Page:Hobson-Jobson a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive.djvu/26

xxii INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. entirely diverse. In such cases it may be that, though the use of the word originated from one of the sources, the existence of the other has invigorated that use, and contributed to its eventual diffusion.

An example of this is boy, in its application to a native servant. To this application have contributed both the old English use of boy (analogous to that of puer, garcon, Knabe) for a camp-servant, or for a slave, and the Hindī-Marāthī bhoi, the name of a caste which has furnished palanquin and umbrella-bearers to many generations of Europeans in India. The habitual use of the word by the Portuguese, for many years before any English influence had touched the shores of India (e.g. bóy de sombrero, bóy d'aguoa, bóy de palanquy), shows that the earliest source was the Indian one. Cooly, in its application to a carrier of burdens, or performer of inferior labour, is another example. The most probable origin of this is from a nomen gentile, that of the Kolīs, a hill-people of Guzerat and the Western Ghats (compare the origin of slave). But the matter is perplexed by other facts which it is difficult to connect with this. Thus, in S. India, there is a Tamil word kūli, in common use, signifying ‘daily hire or wages,’ which H. H. Wilson regards as the true origin of the word which we call cooly. Again, both in Oriental and Osmali Turkish, kol is a word for a slave, and in the latter also there is kūleh, ' a male slave, a bondsman.' Khol is, in Tibetan also, a word for a slave or servant.

Tank, for a reservoir of water, we are apt to derive without hesitation, from stagnum, whence Sp. estanc, old Fr. estang, old Eng. and Lowland Scotch stank, Port, tanque, till we find that the word is regarded by the Portuguese themselves as Indian, and that there is excellent testimony to the existence of tānkā in Guzerat and Rajputana as an indigenous word, and with a plausible Sanskrit etymology.

Veranda has been confidently derived by some etymologists (among others by M. Defréméry, a distinguished scholar) from the Pers. barāmada, ‘a projection,’ a balcony; an etymology which is indeed hardly a possible one, but has been treated by Mr. Beames (who was evidently unacquainted with the facts that do make it hardly possible) with inappropriate derison, he giving as the unquestionable original a Sanskrit word baraṇḍa, ‘a portico.’ On this Burnell has observed that the word does not belong to the older Sanskrit, but is only found in comparatively modern works. Be that as it may, it need not be doubted that the word veranda, as used in England and France, was imported from India, i.e. from the usage of Europeans in India; but it is still more certain that either in the same sense, or in one closely allied, the word existed, quite independent of either Sanskrit or Persian, in Portuguese and Spanish, and the manner in which it occurs in the very earliest narrative of the Portuguese adventure to India (Roteiro do Viagem de Vasco da Gama, written by one of the expedition of 1497), confirmed by the Hispano- Arabic vocabulary of Pedro de Alcalà, printed in 1505, preclude the possibility of its having been adopted by the Portuguese from intercourse with India.

Mangrove, John Crawfurd tells us, has been adopted from the Malay manggi-manggi, applied to trees of the genus Rhizophora. But we learn from Oviedo, writing early in the sixteenth century, that the name mangle was applied by the natives of the Spanish Main to trees of the same, or a kindred genus, on the coast of S. America, which same mangle is undoubtedly the parent of the French manglier, and not improbably therefore of the English form mangrove.