Spanish etymologist Federico Corrientes’ Diccionario de Arabismos y Voces Afines en Iberorromance has interesting things to say about how Arabic words have crept into the Spanish dictionary, from the interjection Aba !, Careful !, (tracing its origin to the Arabic triliteral root ba’ada, meaning “to become distant from”), to the noun zurumí, a variety of grape, (tracing its origin to the 12th C Arab-Sicilian geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi’s list of Andalusian fruits including the jurumi.)
But his dictionary’s most interesting pages list false arabisms, those Spanish words that other scholars- some who contributed the authoritative Dictionary of the Royal Academy of Spain- have incorrectly assumed to be of Arabic origin. Among these are the verb amusgar, “to throw back the ears in an aggressive manner, as when a donkey prepares to kick”, not from Arabic muṣḡá, a passive participle meaning “heeded” or “heard”, but rather from the Latin mussare meaning “to hem or to haw”; the noun res, “cattle”, not from the Arabic ra’s, meaning “head”, rather from Latin res, or “property”; and chisme, “rumor” or “murmur”, not from the Arabic jizm meaning “part”, rather from the Latin cimex, or “bedbug”.
Such minor attempts to “cleanse” the Spanish language will not do much to blot out the fact that so many words- some estimate up to 8% of the daily lexicon- that slip off the tongues of Spanish speakers come from Arabic. And it is even more troublesome to those Spaniards who want to turn their backs on the 900+ year Arab period (including the 100 years following the Reconquista when Arabic was still a lingua franca) that most of these words are from Andalusian Arabic- archaic, out of use, and impossible to retranslate into any understandable form of classical Arabic or Maghrebi dialect. It would be as if American English was stuck with such Shakespearean anachronisms as “gauds”, “belike”, and “beteem”- to take a random sample from Act I Scene i from A Midsummer Night’s Dream- and they meant absolutely nothing when a Yank tries them out on a Brit.