Few examples: Al Jazeera, the news station; Teriyaki, the sauce.

Just a thought, but might be interesting.

Are there any personality characteristics or mental characteristics that people who speak (or would like to speak) many languages share in common? For example, are such people more likely to have musical talent or a greater curiosity about the world? Or are there any common influences that such people share?

I have spent much of my life thinking I was the only one who was fascinated by languages, and it’s wonderful to realize I’m not the only one. In fact, many posters are much more advanced than I am, and it gives me encouragement to go on learning.

Arabic words that have entered other languages are extremely interesting to me because Spanish has so many of them. I had a Spanish teacher who was also fluent in Arabic, who had a book of words Spain borrowed from Arabic–and that thing was HUGE. Does anyone know what this book might be I would LOVE to get my hands on one! If I can connect Arabic words to Spanish that would be great for getting past the vocabulary barrier!

There are some words that came into english by Arabic, and there are some of them are in fact transported from Greek into Arabic then into English. I heard for example that the word “cable” is originally from the arabic word “HHabl” حبل which mainly means “rope.” Also there is “Camel” which I think comes from the word “Jamal” جمل which is the Arabic for “camel.”
To find even more and more about arabic terms used in english or in general in european languages you can just check out the names of the stars and some of the constilltions, like Aldebran, Famelhout (I hope I spelled that right). There are names of constillations that were translated from Greek into Arabic, like Orion which is translated in Arabic as “the ironic man.” Alchemy is another source, but the name of Alchemy itself is in fact an amalgamation of greek and arabic terms as I heard!
If dictionaries are up to trace back the words and their origins, english would be built up on words that are counted by the hands!!!

I just found a really strange one…and this one is either wild coincidence or something even major dictionaries haven’t connected the dots on.

I’m sure you’ve heard the term “gazillion.” Well, I was recently looking up how to say “thank you” in Arabic, and ran into this transliteration of “thank you very much”:

“shokran Gazillan”

http://muttaqun.com/arabic/english2arabic.html

At which I did a double take: “Does that say ‘Thanks a gazillion??’”

So I looked up “gazillion” in the Oxford, Webster, and Dictionary.com, and none of them acknowledged any Arabic roots to the term.

Still, you’ve got the fact that the Arabs gave us a number of math terms…”sifr” and “al-jabr” being a few of the more obvious ones. Was this an accident or some Arabic-speaker’s sense of humor? It would be interesting to find out where the first instance occurred…