But the Crusaders, for all the bad things they did, at least learned a few things from Arabic culture, one of which was the idea of sleeping on cushions.
Bedding was sparer throughout much of their history. Speaking of furniture, Europeans didn't always sleep on big, soft, cushioned things.
Those of us who call it a sofa are using a word we got from Turkish, which got it from the Arabic suffa, which refers to a raised platform with carpeting on it - which is a more Arabic place to sit than a couch. Some of us sit on a sofa and some sit on a couch, but it's the same piece of furniture. But Swahili got it from the Arabic safar, or "journey." These days Mac users go on Safari and never leave their sofas. This word so strongly associated with expeditions in Africa came from an African word for "expedition": the Swahili safari. One of the many things Spanish adopted from them was al-tub, "the brick," which changed over time to adobe. Much of Spain was under Muslim ("Moorish") rule from the early 700s into the 1400s. (The way they look in Arabic now is different from how they look for us now.)īefore it was a software company, adobe was - as it still is - a kind of sun-dried brick.
So he borrowed numerals from Arabic, too - which is why typographers call our digits Arabic numerals. Roman numerals didn't have a zero (of course), and anyway they're not good for doing decimal mathematics: It's much more bother to work with XX times LXVII than with 20 times 67. Of course, along with the concept, he needed a way of writing it. That got trimmed down a little bit over time to the Italian zero. He took the Arabic word sifr, meaning "empty" or "nothing," and Latinized it as zephyrum. He learned it from Arabic culture in North Africa, where he grew up. The electronic device you're reading this on wouldn't exist without digital programming, which wouldn't exist without the number 0 (zero), which - believe it or not - Europeans didn't think of as a number until the Italian mathematician Fibonacci introduced it to them in the early 1200s. But our language has accepted all these imports, and they have assimilated well and been very useful. It didn't borrow all of them directly they mostly came filtered though Latin, Turkish, French, Spanish, German, and/or Italian, and have changed in form - and sometimes meaning - since they left Arabic. Yes, thanks to the traffic of goods and culture around the Mediterranean throughout history, English has many common words that it got from Arabic.
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