A Critical linguistic study of lexical borrowing in Arabic and English

Needless to say that linguistic borrowing is a very common phenomenon and that no language is completely free of borrowed lexical items. It is also noticed that languages vary drastically as to the number of foreign elements comprised therein. This paper provides first some critical remarks related to lexical borrowing in general, i.e. the term 'borrowing' or 'loan-words' and the factors said to determine the proportion of foreign elements in various languages. In the second part, the paper tackles foreign words in Arabic with special reference to Jeffery's The Foreign Vocabulary of the Holy Quran (1938). The paper suggests that Jeffery's methodology of de term in-ing foreign words in the Holy Quran does not hold water. This is done by providing some linguistic and extra-linguistic remarks relating to his book which, in my view, lacks academic objectivity. Part three of this paper is devoted to English words of Arabic origin. The writer, deliberately, makes no attempt of giving a comprehensive list of Arabic words in English since this can be found in Taylor's article which contains most of the established Arabic words in English up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Instead, he discusses different conflicting views regarding the proportion of these words which, I think, is highly exaggerated by Abou Ghoush (1977), and Mazhar (J967). The paper comes to the conclusion that the very term 'borrowing' is not altogether satisfactory and that the proportion of foreign words in different languages cannot be justified solely in terms of extra-lin-guistic factors, e.g. history, nationalism and religion but is rather more determined by linguistic factors such as morphological restrictions, morphological motivation, lexical composition and lexical wealth. It is also found that the scope of foreign vocabulary of the Holy Quran is much less than has been suggested by Jeffery. The scope of Arabic words in English, on the other hand, is thought to be highly exaggerated. The fact that thousands of words in Arabic and English are similar both formally and semantically cannot, in my view, be accounted for solely in terms of borrowing and that it may better be explained in the light of modem linguistic findings discussed in this paper