Abstract: This article reintroduces Sulaiman Abu Ghawsh’s 1977 rare book Ten Thousand English Loanwords of Arabic origin and presents his hypothesis of four possibilities: a) English borrowed from Arabic or Arabic borrowed from English, b) both borrowed from another language, c) one of them is a mother to the other, and d) both of them are siblings from another mother tongue. This paper is specifically dedicated to discussing the first possibility that Abu Ghawsh eventually supports. Then, the article presents the four morphological and phonological change patterns that Abu Ghawsh believes occurred to these words when migrated to English either directly or through the scenic route of other languages; these patterns are: dropping vowels, inversion, replacing, and adding or removing.
Keywords: Loanwords, etymology, Sulaiman Abu Ghawsh, phonological and morphological change, borrowing, English words of Arabic origin.
Title: Do Ten Thousand Arabic Loanwords Truly Exist In English?
Author: Mohamed A. Yacoub
International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research and Innovations
ISSN 2348-1218 (print), ISSN 2348-1226 (online)
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