Aldebaran is a great name for a giant star, and no wonder it appears in each of the first two “Star Trek” movies and many other space films and science fiction tales. It has gravitas; it’s a real star; it comes from Arabic. Many other star names do, part of the great era of learning while Europe was otherwise “dark.” Mathematics, physics, and astronomy flourished in Arabic, and Arabic loan words in these fields are common: algebra, alchemy, chemistry. Among 900 Arabic star names are found in an ordinary English desk dictionary. Alas, the collaboration that put the Arabic-origin word sugar into English in the middle ages almost vanished.

Among Chaucer’s words is the “Treatise on the Astrolabe,” a dense description of an astronomical tool of Arabic origin. (You can see what it an astrolabe looks like at right.) Included in his complete works, it is far less popular than “The Canterbury Tales.” But by Chaucer’s day, Europe had turned beyond science to other things. Prejudice drove Arabs from Europe; alchemy turned into half-baked magic to convert base metals to gold, and potions would produce magical effects rather than product.

We might have had a Renaissance including Arabic along with Greek and Latin and would have been the better for it. Instead, Arabic expressions emerged willy-nilly into English in the usual way: customs that became known like hadji (1585), food like hummus (1949) and baba ganouj (1977), and political movements sometimes benign and sometimes malefic, intifada (1985).

The libraries of Islamic scholarship were dispersed; the schools closed; the solar observatories were smashed down; the chemistry laboratories wrecked. Education became retrograde and rote. Orthodoxy was valued over discovery and innovation. It might have been that the English of science and engineering had been a triple whammy of Arabic, Latin, and Greek, but prejudice against Islam prevented it.

One fascinating glimpse into the emergence of new languages comes from Dearborn High School in south eastern Michigan. According to the school website, a great many students speak Arabic at home but the language of the school is English. In informal hallway speech, a mixed language is emerging: walla bro!: “bless-you, man.”

Of course a Renaissance won’t come from that, but Walt Whitman, the great American poet of the nineteenth-century said that the standard languages came from the “blab of the pave,” and walla bro! has the beginnings.

Languages do not collaborate bilingually but by wearing the edges of expressions so they sit familiarly together and mingle.