September 28, 2020

Few readers are surprised, probably, to learn that the name Sahara is Arabic (it means “deserts”), but the extent of our debt to the Arabs in the field of navigation and geography is shown by such Arabic terms as nadir, zenith, and azimuth, which still form an important part of those disciplines in our own language. Even weather terms like monsoon (mawsim, “season”) and scirocco—probably more familiar as the name of an automobile than in its original meaning… Read more