When I visited Hungary in the summer, the language was totally alien to any other language I am remotely familiar with. Being from the Finno-Ugric group, it is remotely related to Finnish, and little else.

From the signs in the airplane, I learned that the word "dohány" means "smoke", i.e. tobacco. This was confirmed from shops, and even the name of a street in the Jewish section of the city.

Some time ago, I wrote about why Egypt speaks Arabic and not Egyptian. In it, I touched on why Arabic replaced other Semitic languages in West Asia and North America.

Why Arabic replaced other languages

The reason is that Syriac, Amazigh, Coptic and other Semitic languages were similar enough to Arabic to assimilate or be supplanted by it.

It seems that some Arabic words are being used subconsciously for open source software projects.

Here are some recent examples.

Since 1894, several Arabic block printed charms were known by various researchers. Arabic Verses by two Arab poets, Abu Dulaf Al Khazraji أبو دلف الخزرجي, from the 10th century and Safeyudin al-Hilli صفي الدين الحلي from the 14th century suggest that that the term they used, tarsh, is for the print block technology.

The charms or amulets are similar to modern day hijabs حجاب written for superstitious gullible people by greedy quacks pretending to be holy men. 

What does a 2nd century Jewish jurisprudence text and a 13th Persian mystic poetry have in common? At first glance, not much, but there is more linguistic commonality than first meets the eye.

In many cultures, a small number of people pick bad names for their kids to keep them away from envy, evil eye, or demons.

In Egypt, you can find some rural families calling their kids strange and offensive names, to prevent harm from coming to them. This is specially true for a family that has all its male children die in childhood, or something like that.

Names such as El Shahhat الشحات (the begger), Shehata شحاتة (begging) are used.

This practice is not exclusively Egyptian though.

Malaysia recently introduced a set of rules to prevent such practices among its varied ethnicities:

Several years ago, a Dutch friend told me that some Dutch have funny names.

It turns out that this is a story worth telling, possibly repeated in Algeria, with the French playing a part in both.

Many Dutch names are of the form:

van ("of/from"), de/het/'t ("the"), der ("of the"), van de ("of the/from the"), and in het ("in the") or simply de ("the"). All but the latter denote a place of origin or residence, and the latter an occupation or attribute.

Here is a humorous bit on the idiosyncracies of the English language.

What many people do not realize, is that language and alphabets are two different things. A language is mainly a spoken thing, while an alphabet is a way of approximating this spoken voices on paper (or stone, or keyboard).

English is notorious in being non-phonetic, and hence there has always been calls to reform/simplify the way it is spelled.

For example, Yahoo had an article on efforts for pushing simplified spelling, and how they persist.

This idea is not new of course. In 1779, Benjamin Franklin proposed a new phonetic spelling system. You can see the full details on that system in this article. Noah Webster proposed the same in 1789.

The Maltese language is the most visible vestiges of Arab heritage in Malta.