synonymous with 'official'; and I have heard my Hindu clerks, of Kayath caste, described as Turks merely because they were in Government employ. On the Biloch frontier, also, the word Turk is commonly used as synonymous with Mughal."[1]
But though Oriental writers make use of the tribal name of Turk to denote a nomadic people, similar inconsistencies are not wanting in European languages. The way in which the French apply the word Bohémien to the gipsies is a parallel instance. The gipsies, though in no way belonging to the same race as the natives of Bohemia, acquired their name in France, on account of certain social habits and customs which they were believed to have brought with them from Bohemia, and because they were known to wander into France from that country.[2] An almost similar instance, though not precisely parallel, was the use in English of the word Indian, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to define the aborigines of North America, the Caribbean, and many other islands. In this case it was not the social condition and proclivities of the inhabitants that caused the misapplication of name, but their colour, the climate and products of their countries, and other circumstances, which reminded those who came into contact with them, of the India of the East. The process and result, however, are much the same. But if we leave out of consideration the fact that Turk happened also to be a race-name, its employment to designate the pastoral tribes of unsettled abodes becomes no more anomalous than such appellations as Kohistano, Baduin, etc., in Asia, or the familiar Mountaineer, Islander, etc., in Europe.
Misapplication, or change in the application, of race-names is a practice so commonly met with, that it is almost superfluous to mention it here. It may, however, be briefly pointed out, in regard to the names we are dealing with, that the term Tájik has been made, in one instance, to take exactly the opposite meaning to that which it usually bears. Mr. A. G. Ellis, of the British Museum, informs me that while early Armenian writers applied it to the Arabs,[3] modern Armenians
- ↑ Report on the Punjab Census for 1881. Calcutta, 1883, vol. i., p. 276.
- ↑ It is curious that the name Gypsey is a corruption of Egyptian. They are always called Egyptians in our early Acts of Parliament, and it is probable that they came to England first from Egypt, whither they had gone from the country of the Golden Horde, where we first meet with them.—H. H.
- ↑ Whence it came about that the Arabs are referred to as Ta-hi in early Chinese accounts of the West.—H. H.
