1.1 Reading the history of both Arabic and English unveils many areas of interest. One of these areas is loanwords. It is almost a universal feature of the world's languages to borrow from one another. This results in the fact that some languages, such as Latin, are usually classified as lending or donor languages; however, when such languages lose their ‘prestige', they stop playing that role. Other languages are classified as borrowing languages. However, some linguists object to the use of ‘borrowing'; they think that it is not accurate because “it implies that the element in question is taken from the donor language for a limited amount of time and then returned, which is by no means the case. The item is actually copied, rather than borrowed in the strict sense of the term" (Aitchison: 114).