Etymon #8
Setting two ways
Borrowed from Arabic, the word entered English around 1400, in a Middle English translation of Chirurgia Magna, a Latin treatise on surgery written a century earlier by Lanfranc of Milan, an Italian surgeon practising in Paris as personal physician to the king of France. Its original sense was nothing to do with what the word now means: it described the restoring of something broken back to its proper place.
Two routes carried the word into English, a century and a half apart. Both began in Arabic, both passed through medieval Latin in the twelfth century, and both arrived in English carrying the same buried sense untranslated. The first entered around 1400 through surgical writing. The second came in the 1550s through the Italian, Spanish, and Latin of Renaissance scholars.
The earliest meaning was the setting of broken bones. The Arabic root described the surgeon's act of bringing the parts of a fractured bone back into their proper relation, restoring the bone to its original alignment.
Arabic gave English a family of words at the same time, all carrying the al- of the Arabic definite article still fused to the front: ALCOHOL, ALCHEMY, ALKALI, all entering through Latin in the period when European scholars were translating Arabic learning. This word belongs to the same family.
