Arabic and Persian Loanwords in Tagalog

Book excerpt: The few, and generally obsolete Tagalog words of Arabic and/or Persian origin that can be found in old and modern dictionaries are fragments from a period when they must have been more numerous, although their number cannot ever have been very large. Some illustrate how Manila was an outpost of the Bornean polity based in Brunei, itself a part of the Indo-Javanese system, while others point at direct contacts with traders who spoke some varieties of Arabic, but were probably Indians, Persians, Armenians from Persia or even Turks. Thus these terms entered Tagalog over a very long period that lasted until the 19th Century.