Yes and no (meaning that we strangely use both Arabic and Turkish in different situations).
If you don't understand, you would say "Mi sembra arabo" (it seems arabic to me) but if you are talking and the other part doesn't understand it is more common "E che parlo, turco?" (what am I speaking, turkish?) than "E che parlo, arabo?" (what am I speaking, arabic?) at least in my experience.
Of course historically "turk" and "arab" were synonyms due to the fall of of Constantinople and the "contacts" with the Ottoman Empire.
And now, risking to quote myself, evidence of the sentence (by a greek) "it's English to me":
I wouldn't say that a language studied by a minority of students (those in liceo classico) is the reason we use "Arab" as the incomprehensible language shorthand. Especially when you consider that the Greek studied in liceo is not the Greek spoken in Greece today.
>I wouldn't say that a language studied by a minority of students (those in liceo classico) is the reason we use "Arab" as the incomprehensible language shorthand.
A minority today, but one would assume (as in the case in e.g. German and France) more (of students) in the past 50-100-200 years when the phrase was established.
Thdre's the connotation of respect if not awe for the language, whereas this idiom is pejorative. The implication of the idiom is not "what, am I talking too educated?", quite the opposite (the connotation is not "stupid" either, just "way foreign")
That's because we are still studying Greek and Latin on some public school.