Chapter Introductory Remarks of Introductory Remarks by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

durian, a-muck, prow, and cadjan, junk, crease, are some of these. It is true that several of them may be traced eventually to Indian originals, but it seems not the less certain that we got them through the Malay, just as we got words already indicated through the Portuguese.

We used to have a very few words in French form, such as boutique and mort-de-chien. But these two are really distortions of Portuguese words.

A few words from China have settled on the Indian shores and been adopted by Anglo-India, but most of them are, I think, names of fruits or other products which have been imported, such as loquot, leechee, chow-chow, cumquat, ginseng, &c. and (recently) jinrickshaw. For it must be noted that a considerable proportion of words much used in Chinese ports, and often ascribed to a Chinese origin, such as mandarin, junk, chop, pagoda, and (as I believe) typhoon (though this is a word much debated) are not Chinese at all, but words of Indian languages, or of Malay, which have been precipitated in Chinese waters during the flux and reflux of foreign trade.

Within my own earliest memory Spanish dollars were current in England at a specified value if they bore a stamp from the English mint. And similarly there are certain English words, often obsolete in Europe, which have received in India currency with a special stamp of meaning; whilst in other cases our language has formed in India new compounds applicable to new objects or shades of meaning. To one or other of these classes belong outcry, buggy, home, interloper, rogue (-elephant), tiffin, furlough, elk, roundel (‘an umbrella,’ obsolete), pish-pash, earth-oil, hog-deer, flying-fox, garden-house, musk-rat, nor-wester, iron-wood, long-drawers, barking-deer, custard-apple, grass-cutter, &c.

Other terms again are corruptions, more or less violent, of Oriental words and phrases which have put on an English mask. Such are maund, fool’s rack, bearer, cot, boy, belly-band, Penang-lawyer, buckshaw, goddess (in the Malay region, representing Malay gadis, ‘a maiden’), compound, college-pheasant, chopper, summer-head,¹⁴

eagle-wood, jackass-copal, bobbery, Upper Roger (used in a correspondence given by Dalrymple, for Yuva Raja, the ‘Young King,’ or Caesar, of Indo-Chinese monarchies), Isle-o’- Bats (for Allahabad or Ilahabaz as the natives often call it), hobson-jobson (see Preface), St. John’s. The last proper name has at least three applications. There is “St. John’s” in Guzerat, viz. Sanjan, the landing-place of the Parsee immigration in the 8th century; there is another “St. John’s” which is a corruption of Shang-Chuang, the name of that island off the southern coast of China whence the pure and ardent spirit of Francis Xavier fled to a better world: there is the group of “St. John’s Islands” near Singapore, the chief of which is properly Pulo-Sikajang.

Yet again we have hybrids and corruptions of English fully accepted and adopted as Hindustani by the natives with whom we have to do, such as simkin, port-shrab, brandy-pani, apil, rasid, tumlet (a tumbler), gilas (‘glass,’ for drinking vessels of sorts), rail-ghari, lumber-dar, jail-khana, bottle-khana, buggy-khana, ‘et omne quod exit in’ khana, including gymkhana, a very modern concoction (q.v.), and many more.

Taking our subject as a whole, however considerable the philological interest attaching to it, there is no disputing the truth of a remark with which Burnell’s fragment of intended introduction concludes, and the application of which goes beyond the limit of those words which can be considered to have ‘accrued as additions to the English language’: “Considering the long intercourse with India, it is noteworthy that the additions which have thus accrued to the English language are, from the intellectual standpoint, of no intrinsic value. Nearly all the borrowed words refer to material facts, or to peculiar customs and stages of society, and, though a few of them furnish allusions to the penny-a-liner, they do not represent new ideas.”

It is singular how often, in tracing to their origin words that come within the field of our research, we light upon an absolute dilemma, or bifurcation, i.e. on two or more sources of almost equal probability, and in themselves 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.