s
duties attending a residence in India is the correcting of those
misapprehensions which your travelling M.P. sacrifices his bath to
hustle upon paper."

XIX

BORROWED INDIAN WORDS

Of the results of the Roman supremacy in Britain none have been so
permanent as their influence on our language. No doubt this was less due
to any direct effect that their residence among the Britons had at the
time on vernacular speech than to the fact that, for many centuries
after their departure, Latin was the language, throughout Europe, of
literature and scholarship. Our supremacy in India is acting on the
languages of that country in both ways, and though it has scarcely
lasted half as long yet as the Roman rule in Britain, English already
bids fair to become one day the common tongue of the Hindus. But there
is also a current flowing the other way, comparatively insignificant,
but curious and interesting.

Few persons in England are aware how often they use words of Indian
origin in common speech. In attempting to give a list of these I will
exclude the trade names of articles of Indian produce or manufacture,
which have no literary interest, and also words which indicate objects,
ideas or customs that are not English, and therefore have no English
equivalents, such as "tom-tom," "sepoy" and "suttee," I will also omit
Indian words, such as "bundobust," and "griffin," which are used by
writers like Thackeray in the same way in which French terms are
commonly introduced into English composition.

Of course, it is not always possible to draw a hard and fast line. There
are words which first came into England as the trade names of Indian
products, but have extended their significance, or entirely changed it,
and taken a permanent place in the English language. Pepper still means
what it originally meant, but it has also become a verb. Another example
is Shawl, a word which has lost all trace of its Oriental origin. It is
a pure Hindustani word, pronounced "Shal," and indicating an article
thus described in the seventeenth century by Thevenot, as quoted in
Hobson-Jobson:--"Une Chal, qui est une maniere de toilette d'une laine
tres fine qui se fait a Cachmir." With the article to England came the
name, but soon spread itself over all fabrics worn in the same fashion,
except the Scotch plaid, which held its own.

Somewhat similar is Calico, originally a fine cotton cloth imported from
Calicut. This place is called Calicot b