Language is a Virus

The only way to get into a foreign culture is by learning the language. The great thing about this is that you not only learn a language, but also get loads of new inspirations and knowledge as a side dish. We me, this unfortunately failed with French (I had to learn it at school but it was an absolute disaster. My mother still rolls her eyes when you bring up this subject). However, it worked pretty with English and the weird Anglo-Saxon world and with Russian. Right now, I'm working on Spanish.

In yesterday's Spanish class we had to read a text about the Reconquista, when we had one of those side dishes. Did you know that Alcohol is of Arabic origin? When I recall correctly, Alcohol is supposed to be prohibited their religion. Here is an extract from a dictionary:

The al– in alcohol may alert some readers to the fact that this is a word of Arabic descent, as is the case with algebra and alkali, al- being the Arabic definite article corresponding to the in English. The origin of –cohol is less obvious, however. Its Arabic ancestor was kuḥl, a fine powder most often made from antimony and used by women to darken their eyelids; in fact, kuḥl has given us the word kohl for such a preparation. Arabic chemists came to use al-kuḥl (الكحول) to mean “any fine powder produced in a number of ways, including the process of heating a substance to a gaseous state and then recooling it.” The English word alcohol, derived through Medieval Latin from Arabic, is first recorded in 1543 in this sense. Arabic chemists also used al-kuḥl to refer to other substances such as essences that were obtained by distillation, a sense first found for English alcohol in 1672. One of these distilled essences, known as “alcohol of wine,” is the constituent of fermented liquors that causes intoxication. This essence took over the term alcohol for itself, whence it has come to refer to the liquor that contains this essence as well as to a class of chemical compounds such as methanol.

More about yesterday's Spanish class at Cocinar con Chilo.
By the way, you can brush up your French with a Dirty French Lesson.