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Comment by _dain_ | Hacker News Reader

>The lexical contribution of Latin to Albanian is simply vast; one previous estimate for the total today is around 600 words, another around 800 (Gramelová 2013: 101).

That doesn't seem "vast" to me?

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For comparison: Spanish has around 4000 words of Arabic origin.

I don't think anyone ever called Spanish almost Semitic.

It is true that no one would call it almost Semitic, but some very common words are of arabic origin.

Taza, guitarra, almohada, albañil, algebra, elíxir, tamarindo, fulano, alfombra, acimut, cenit, café, azúcar, naranja, azar, ajedrez, arsenal, aceite, alcohol, arroba, azulejo, alberca, cero, etc.

And also several toponyms, the most famous probably being Andalucía.

Andalucía to name the geography is Arabic-speakers’ legacy, but as a term for a people, it can be traced further back to a Germanic root.

Several of the words you list are also English words: guitar, algebra, elixir, tamarind, cafe, orange, arsenal, alcohol. When talking about English origins do we count those for Spanish or Arabic? ;)

Only guitar in that list comes to English from a Spanish etymology, the others come from Arabic via medieval Latin, French and Italian, not Spanish.

azimuth, zenith

Numbers like that don't even make sense. With lots of morphology, one "word" has lots of forms and derivations. With high frequency, one "word" takes up a huge chunk of any given text. Maybe it would give a better idea if they counted the frequency of Latin-contributed (vs other) tokens in a corpus.

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