alfaç (catalan), alfaz (aragones), alfalce (navarro), alfalfa (castellano, gallego, portugues), afalfa (murciano), falfa (leones): en algun momento hemos creido, como Machado, que esta voz derivaba mas probablemente de arabe halfaa’ que del classico fisfisah, ya que la evolucion fonetica resulta mucho mas sencilla y la dificultad semantica podria esquivarse suponiendo que en algun momento alhalfa designara en al-Andalus alfalfa. Pero, habiendo leido buen numero de obras de botanica de autores andalucies que no dejan de consignar los distintos nombres de las plantas en varias lenguas y dialectos, hay que devolver la razon a Coromines y a su hipotesis mas complicada, Derivado intrarromance castellano alfalfal, catalan alfalsar, portugues alfafal
-Diccionario de Arabismos y Voces Afines en Iberorromance, Federico Corrientes
birsim, clover, specifically Egyptian clover (Trifolium alexandrinum L.)
-Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, Hans Wehr
There is nothing like reading a dictionary to kill time if you have all the time in the world. The Arabismo Dictionary’s entry for alfalfa goes on and on and on, from Aragonese to Portuguese, and then on to Subarabigo, Tunecino, and Ugaritico if you could be so lucky. Corrientes doesn’t mention the history of alfalfa’s English language written usage, which according to the OED began with W.Harte in his Essential Husbandry of 1764, “Alfalfa, whose luxuriant herbage feeds the lab'ring ox, mild sheep, and fiery steeds.” Darwin in the Voyage of the Beagle spelled it a bit differently, “The beds of alfarfa, a kind of clover” and an 1891 entry in The Judge’s Library- A Monthly Magazine of Fun has this to say, “He'd done fenced in his claim an' cut two craps of alfalfy afore that feller ever seed the steerage.” So let’s cut the crap, so to speak, and add them to the list of variant spellings.
But KhairAllah, like Shakespeare having small Latin and less Greek, wouldn’t know his Medicago sativa from his Trifolium alexandrinum, only that birsim gives a camel the runs and fattens the cow, while thistles and thorns fatten a camel and kill the cow. Alfalfa? Never heard of it in any language, certainly not in the supposed but lost Classical Arabic source word fisfisah (with the “s” a velarized fricative), as opposed to fasfasah (with a non-velarized “s”), meaning bedbugs- which KhairAllah might call rukaab, riders, of which he too is one, on camel back.