during the day, and spread out on the floor at bedtime; "they did not have beds properly speaking in the fashion of us French" – Devic year 1876; "everyone passing through the Middle East can understand how a word for a throw can lead to a word for a bed" – Lammens year 1890.
The Canon of Medicine of Ibn Sina (died 1037) has Arabic mūmiyā | mūmiyāyī = "medicinal bitumen". This is written in Latin as mumia in Gerard of Cremona's late 12th century translation of Ibn Sina's book. Among the first records in Latin is mumia = "medicinal bitumen" in the Arabic-to-Latin medical translator Constantinus Africanus (died c. 1087) (ref). Bitumen here means viscous tar found naturally in the ground with some sand or other minerals naturally mixed in to some degree. As offspring from the medieval Latin, the following is an example in an English medical book in 1475: "Make a plastir of bole and sandragon and mummie and sumac and of gum arabike" – MED. Another English example, this dated 1425, spelling modernised: "Another emplaister [plaster dressing] to the same, Take mummie, glue..bole armoniak, aloes, and half an ounce mastic" – MED. In later-medieval Europe this medicinal mummie was an import from the Eastern Mediterranean with much of it coming ultimately from Iran and Yemen – Histoire du Commerce du Levant au Moyen-âge, by W. Heyd, year 1886, Volume 2 pages 635–636. Studies on the embalming methods used by the ancient Egyptians to embalm and preserve the famous Egyptian mummies show: (1) the methods used were quite variable and (2) bituminous material was used in many cases and (3) wood tar or cedar oil was used in other cases and contributed to preserving the corpse in a black or near-black color in the long term – A History of Egyptian Mummies, by J.T. Pettigrew, year 1834, Chapter VI: On Embalming, especially pages 70–71. From the corpse's bituminous or tarry material and its black color, the term mūmiyā came to be applied to the whole corpse. This transfer of meaning started in Egypt. Abdallatif al-Baghdadi (died 1231) in his description of Egypt says a black bituminous matter taken from ancient embalmed corpses is available for purchase in Egypt under the name mūmiyā, and he says it is purchased to be used medicinally in the same way as the ordinary mūmiyā – ref. The medicines book of Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) says that one of the sources of medicinal mūmiyā is the mūmiyā that is taken from old embalmed corpses found in the burial tombs in Egypt – ref. That kind of medicinal mumia, taken from ancient embalmed corpses of Egypt, made its way into medieval Latin medicines books as well – e.g. in Pandectarum Medicinae of Matthaeus Silvaticus, year 1317. Today's Arabic mūmiyāʾ means "mummy".
tdx.cat
In standard Arabic today مطرح matrah means "location"; it does not mean mattress or rug or suchlike. But in medieval Arabic there is lots of documentation that, in addition to meaning "location", it had a meaning of a rug or padded fabric for lying on. A handful of medieval Arabic examples are given in Reinhart Dozy, year 1869 including from the writers Al-Tha'alabi (died 1038), Ibn Hayyan (died 1075), and Al-Qazwini (died 1283). The Cairo Geniza records of the 11th and 12th centuries contain many instances of Arabic matrah meaning a padded fabric for sleeping on – A Mediterranean Society: Volume IV, Daily Life, by S.D. Goitein, year 1967. A reason for confidence that the medieval European mattress word came from Arabic is that the word was sometimes spelled with al- prefixed in European languages. Some examples of that are given in Dozy's book and one additional example is the year 1291 Latin almatracium @ DuCange. The letter 'c' in the Latin almatracium | mataracium was pronounced as sound /s/. Medieval Latin also had almatracum | materacum where the 'c' was pronounced as sound /k/. The 'h' of the Arabic matrah is strongly aspirated. Especially when it occurs at the end of a word, there is nothing close to it in the Latinate languages (nor in English). It is denoted sound / ħ/. It was converted to /k/ in Catalan almatrac and /s/ in Italian materasso. In the European languages the word's earliest known records are in Catalan-Latin in legal notarizations spelled almatrazt (circa 1085), almatraf (year 1122), and almatrac (year 1134); more about those early instances is in the book La Terminologia Tèxtil a la Documentació Llatina de la Catalunya Altomedieval, by Laura Trias Ferri, year 2012. The mattress word in later-medieval Europe usually meant a somewhat padded underblanket, not a deep stuffed mattress, not a "featherbed". Sets of medieval examples are online at MED (in English), DMF (in French), TLIO (in Italian), Caracausi (in Sicilian), Gual Camarena (Catalan and Spanish), almadraque @ CORDE (in Spanish), Benecke Müller (in German), Matthias Lexer (in German), and Du Cange (in Latin) (Latin wordforms in Du Cange include matracium, matratium, matratum, mataratium, materatium, materacium, almatracum). In the early records in European languages in some cases the padding material was cotton fluff, which in those days was an import from Arabic lands and was a preferred material for padding fabrics. Example: year 1232 Italian-Latin materacum bombesi where bombesi = "cotton fluff". Example: year 1298 Italian una materazza... piene di bambagia = "a mattress filled with cotton lint". The Arabs slept on padded blankets which were rolled up and put away during the day, and spread out on the floor at bedtime; "they did not have beds properly speaking in the fashion of us French" – Devic year 1876; "everyone passing through the Middle East can understand how a word for a throw can lead to a word for a bed" – Lammens year 1890.
thefreedictionary.com
A servant of Ibn Badis (died 1062) used لكّ lakk | lukk = "lac" as an ingredient in making red ink, where it acted as a binder and as a red tincture – ref (pages 19 and 23), ref (pages 30 and 32). Ibn Sina's Canon around year 1025 said lak was a resinous exudation from a plant – ref. Ibn Baklarish in his book Mustaʿīnī dated around year 1100 said lakk could refer to either the resin from a tree or the crimson colorant from the lac scale insect – Reinhart Dozy, year 1869. Dozy says the Arabs used lac foremostly as a red colorant. Simon of Genoa in the 1290s said in Latin: "Lacca is a red gum from which a dye is made.... The Arabs call it lech" – ref. The word is in Latin as lacca in the early 9th century in a book about making colorants, where the lacca is used as a coloring ingredient – namely this is the book Compositiones Variae, which survives today in a physical manuscript dated early 9th century as a physical manuscript – Compositiones Variae text; ref for its date. Lacca is similarly in Latin in the Mappae Clavicula, a book about making colorants dated during and before the 12th century. Today's Italian, Spanish & Portuguese lacca | laca meaning lac and lacquer go back to medieval dates in those languages. Spanish laca and Catalan laca have records at around 1250 – CORDE, Diccionari.cat. French lacque dates from about 1400 and French also has lac, lache, and lacca with late medieval dates meaning lac and lacquer – Dictionnaire du Moyen Français. The English lac and lacquer are given 16th-century start dates in English, but English has at least two 15th-century records in the form lacca in Latin-to-English medical translations – Middle English Dictionary. When the Europeans sailed to India in the 16th century, they met the word lākh spoken by the Indians meaning the lac resin, and they imported the lac directly from India to Europe. Since the word was already in Portuguese, Latin, French, and English before they sailed, it is incorrect or disputable to say (as some dictionaries do) that the word "lac" came to English directly from India. Compare American Heritage Dictionary against Random House Dictionary on this issue at Lac @ TheFreeDictionary.com.
Different dictionaries report different origins for "massicot". The origin reported here is the one in massicot @ CNRTL.fr, massicot @ Random House Dictionary, marzacotto @ TLIO.ovi.cnr.it, marzacotto @ treccani.it, mazacote @ RAE.es. The modern English name massicot came from the 15th century French massicot which came from the 14th century Italian mazzacotto (1303), Italian maççacocti (1312), Italian marzacotto (1355), which in Italian in the 14th century was a glaze for earthenware, not necessarily lead-based – TLIO (in Italian). Medieval Arabic writers having مسحقونيا masḥaqūniyā | مسحوقونيا masḥūqūniyā as a glaze for earthenware include Ibn Ahmad Ibn Yusuf Al-Khwarizmi (lived c. 980) (Ref), Al-Biruni (died 1048) (Ref), and Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) (Ref). The derivation of the European word from the Arabic word is complicated, and involves the fact that the European word has records in the 13th and 14th centuries in Latin in Italy in the wordform massacumia (and in France in Latin in the 14th century as massacumia, and in Spain in Spanish in the 13th century as maçaconia). For details see English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #100: Massicot.
um.es
In standard Arabic today مطرح matrah means "location"; it does not mean mattress or rug or suchlike. But in medieval Arabic there is lots of documentation that, in addition to meaning "location", it had a meaning of a rug or padded fabric for lying on. A handful of medieval Arabic examples are given in Reinhart Dozy, year 1869 including from the writers Al-Tha'alabi (died 1038), Ibn Hayyan (died 1075), and Al-Qazwini (died 1283). The Cairo Geniza records of the 11th and 12th centuries contain many instances of Arabic matrah meaning a padded fabric for sleeping on – A Mediterranean Society: Volume IV, Daily Life, by S.D. Goitein, year 1967. A reason for confidence that the medieval European mattress word came from Arabic is that the word was sometimes spelled with al- prefixed in European languages. Some examples of that are given in Dozy's book and one additional example is the year 1291 Latin almatracium @ DuCange. The letter 'c' in the Latin almatracium | mataracium was pronounced as sound /s/. Medieval Latin also had almatracum | materacum where the 'c' was pronounced as sound /k/. The 'h' of the Arabic matrah is strongly aspirated. Especially when it occurs at the end of a word, there is nothing close to it in the Latinate languages (nor in English). It is denoted sound / ħ/. It was converted to /k/ in Catalan almatrac and /s/ in Italian materasso. In the European languages the word's earliest known records are in Catalan-Latin in legal notarizations spelled almatrazt (circa 1085), almatraf (year 1122), and almatrac (year 1134); more about those early instances is in the book La Terminologia Tèxtil a la Documentació Llatina de la Catalunya Altomedieval, by Laura Trias Ferri, year 2012. The mattress word in later-medieval Europe usually meant a somewhat padded underblanket, not a deep stuffed mattress, not a "featherbed". Sets of medieval examples are online at MED (in English), DMF (in French), TLIO (in Italian), Caracausi (in Sicilian), Gual Camarena (Catalan and Spanish), almadraque @ CORDE (in Spanish), Benecke Müller (in German), Matthias Lexer (in German), and Du Cange (in Latin) (Latin wordforms in Du Cange include matracium, matratium, matratum, mataratium, materatium, materacium, almatracum). In the early records in European languages in some cases the padding material was cotton fluff, which in those days was an import from Arabic lands and was a preferred material for padding fabrics. Example: year 1232 Italian-Latin materacum bombesi where bombesi = "cotton fluff". Example: year 1298 Italian una materazza... piene di bambagia = "a mattress filled with cotton lint". The Arabs slept on padded blankets which were rolled up and put away during the day, and spread out on the floor at bedtime; "they did not have beds properly speaking in the fashion of us French" – Devic year 1876; "everyone passing through the Middle East can understand how a word for a throw can lead to a word for a bed" – Lammens year 1890.
umich.edu
quod.lib.umich.edu
A number of distinct scale-insect species yield comparable but distinct red dyes. Kermes in English today refers to one of these, but the medieval Arabic name qirmiz usually referred to a different one of these -- the one now called in English "Armenian cochineal", obtained from insects of the genus Porphyrophora (different from the genus Kermes). Some examples of medieval Arabic writers who mention al-qirmiz and whose works are online in Arabic in text-searchable format at AlWaraq.net: Ibn Duraid (died 933), Ibn Abd Rabbih (died 940), Al-Istakhri (died c. 957), Al-Biruni (died 1048), Ibn Sida (died 1066). Additional medieval history is in "The Insect Dyes of Western and West-Central Asia", by R.A. Donkin, year 1977, 33 pages. In the later medieval centuries in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin, today's Kermes dye was usually called grain or grana | granum. Kermes-like red dyes, including Armenian cochineal and Polish cochineal, were called in late medieval Italian chermisi | cremisi, which begot late medieval Latin chermes | kermes. The Latin and Italian spelling che- was pronounced KE-. One of the earliest scientific writers in Europe to use the Latin word chermes in the specifically restricted sense of today's Kermes was Pietro Andrea Mattioli in the 1540s (example in Latin). The word-form kermes entered English and French in the 16th century from the Italian-Latin chermes. More details about kermes are at English Words Of Arabic Etymological Ancestry: Note #59: Crimson and Kermes.
A servant of Ibn Badis (died 1062) used لكّ lakk | lukk = "lac" as an ingredient in making red ink, where it acted as a binder and as a red tincture – ref (pages 19 and 23), ref (pages 30 and 32). Ibn Sina's Canon around year 1025 said lak was a resinous exudation from a plant – ref. Ibn Baklarish in his book Mustaʿīnī dated around year 1100 said lakk could refer to either the resin from a tree or the crimson colorant from the lac scale insect – Reinhart Dozy, year 1869. Dozy says the Arabs used lac foremostly as a red colorant. Simon of Genoa in the 1290s said in Latin: "Lacca is a red gum from which a dye is made.... The Arabs call it lech" – ref. The word is in Latin as lacca in the early 9th century in a book about making colorants, where the lacca is used as a coloring ingredient – namely this is the book Compositiones Variae, which survives today in a physical manuscript dated early 9th century as a physical manuscript – Compositiones Variae text; ref for its date. Lacca is similarly in Latin in the Mappae Clavicula, a book about making colorants dated during and before the 12th century. Today's Italian, Spanish & Portuguese lacca | laca meaning lac and lacquer go back to medieval dates in those languages. Spanish laca and Catalan laca have records at around 1250 – CORDE, Diccionari.cat. French lacque dates from about 1400 and French also has lac, lache, and lacca with late medieval dates meaning lac and lacquer – Dictionnaire du Moyen Français. The English lac and lacquer are given 16th-century start dates in English, but English has at least two 15th-century records in the form lacca in Latin-to-English medical translations – Middle English Dictionary. When the Europeans sailed to India in the 16th century, they met the word lākh spoken by the Indians meaning the lac resin, and they imported the lac directly from India to Europe. Since the word was already in Portuguese, Latin, French, and English before they sailed, it is incorrect or disputable to say (as some dictionaries do) that the word "lac" came to English directly from India. Compare American Heritage Dictionary against Random House Dictionary on this issue at Lac @ TheFreeDictionary.com.
Colcothar, Tutty, and Zarnich are three obsolete English names originating in medieval Arabic alchemy. They have been replaced by the modern names iron oxide, zinc oxide, and arsenic sulfide, respectively. Marcasite meaning iron sulfide has survived in modern science because the word was redefined in the mid-19th century to designate a certain narrow type of iron sulfide. The older, broader meaning of marcasite dates from late medieval centuries in English (examples). Today the most common type of iron sulfide is usually called by the name pyrite. But jewelry made from pyrite is still called "marcasite jewelry", a term that got established in English in the 18th century.
In standard Arabic today مطرح matrah means "location"; it does not mean mattress or rug or suchlike. But in medieval Arabic there is lots of documentation that, in addition to meaning "location", it had a meaning of a rug or padded fabric for lying on. A handful of medieval Arabic examples are given in Reinhart Dozy, year 1869 including from the writers Al-Tha'alabi (died 1038), Ibn Hayyan (died 1075), and Al-Qazwini (died 1283). The Cairo Geniza records of the 11th and 12th centuries contain many instances of Arabic matrah meaning a padded fabric for sleeping on – A Mediterranean Society: Volume IV, Daily Life, by S.D. Goitein, year 1967. A reason for confidence that the medieval European mattress word came from Arabic is that the word was sometimes spelled with al- prefixed in European languages. Some examples of that are given in Dozy's book and one additional example is the year 1291 Latin almatracium @ DuCange. The letter 'c' in the Latin almatracium | mataracium was pronounced as sound /s/. Medieval Latin also had almatracum | materacum where the 'c' was pronounced as sound /k/. The 'h' of the Arabic matrah is strongly aspirated. Especially when it occurs at the end of a word, there is nothing close to it in the Latinate languages (nor in English). It is denoted sound / ħ/. It was converted to /k/ in Catalan almatrac and /s/ in Italian materasso. In the European languages the word's earliest known records are in Catalan-Latin in legal notarizations spelled almatrazt (circa 1085), almatraf (year 1122), and almatrac (year 1134); more about those early instances is in the book La Terminologia Tèxtil a la Documentació Llatina de la Catalunya Altomedieval, by Laura Trias Ferri, year 2012. The mattress word in later-medieval Europe usually meant a somewhat padded underblanket, not a deep stuffed mattress, not a "featherbed". Sets of medieval examples are online at MED (in English), DMF (in French), TLIO (in Italian), Caracausi (in Sicilian), Gual Camarena (Catalan and Spanish), almadraque @ CORDE (in Spanish), Benecke Müller (in German), Matthias Lexer (in German), and Du Cange (in Latin) (Latin wordforms in Du Cange include matracium, matratium, matratum, mataratium, materatium, materacium, almatracum). In the early records in European languages in some cases the padding material was cotton fluff, which in those days was an import from Arabic lands and was a preferred material for padding fabrics. Example: year 1232 Italian-Latin materacum bombesi where bombesi = "cotton fluff". Example: year 1298 Italian una materazza... piene di bambagia = "a mattress filled with cotton lint". The Arabs slept on padded blankets which were rolled up and put away during the day, and spread out on the floor at bedtime; "they did not have beds properly speaking in the fashion of us French" – Devic year 1876; "everyone passing through the Middle East can understand how a word for a throw can lead to a word for a bed" – Lammens year 1890.
The Canon of Medicine of Ibn Sina (died 1037) has Arabic mūmiyā | mūmiyāyī = "medicinal bitumen". This is written in Latin as mumia in Gerard of Cremona's late 12th century translation of Ibn Sina's book. Among the first records in Latin is mumia = "medicinal bitumen" in the Arabic-to-Latin medical translator Constantinus Africanus (died c. 1087) (ref). Bitumen here means viscous tar found naturally in the ground with some sand or other minerals naturally mixed in to some degree. As offspring from the medieval Latin, the following is an example in an English medical book in 1475: "Make a plastir of bole and sandragon and mummie and sumac and of gum arabike" – MED. Another English example, this dated 1425, spelling modernised: "Another emplaister [plaster dressing] to the same, Take mummie, glue..bole armoniak, aloes, and half an ounce mastic" – MED. In later-medieval Europe this medicinal mummie was an import from the Eastern Mediterranean with much of it coming ultimately from Iran and Yemen – Histoire du Commerce du Levant au Moyen-âge, by W. Heyd, year 1886, Volume 2 pages 635–636. Studies on the embalming methods used by the ancient Egyptians to embalm and preserve the famous Egyptian mummies show: (1) the methods used were quite variable and (2) bituminous material was used in many cases and (3) wood tar or cedar oil was used in other cases and contributed to preserving the corpse in a black or near-black color in the long term – A History of Egyptian Mummies, by J.T. Pettigrew, year 1834, Chapter VI: On Embalming, especially pages 70–71. From the corpse's bituminous or tarry material and its black color, the term mūmiyā came to be applied to the whole corpse. This transfer of meaning started in Egypt. Abdallatif al-Baghdadi (died 1231) in his description of Egypt says a black bituminous matter taken from ancient embalmed corpses is available for purchase in Egypt under the name mūmiyā, and he says it is purchased to be used medicinally in the same way as the ordinary mūmiyā – ref. The medicines book of Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) says that one of the sources of medicinal mūmiyā is the mūmiyā that is taken from old embalmed corpses found in the burial tombs in Egypt – ref. That kind of medicinal mumia, taken from ancient embalmed corpses of Egypt, made its way into medieval Latin medicines books as well – e.g. in Pandectarum Medicinae of Matthaeus Silvaticus, year 1317. Today's Arabic mūmiyāʾ means "mummy".
The typhoon storm was written tufão in 1540 in Portuguese, touffon in 1588 in English, and tuffon in 1610 in English – all very close to the Arabic tūfān. The Koran uses this word for The Deluge in Sura29:Verse14 and the medieval Arabic dictionaries define tūfān also as "overwhelming rain" (http://www.Baheth.infoArchived 29 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine). The English word-form was later affected by the ancient Greek mythological demon Typhon – see typhon @ CNRTL.fr. It was perhaps also affected by a Chinese word tai feng. "Sometimes [typhoon is] claimed as a Chinese word meaning 'a great wind' [tai feng]... but this seems to be a late mystification." – Yule & Burnell. Other early records for the typhoon word in English include the following: tufan (1614), tuffon (1615), tufon (1625), tuffon (1626), tuffon (1665), tuffin (1674), tuffoon (1699), tuffoon (1721), tuffoon (1727), tuffoon (1745), tay-fun (1771), tiffoon (1773), tuffoon (1780), typhawn (1793), tuffoon (1802), ty-foong (1806), touffan (1811), typhoon (1819), toofan (1826), toofaun (1826), tiffoon (1831), typhoon (1832), typhoon (1840), tyfoon (1848), tufan (1850), typhoon (1851) – ref: NED; also Yule & Burnell. The first known record of the word-form "typhoon" in English is in 1819 in the classically educated poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who never went to the Indies or China. Turkish navy admiral Sidi Ali Reis (died 1563) travelled on Arab ships on the Indian Ocean in the 1550s and wrote in Turkish: "We left the port of Guador [in today's Pakistan] and again steered for Yemen. We had been at sea for several days... when suddenly from the west arose a great storm known as fil tofani [where fil = "elephant" in Arabic and Turkish].... As compared to these awful tempests, the foul weather in the Mediterranean and Black Sea is mere child's play and their towering billows are as drops of water compared to those of the Indian Sea." – ref.
In India, from October to April the winds blow from the northeast, while from April to October they blow approximately from the southwest (with heavy rains arriving in June); see monsoon of India. The first governor of Portuguese India, Afonso de Albuquerque (died 1515), often mentions the monsoon winds in his letters. He usually spells it mouçam. E.g. in a letter on 8 November 1514 he writes of trade goods which were "am de partyr nesta mouçam d abryll" = "to depart at this April's monsoon" – ref. The Portuguese ç is pronounced s. Mouçam is phonetically close to the Arabic mawsim. Diogo do Couto lived in Portuguese India in the 1560s, and consistently spelled it moução (ref: Yule & Burnell), which is close to the Arabic form as well -- the letter ã of Portuguese is 'a' with nasalization and is etymologically an 'an'. Portuguese usually replaces 'an' with ã. From the Portuguese word, an Italian traveler in India in the 1560s, Cesare Federici, writing in Italian, spelled it moson (ref: Yule & Burnell). But in Portuguese India during the 16th century the dominant wordform became monção, from causes not understood. English sailors in the late 16th century in India adopted it with spelling monson, from monção. In year 1442, Persian historian and ambassador Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi sailed to India from the Persian Gulf, starting at the port of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. He sailed back home again in 1444. He wrote in Persian a 45-page narrative of his trip. The following is a quote from a published English translation, plus three of his Persian words have been put in brackets together with alternative translation: "The favorable time for departing by sea [to India from the Persian Gulf]... is the beginning or middle of the monsoon [= موسم mawsim = sailing season]... The end of the monsoon [= آخر موسم ākher mawsim = last part of the sailing season] is the season [= زمان zamān = time] when tempests [= طوفان tūfān[tˤwfaːn] (listenⓘ) = violent sea-storm] and attacks from pirates are to be dreaded.... The time for navigation having passed, every one who would put to sea at this season was alone responsible for his death, since he voluntarily placed himself in peril." – ref: Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi in Persian (on page 344) and in English translation. An admiral in the Turkish navy, Seydi Ali Reis, traveled with Arabs on the Indian Ocean in the mid 1550s. He started out from the Iraqi port of Basra. Writing in Turkish in 1556, he says that when he was in Basra he had to wait for almost half a year for the arrival of what he called the mowsim = "sailing season" – ref, alt link. A century later, French traveller Jean de Thévenot set sail to India from Basra. Thévenot had lived in the Middle East for about five years previously and could speak Arabic. He wrote: "I set out from Balsora [i.e. Basra] on the sixth of November 1665.... The proper season for sailing on the Indian Sea is called mousson or monson by corruption from [Arabic] moussem. The season wherein there is a constant Trade Wind upon that Sea begins commonly at the end of October and lasts to the end of April." – ref: in French, in English translation. Arabic mawsim is from Arabic root wasem = "to mark" and Arabic grammar prefix m-. It is not hard to find mawsim in medieval Arabic in the sense of "season, time of year". E.g. botanist Ibn al-Baitar (died 1248) has المطر الموسمي al-matar al-mawsemī = "seasonal rain" (in a climate having rainy and rainless seasons) and he also has الموسم بمكة al-mawsem be-meka = "pilgrimage season" – ref. More historical details in Yule & Burnett, NED, Dozy, CNRTL.fr.
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it.wikipedia.org
Muslin meaning fine lightweight cotton fabric made in Mosul has it earliest record in European languages in the Latin writer Andreas Alpagus Bellunensis (died c. 1522), an Italian who lived in Damascus for decades. He spelled the fabric name as mussoli in Latin – he is quoted in Yule & Burnell (1903). Another early record is in the German traveller Leonhard Rauwolf, who travelled round the Levant in 1573–1575 and published a 350-page narrative of his visit. When talking about muslin in Aleppo, Rauwolf says the stuff is brought to Aleppo from Mosul, it is made from cotton, and the Arabs call it "Mossellini" – ref German 1582 edition (page 93) (Cf an English translation 1693 (page 62)). But Rauwolf's wordform Mossellini looks like it's the Italian merchants' wordform, because the Arabic wordform was mūsilī with no letter 'n' (Dozy 1869, Lammens 1890, CNRTL.fr), and -ini in Italian is a diminutive. Italian speakers dominated the commerce between Aleppo and Western Europe at that time. William Biddulph, an English traveller in Aleppo writing in 1609, says "muslina" is a type of cloth brought to Aleppo from Mosul, but he says it is made from linen – NED. The English word "shash" | "sash" entered English from Arabic shāsh at about the same time as muslin. The Arabic shāsh was a long ribbon of lightweight muslin wrapped to form a turban. It was many meters long. It could be of cotton or linen. A large part of the market for fine lightweight muslin in the Middle East in those days was for shāsh turbans. The Thousand and One Nights tales has Arabic وإلى رأسه شاش موصلي = "and on his head a shāsh mūsilī ". John Florio's Italian dictionary in 1611 has Italian mussolo defined as "a kind of head-attire or turbant that the Persians wear" – ref. Later in the 17th century and still today in Italian mussola = "muslin". Italian today also has mussolina = "fine muslin".
fr.wikipedia.org
The common lilac tree is popular in gardens in Russia and Canada. It will not bloom under cultivation in most Arabic-speaking locales because the winters are not cold enough; the tree requires a length of cold weather to set the buds for bloom – Refs: The Lilac: a monograph, by Susan Delano McKelvey, year 1928 on pages 212-215 and 230; and Lilacs: the genus Syringa, by John L. Fiala, year 1988, on pages 5, 13 and 15–18. The tree is native in upland areas of the Balkans, where it blooms with light-violet color, and it has not been demonstrated to be native anywhere else – same refs. In world history, the earliest recorded notice of the tree comes from 16th century Istanbul, where it was grown as an ornamental, and from where it was brought to northwestern Europe for the same purpose in the later 16th. The Balkans were part of the Turkish Empire at the time. However, the western European botanists at the time imagined that the Turks in Istanbul must have gotten the new tree species from somewhere in the Orient. It was not until more than two centuries later (beginning in 1828) that Western botanists discovered and confirmed it was native in the Balkans, and afterwards the earlier misperception was shaken off only gradually – "A visit to the home of the lilac", by Edgar Anderson, year 1935, pages 2 and 4. The tree does not have a known record in Arabic until two centuries after the records begin in English and French; fr:Ellious Bocthor (died 1821), an Egyptian who lived in northern France, seems to be the author of the first known record in Arabic – see e.g. Dozy, year 1869 page 297. The lilac tree is called люляк leulyak ("lewl-yak") in today's Bulgarian and liliac ("leel-yak") in today's Romanian. In Turkish, it is called leylak today, and it was called leylak or "lilac" in Turkish in the 16th century. The Turkish was the direct source of the Western European word (details above). It is possible that the 16th century Turkish tree-name leylak was originally sourced from the southern Balkans, since the tree itself certainly was. The quantity of writings from late medieval and 16th century Balkans languages is small, and it is small also in Turkish. For that reason and other reasons, evidence is not available to determine where the Turkish name came from.
woerterbuchnetz.de
In standard Arabic today مطرح matrah means "location"; it does not mean mattress or rug or suchlike. But in medieval Arabic there is lots of documentation that, in addition to meaning "location", it had a meaning of a rug or padded fabric for lying on. A handful of medieval Arabic examples are given in Reinhart Dozy, year 1869 including from the writers Al-Tha'alabi (died 1038), Ibn Hayyan (died 1075), and Al-Qazwini (died 1283). The Cairo Geniza records of the 11th and 12th centuries contain many instances of Arabic matrah meaning a padded fabric for sleeping on – A Mediterranean Society: Volume IV, Daily Life, by S.D. Goitein, year 1967. A reason for confidence that the medieval European mattress word came from Arabic is that the word was sometimes spelled with al- prefixed in European languages. Some examples of that are given in Dozy's book and one additional example is the year 1291 Latin almatracium @ DuCange. The letter 'c' in the Latin almatracium | mataracium was pronounced as sound /s/. Medieval Latin also had almatracum | materacum where the 'c' was pronounced as sound /k/. The 'h' of the Arabic matrah is strongly aspirated. Especially when it occurs at the end of a word, there is nothing close to it in the Latinate languages (nor in English). It is denoted sound / ħ/. It was converted to /k/ in Catalan almatrac and /s/ in Italian materasso. In the European languages the word's earliest known records are in Catalan-Latin in legal notarizations spelled almatrazt (circa 1085), almatraf (year 1122), and almatrac (year 1134); more about those early instances is in the book La Terminologia Tèxtil a la Documentació Llatina de la Catalunya Altomedieval, by Laura Trias Ferri, year 2012. The mattress word in later-medieval Europe usually meant a somewhat padded underblanket, not a deep stuffed mattress, not a "featherbed". Sets of medieval examples are online at MED (in English), DMF (in French), TLIO (in Italian), Caracausi (in Sicilian), Gual Camarena (Catalan and Spanish), almadraque @ CORDE (in Spanish), Benecke Müller (in German), Matthias Lexer (in German), and Du Cange (in Latin) (Latin wordforms in Du Cange include matracium, matratium, matratum, mataratium, materatium, materacium, almatracum). In the early records in European languages in some cases the padding material was cotton fluff, which in those days was an import from Arabic lands and was a preferred material for padding fabrics. Example: year 1232 Italian-Latin materacum bombesi where bombesi = "cotton fluff". Example: year 1298 Italian una materazza... piene di bambagia = "a mattress filled with cotton lint". The Arabs slept on padded blankets which were rolled up and put away during the day, and spread out on the floor at bedtime; "they did not have beds properly speaking in the fashion of us French" – Devic year 1876; "everyone passing through the Middle East can understand how a word for a throw can lead to a word for a bed" – Lammens year 1890.
