INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. xix
our Anglo-Indian colloquialisms, even if eventually traceable to native sources (and especially to Mahratti, or Dravidian originals) have come to us through a Portuguese medium, and often bear traces of having passed through that alembic. Not a few of these are familiar all over India but the number current in the South is larger still. Some other Portuguese words also, though they can hardly be said to be recognized elements in the Anglo- Indian colloquial, have been introduced either into Hindustani generally, or into that shade of it which is in use among natives in habitual contact with Europeans. Of words which are essentially Portuguese, among Anglo-Indian colloquialisms, persistent or obsolete, we may quote goglet, gram, plantain, muster, caste, peon, padre, mistry or maistry, almyra, aya, cobra, mosquito, pomfret, cameez, palmyra, still in general use; picotta, rolong, pial, fogass, margosa, preserved in the South; batel, brab, foras, oart, vellard in Bombay; joss, compradore, linguist in the ports of China; and among more or less obsolete terms, Moor, for a Mahommedan, still surviving under the modified form Moorman, in Madras and Ceylon; Gentoo, still partially kept up, I believe, at Madras in application to the Telugu language, mustees, castees, bandeja (‘a tray’), Kittysol (‘an umbrella,’ and this survived ten years ago in the Calcutta customs tariff), cuspadore (‘a spittoon’), and covid (‘a cubit or ell’). Words of native origin which bear the mark of having come to us through the Portuguese may be illustrated by such as palanquin, mandarin, mangelin (a small weight for pearls, &c.) monsoon, typhoon, mango, mangosteen, jack-fruit, batta, curry, chop, congee, coir, cutch, catamaran, cassanar, nabob, avadavat, betel, areca, benzoin, corge, copra.[1] A few examples of Hindustani words borrowed from the Portuguese are chābi (‘a key’), bāola (‘a port-manteau’), bāltī (‘a bucket’), martol (‘a hammer’), tauliya (‘a towel,’ Port. toalha), sābūn (‘soap’), bāsan (‘plate’ from Port, bacia), līlām and nīlām (‘an auction’), besides a number of terms used by Lascars on board ship.
The Dutch language has not contributed much to our store. The Dutch and the English arrived in the Indies contemporaneously, and though both inherited from the Portuguese, we have not been the heirs of the Dutch to any great extent, except in Ceylon, and even there Portuguese vocables had already occupied the colloquial ground. Petersilly, the word in general use in English families for ‘parsley,’ appears to be Dutch. An example from Ceylon that occurs to memory is burgher. The Dutch admitted people of mixt descent to a kind of citizenship, and these were distinguished from the pure natives by this term, which survives. Burgher in Bengal means ‘a rafter,’ properly bargā. A word spelt and pronounced in the same way had again a curiously different application in Madras, where it was a corruption of Vadagar, the name given to a tribe in the Nilgherry hills; — to say nothing of Scotland, where Burghers and Antiburghers were Northern tribes (veluti Gog et Magog!) which have long been condensed into elements of the United Presbyterian Church !
Southern India has contributed to the Anglo-Indian stock words that are in hourly use also from Calcutta to Peshawur (some of them already noted under another cleavage), e.g. betel, mango, jack, cheroot, mungoose, pariah, bandicoot, teak, patcharee, chatty, catechu, tope (‘a grove’), curry, mulligatawny, congee. Mamooty (a digging tool) is familiar in certain branches of the
- ↑ The nasal termination given to many Indian words, when adopted into European use, as in palanquin, mandarin, &c., must be attributed mainly to the Portuguese; but it cannot be entirely due to them. For we find the nasal termination of Achīn, in Mahommedan writers (see p. 3), and that of Cochin before the Portuguese time (see p. 225), whilst the conversion of Pasei, in Sumatra, into Pacem, as the Portuguese call it, is already indicated in the Basma of Marco Polo.
