We've all been there, our first geography class, the place where you learn all the words for all these strangely shaped pieces of land or water. You know what I am talking about. All those words that sound funny and you can never remember how to spell. For instance, a peninsula is a piece of land that sticks out into a body of water but is attached on only one side, i.e. Italy.
Well, imagine you grew up in the heart of Saudi Arabia. When you were sitting around the fires at night thousands of years ago making up the Arabic language do you think you would have ever thought about what to name a "peninsula?" More than likely you had probably never even seen one. So what do you do after you've made this language and then all of a sudden you find bodies of land that stick out into the water on all sides, except one?
Well, this is what made me laugh today. Arabic does have a word for peninsula, but first let me tell you the Arabic word for island, "jazeera." You may recognize this word from Al-Jazeera, the Arab version of CNN, which is strangely enough based out of Qatar, which is a peninsula and not an island.
The Arabic word for peninsula is, "Shibih Jazeera." Literally translated it means, "It looks like an island." So picture the Bedouins coming to a peninsula a thousand years ago for the first time.
It could look like this (except totally in Arabic):
Abdullah: Hey, what is this?
Saud: I don't know. Shibih Jazeera.
A: What?
S: Shibih Jazeera!
A: Yeah, Shibih Jazeera, but not on one side.
S: They'll never believe this back home.
A: How are we going to tell them about this?
S: Lets just tell them, Shibih Jazeera.
A: Sounds good to me!
So they get back to the tents and gather everyone around the fire and say, "we found a piece of land and Shibih Jazeera." Everybody goes, "yeah? What is it though?" So Abdullah and Saud say, "I don't know, shibih jazeera," so from then on, it stuck.
So for the lack of a better word, "peninsula" in Arabic, "looks like an island."
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