My linguistics presentation

[pooka]

Languages come in family trees.  

Arabic and Hebrew are written backwards and without any vowels.

Well, they do sort of have vowels, but only three and they also stand for consonants.

Writing the teacher's name in Arabic (transliterated, of course)

Glottal stops.  One boy claimed his dad always made them say their Ts.  Poor kid.

Fun with Gutturals.  (during this part the intercom kept coming on, and they office can hear us.)

Three letters that all mean "th".  

Three letters that all mean "h".  Kind of like the three bears.

Latin had no word meaning "the".  La, el, and Le all came from Al.  The moors invaded spain in the middle ages.

What, you haven't ever heard of Arabic?  Have you heard of Iraq?

Words from Arabic: Alligator, Aluminum, Alcohol, schedule.

Look, I have some books written in these languages which I cannot read.

There is a hardness scale of how hard it is to learn languages.

I got interested in linguistics because it is really confusing.  (this was a question someone asked me.  Probably the teacher.)

[Jonathon]

A few nitpicks: alligator, aluminum, and schedule are not Arabic. The latter two come from Latin, and alligator comes from the Spanish el lagarto ("the lizard"). Also, the Romance articles come from Latin demonstrative adjectives, not from Arabic articles.

[Brinestone]

I finally voted.

[Porter]

For?

[Brinestone]

What Jonathon should do with his life.

Actually, I voted a few hours ago, but his response in this thread has made me sure.

[pooka]

I want backup on Schedule.  I forgot Alaska, which comes via Russia.

I felt really stupid at one point because I couldn't think of any cognates between French and Spanish.  But they are related, right?

[Jonathon]

Schedule

Here's a list of Arabic words in English. I haven't checked any of them, so I can't vouch for the whole list, but I know that at least some of them are correct.

French and Spanish are very much related, but there are some sound changes that separate them.

F/S
je/yo
faire/hacere
nuit/noche
homme/hombre
lait/leche
savoir/saber
moi/me

[pooka]

Huh, the arabic is /zhedwal/.  It seemed to me that if it had come from the latin and not the other way around, the sc would not have been written as a single letter.  But I guess it's hard to know.  And, you have to admit, the average entymologist doesn't tend to look past the Latin.  Though even Latin words came from somewhere else.

P.S.  Thats a great list of words from Arabic.  Assasin makes sense now that I think about it.

[kojabu]

And all this time I thought marzipan was great almond paste-y candy.

[Porter]

Thanks to Slash, I recently learned where the word Assassin comes from.

[Jonathon]

Huh, the arabic is /zhedwal/.  It seemed to me that if it had come from the latin and not the other way around, the sc would not have been written as a single letter.  But I guess it's hard to know.  And, you have to admit, the average entymologist doesn't tend to look past the Latin.  Though even Latin words came from somewhere else.

I disagree about etymologists not looking past Latin. Nearly all Latin words are descended straight from Proto-Indo-European, so there's typically no need to look elsewhere. And if a Latin word isn't straight Latin, it's borrowed from Greek (like schedule). I'd guess the Arabic word was borrowed from Greek or Latin.