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.

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.

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 history of Malta includes several centuries of Arab presence that were very influential in what its heritage today is, including language, and place names.

Introduction

Swahili is a language that fuses African Bantu with Arabic. Arab sailors and traders have established links and ties with East Africa for centuries, their language  strongly merged with the local language to produce a creole derivative.

The word Swahili itself is derived from Arabic Sawahili سواحلي which is plural for ساحل meaning [Language] of the Coast. 

This article gives  some examples of Arabic words still in today's Swahili.

Here are some words.