manker

the barren area or place(lugar) of land within or surrounded by an urban sprawl, devoid of either tree, shrub or grass. Its derivation is certainly Arabic and refers to a barren desert like place on which nothing grows.Although now extant the Caribs adopted it as a Spanish loan word in the seventeenth century, undoubtedly from a translation of Cervantes' "Don Quijote" where it occurs in the first 12 words of this immortal book "en un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre, no accordarme.....". Regrettably, lugar was superceeded by the English "place". Both words can lay claim to being the not only the first words of a new creole, yet to become American/African/British Urban, but their first and oldest autographed appearance in the translation of any novel. The pronunciation manker(as in hanker and the obscenity w.....) is closer to the Arabic manxa than the current Spanish pronunciation Mancha, and it should be stated that the 1616 first edition utilises manxa. It would be a great pity if this word and its already extinct companion lugar were to give up the ghost, by that I mean die, as Don Quijote said.