Ojalá

Satori, Language — Stephen on 18 January 2008 @ 4:02 PM — 1 comment

Language just fascinates the hell out of me.

Ojalá is a Spanish word that means “hopefully”. Someone may be describing something like possibly getting a promotion next week and then say “ojalá”.  I have just recently become aware of this word and it puzzled me the first time I saw it.  I couldn’t figure out its root or context clearly, so I looked it up on the internet.  It is derived from the Arabic “Insha’Allah”, meaning “if God wills it”.  This is one of many words that came to the Spanish language at the time of the Muslim rule of the Iberian Peninsula from the 8th to the 15th centuries.  In fact, Spanish (and Portuguese, for that matter) has been changed rather dramatically in ways that other romance languages were not because of this history.