Egyptian Railway Vocabulary

This paper discusses an English–Egyptian Arabic–Standard Arabic vocabulary of words and phrases related to railways and trains. This booklet, titled English-Arabic vocabulary compiled in connection with the Egyptian State Railway Signalling School Lectures was published by the Egyptian State Railways in the late 1920s or the early 1930s. The vocabulary includes many general, well-known vocabulary items such as ‘exit’, ‘goods’, ‘work’, etc., which are obviously all needed when working in the railways, but not of great interest. However, the vocabulary items that concern us here are those that are specific to railways, trains, train signals and train stations. While some of these can be found in the Egyptian–Arabic dictionary of Badawi and Hinds (1986), many others, especially the more technical terms, are not mentioned therein. Some other terms that are mentioned in Badawi and Hinds are still of interest to us, for instance because their etymology can tell us something about how the vocabulary used in the railways came about and how it was connected to the different foreign nations that had some involvement in the history of the railways in Egypt. For this purpose, a short history of Egypt’s railways will be given. The paper will then look at the technical vocabulary given in the booklet, focussing on the etymology (loanwords from English, French, Ottoman Turkish and Italian), calques/loan translations, and semantic extension.