Arabic and persian loanwords in tagalog

This is a thorough and comprehensive study of a little known subject - the few score Tagalog words borrowed from Arabic and Persian. These words entered Manila at the turn of the 16th century, when it became an outpost of Brunei, then a Muslim kingdom, and continued to trickle in after its conquest for the Crown of Spain by Miguel LÑpez de Legazpi in 1571. Specific compendia and various appendices spare readers the task of retrieving necessary data in hard-to-find publications. A long index makes the book easy to search. The collection is completed by Spanish and English borrowings from Arabic that are also used in Tagalog. These two lists help eliminate such terms from those that entered Tagalog before any contact with Europeans. The question of whether a term was borrowed directly from Arabic or through Malay is carefully examined with a statement of the pros and cons followed by a provisional conclusion.