More on linguistics of water salesmanship

At the same time as I wrote about Dune yesterday I sent a letter to Khalid about his Arabic and Islamic themes in Frank Herbert's "Dune" page. He responded quickly to my email and also updated his page to reflect what I said. Very excellent.

We also talked about other things. I knew that Turkish has a lot of Arabic words, (obviously the mentioned 'sihir' is originally an Arabic word, also meaning 'magic') but it has never struck me that a large part of the Arab world uses a lot of words with Turkish origin. This is of course especially true for the parts which have been under Ottoman rule, as Egypt.

It was very interesting for me to see his list about the origin of Herberts terminology. As I told him It was interesting to learn that when we during our adolescence screamed Kull wahad! when surprised, we in reality screamed in Arabic.