The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #103975   Message #2124323
Posted By: Q (Frank Staplin)
12-Aug-07 - 04:03 PM
Thread Name: Arabic & African names in English songs & stories
Subject: RE: Arabic & African names in English songs & stories
My remarks re 'Cuffee' in the minstrel song were meant merely to indicate that there were other sources for the name- English as well as the African name. I do not presume to know which was in the mind of the composer of that stage routine.

I used "Islamic' instead of Arabic for the names, and selected a site with that heading, because many peoples of that faith object to being classed as Arabic- perhaps like African-Americans now prefer that term to the generic Negro.
Farsi-speakers object to their language being called Arabic, although it is 'Arabicized Parsi,' to use a phrase (the most widely spoken language in Iran- about 50%). The Arabic influence came in about 900 years ago. Farsi Iranians call their language Indo-Iranian. See, the whole world is becoming PC!
The Sephardic Jews, living under tolerant Muslim rule in Spain and cast out with them when the Christians took over, have no objection to calling their Spanish-based mixed language Arabic-influenced.

Here is the list of Female Islamic names. (There are many varied spellings, not taken into account). Sorry, that is not an easy website to move around in, no link from male to female names. www.geocities.com/~abdulwahid/muslimarticles/names_arabic_female.html

Female names

-din (deen) is complex. It is generally cited as 'way, or path, way of life'; probably Aramaic, the Hebrew word from the same source but via the Persian Zoroastrian word den, which meant the system of ritual practices of that religion.
In Islam, it encompasses the totality of a Muslim's faith and the code of conduct necessary to obey Sharia. In essence the term means Islam. Modern religious writers transliterate -din as deen when they speak of the totality of the faith.
The word can mean (or has meant) mastery, obedience, allegiance.
As I posted earlier, 'Ala al din basically means nobility of faith ('Ala often mis-spelled as Ala'). The ' indicates pronunciation from the back of the mouth, unlike the ' in Hawai'i which indicates a full glottal stop.
The word also has a European origin (see below).

English is the most agglomerative and inventive language in the world, as the 20 thick volumes of the current Oxford English Dictionary show. I doubt that a single language or dialect has not had a word, or words adopted from it and absorbed into English.

-din offers problems since din (dun) from the Celtic-Teutonic-Old English has no relationship with din (Aramaic and whatever divergent derivations and shades of meaning it has when lumped into 'Arabic.').

Getting back to the SUBJECT stated for this thread, I can't think of many surnames or first names of people in the songs. If names of foods and objects other than names of persons are considered, there are many African words.
Songs using Asian and African words, often wrongly, exist and some have been named (Abdul Abulbul Amir- sp.?, etc., but offhand I can't recall many.
There is "Miserlu," a Sephardic song from the Middle East, uncertain provenance, which also got to Greece as a dance. And several with "Ali." But many names seem to be rather recent occurrences in English (Black Muslims, and the revival of interest in African roots, etc.).

Salome and Solomon (Salman) are Hebrew, probably Aramaic, also adopted into Arabic and cultures that became Islamic. The names appear in some songs.