Post by Deleted on May 12, 2024 11:40:11 GMT
It is a notable fact the extent to which our involvement in India has shaped our language and culture.
The ubiquitous curry immediately springs to mind as an obvious import from India, but what is less known is that the spices and peppers used to make it so hot were in fact introduced into India by the Portuguese long before we began to make our presence felt.
Another ubiquitous vegetable we all use for roasts, mash or chips is the good old potato. Yet the home of the potato is America. It was unknown on this side of the Atlantic until Europeans started going there. Likewise tobacco. When we imagine great Roman feasts, it is worth pondering the fact that they never included potatoes.
Anyway, back to India and it's impact on our language. It is well known that the word "bungalow" derives from India, as does the word "thug". Less well known is the word used less frequently today but which used to be used a lot to refer to the homeland of Britain by those Britons in India or elsewhere - "blighty". This is actually an anglicised form of the Indian word "bilati" which is the word for "home" in one of the main Indian dialects, possibly Urdu.
Getting away from India again, today we think of the Muslim lands as being steeped in religious fundamentalism and intolerance for secular values and ideas or indeed for other religions. And we think of what can loosely be called the west which includes ourselves as the epitome of knowledge, toleration, and secular values.
What is often forgotten is that there was a time a millennia or less ago, when the west was in a dark age with little learning and very little scientific enquiry, as well as growing ever more religiously fundamentalist in the centuries that followed, burning people for heresy and suchlike. In those times the Muslim caliphate was far more tolerant of religious differences than we were, and was also very much a seat of learning where scientific and mathematical enquiry were widespread. Some of the words in use in our language today derive from Arabic as a relic from that time - astronomy, algorithm, algebra, alcohol.
The ubiquitous curry immediately springs to mind as an obvious import from India, but what is less known is that the spices and peppers used to make it so hot were in fact introduced into India by the Portuguese long before we began to make our presence felt.
Another ubiquitous vegetable we all use for roasts, mash or chips is the good old potato. Yet the home of the potato is America. It was unknown on this side of the Atlantic until Europeans started going there. Likewise tobacco. When we imagine great Roman feasts, it is worth pondering the fact that they never included potatoes.
Anyway, back to India and it's impact on our language. It is well known that the word "bungalow" derives from India, as does the word "thug". Less well known is the word used less frequently today but which used to be used a lot to refer to the homeland of Britain by those Britons in India or elsewhere - "blighty". This is actually an anglicised form of the Indian word "bilati" which is the word for "home" in one of the main Indian dialects, possibly Urdu.
Getting away from India again, today we think of the Muslim lands as being steeped in religious fundamentalism and intolerance for secular values and ideas or indeed for other religions. And we think of what can loosely be called the west which includes ourselves as the epitome of knowledge, toleration, and secular values.
What is often forgotten is that there was a time a millennia or less ago, when the west was in a dark age with little learning and very little scientific enquiry, as well as growing ever more religiously fundamentalist in the centuries that followed, burning people for heresy and suchlike. In those times the Muslim caliphate was far more tolerant of religious differences than we were, and was also very much a seat of learning where scientific and mathematical enquiry were widespread. Some of the words in use in our language today derive from Arabic as a relic from that time - astronomy, algorithm, algebra, alcohol.
