Shufty

I learnt to speak very late for a child. Part of that was because I'd been immersed in three (3) languages as a toddler: good English, bad French and worse (Algerian) Arabic. Some words stuck - shuf, 'asma! - that is, watch out! listen!!, which is pretty much all a bored male toddler will ever hear. And whenever someone on (usually American) TV is casting a working-class Brit from the south of England you'll be hearing shufty.

Zoosh was another one, for two.

Learning Modern Standard Arabic, and especially focusing on Classical, I never saw shuf; I saw ra'. Couldn't figure out zoosh either: any Semite knows ethnayn or (ordinal) thani. Was zoosh Iranian? What's it doing so far west of Alexander's City, then? Later I heard from a Moroccan that it comes from zawj which is in the Qurân for a pair.

Here is Ahmed al-Jallad's shufty on areal spread of common Arabic. Nobody says shufty (šâf) in Malta except tourists. Likewise back when Arabic was spoken in Cyprus. These Arabics landed in the High Middle Ages; šâf, then, postdates the 7th/13th century.