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Comment by s20n | Hacker News Reader

I assumed the word was derived from "azul" but from the article, it's apparently derived from the Arabic الزليج (al-zillīj) and has no relation with "azul"

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Portuguese here - many Portuguese words have origin from Arabic as Portugal has been conquered and occupied by "the Moors" in 8th~13th century. That's a long time! Alentejo, Aljezur, Algarve, and many of the cities in the Southern part of the country have have Arabic origins.

So much so that the controversy over the use of “insha’Allah” by non-Muslims was missed by me, Portuguese has “oxalá”, and I could not understand the problem. It’s funny how many words we use in Portuguese and Spanish that have their origin in the Moorish time.

Arab Orthodox Christians have been saying "inshallah" longer than Muslims have been around.

Some words also came into Portuguese from African slaves who were Muslim.

And also from the Lebanese who immigrated to Brazil in the XX century.

I'm Brazilian and I had never connected "insha'Allah" to "oxalá". Wow, TIL.

At least we were taught in school that if a word starts with "al" then there is a big chance it has roots in Arabic.

And the surname "matamoros"!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Matamoros

> The Christians marched on the cry of ¡Dios ayuda a Santiago! "God save St. James!". They slew more than 5000 Muslims and James became known as "Matamoros".

OK, I'm going to go out on a tangent, and put this SE topic where they discuss why "James" is the English equivalent of "Santiago", because it didn't seem reasonable.

https://spanish.stackexchange.com/questions/4588/why-is-sant...

interestingly, apparently "azul" also comes from the arabic "lāzuward"

I always thought it came from lapis lazuli (portuguese). Azul as a subpar of Lazuli even sounds exactly the same in portuguese.

In french we have “azur”

Lapis Lazuli is cognate, both come from the same Arabic/Persian root. Apparently “azure”, “azul”, “azzurro” lost the L because it got confused with the common “l’” article,

Rebracketing strikes again!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing

And the word from arabic comes, for both of them comes from persian for hte term lapis lazuli (lāžward) and suposedly this comes from sanskrit... but I ignore how it may sound in sanskrit.

The arabic word for "azul" is أزرق (azraq) so they all look pretty adjacent.

Azul 100% comes from Arabic (well Persian, but through Arabic), although I think the specific Andalusian form that was borrowed was a bit different from that.

This wikipedia article, the wiktionary entry for Portuguese, and the Spanish wiktionary entry all have different etymologies lmao.

As a Spanish speaker it seems really hard to believe it's not azul + -ejo. They're literally blue.

Even more confusing since they are indeed often blue and white, like other ceramics.

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