Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/122

 Rh have imposed it on the Turks and the Turkish Empire, and even on Musulmans in general. In this case it seems that the word is used to imply a 'stranger,' or 'barbarian'; but it is a curious example of the length to which misapplication can go, for it constitutes an absolute reversal of the usual and original sense of the word. In the Tarikh-i-Rashidi, among other books, we find Hazára used for 'hill-men,' or 'mountaineers,' without reference to its original meaning or to any racial consideration, while in modern times the term has become the name of a specific race or people. Hazára meant simply "a thousand," and was the name, it appears, which was given to a particular section of cavalry or other troops, who were perhaps the original settlers in the hill districts in question. What Mr. Ibbetson has told us above, of the employment of the words Turk and Moghul in the Punjab, is another instance of mere misapplication or irrelevent nomenclature; but we need hardly go far from home to find a telling example of the same thing. From Earle's Philology of the English Tongue we learn, with regard to the Cymraeg, or British language now spoken in Wales, that "the Anglo-Saxons called it Wylse, and the people who spoke it they called Walas, which we have modernised into Wales and Welsh. So the Germans of the Continent called the Italians and their language Welsch. The word simply means foreign or strange. At various points on the frontiers of our race we find them affixing the name on the conterminous Romance-speaking people The French  in the reign of Edward the Confessor, are called, by the contemporary [Anglo-Saxon] annalist, tha Welisce men, by which was meant 'the foreigners.

Thus, the evidence on this subject (apart from that of nicknames or terms of contempt) points to three distinct conclusions. The first is that, in reading the histories of Musulman authors, the tribal names they use must not always be