Morisco Spanish camouflaged Arabic meaning inside Romance vocabulary to stay secret

Evidence

In Islamic Spanish texts this verb descender acquires the full range of the senses of anzala and inzal, and in consequence the verbal noun derived from descender, descendimiento, can mean “[divine] revelation (as in the Scriptures, etc.).” In this way a word that externally seems entirely Romance—there is nothing un- Romance either in the phonology or morphology of descendimiento— acquires an inner non-Romance semantic content. Arabic, as the background language of culture makes its presence felt without appearing on thesurfaceatall. And a Spanish-speaking Christian, unless he could guess from the context, would fail totally to understand what was meant by it. But then a text was not written in Arabic characters in order to communicate with Christians; on the contrary, it was intended to be kept secret. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 664

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the translation-loanword process by which Morisco texts smuggled Arabic semantics into outwardly-Romance words.
• XREF: Connects to code-switching and hidden-language phenomena (e.g., dog whistles, cryptolects) and to the survival of the Moriscos as a clandestine community under Spanish repression.
• SEED: Article angle: secret languages as infrastructure for persecuted religious communities — how outward conformity in phonology/morphology hides inner semantic loyalty.