Description
Sicily was Arab for two centuries and the Mediterranean traded in Arabic for far longer, so Italian carries a stratum of Arabic that speakers stopped noticing centuries ago: the words for customs duties, for sugar and cotton, for admirals and arsenals and warehouses. Enrico Narducci (1832-1893), librarian of the Biblioteca Alessandrina in Rome, works through them one by one and prints the Arabic original beside each — which is what separates a philological essay from a list of guesses. This is a faithful print-on-demand facsimile of the 1858 Roma edition, reproduced in full from a library copy. The historical text is reproduced without modification; only the format, margins and legibility have been reset for modern printing.
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