The migrants’ almanac
By Khaled Diab
For
those tired of the endless polarised debate on immigration, there is a breed of
migrants that no political or cultural frontier can hold back.
February 2008
Judging by how some people speak of downtrodden
asylum seekers, hardworking economic migrants and the diverse Muslim minority,
you’d be excused for thinking that Britain and other parts of Europe were under
foreign occupation by some mysterious and sinister, yet unarmed, multinational
force. While I sympathise with the insecurity and fear
triggered by the uncertainties of the modern world, the situation is getting
surreal.
However, today I’m too weary to deconstruct the ridiculous ban on the headscarf that
started in France (and
before it Turkey) and spread
like an unsightly rash to other parts of Europe.
Here in Belgium,
the far-right Vlaams Belang
has been on a political crusade to have the hijab
banned from local government offices.
Entering the domain of absurdist farce, a
populist Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders has produced a film calling for the banning of the Quran. Perhaps I should point out to
Wilders that, to be consistent, he would have to ban an awful lot of political
literature. After all, what is the difference between ‘liberating’ people for
democracy and the early Islamic practice, now defunct, of “opening” a country
to Islam? They’re both imperial projects flying a ‘civilising’ banner.
Does Wilders not realise that his ludicrous
position conflicts with the freedom of expression that he and other extreme right-wingers
defended so valiantly during the Danish cartoon controversy and why hasn’t he called for the
banning of the Bible which contains passages justifying the mass
murder of “sinners”? Anyway, I should save my breath because he, and the
fanatical Muslims he provokes, will be too engrossed in their
self-righteousness to listen.
Instead, I’ll explore a domain where foreign
influences are welcome and thrive: language. English, which has enriched itself
by borrowing perhaps half its vocabulary from other tongues, is a prime
example of this. Since I urge Wilders to chill out and not to get his knickers
in a twist, perhaps he’ll appreciate the fact that ‘knickers’ actually comes
from the Dutch ‘knie-broek’ (knee trousers).
Other Dutch words in wide circulation include
dam, dike, beaker, brawl, ahoy, skipper, buoy, trigger, dope, drill, frolic,
gin, golf, grab, spook, stove, dapper, tulip, as well as the Americanisms
cookie and geek.
Some words have the habit of leaving home,
settling down elsewhere, and eventually being repatriated as an exotic foreign
import. One interesting example is the word which embodies the very essence of
French chic: mannequin.
But this word, which evokes images of French
ateliers and haute couture, actually started life as a humble little man (‘manneken’ is the diminutive form for ‘man’ in Dutch) from
the Low Countries who apparently stole across the border into France. Today,
he has returned in glamorous new clothes and most locals aren’t even aware of
his origins – or even gender.
In English, the largest waves of foreign
migrant words came with invasion – Norse, Norman French, etc. – but trade,
science, literature, religion, empire and immigration have all attracted tribes
of foreign vocabulary to settle these shores, some becoming so well assimilated
that they strut around like natives.
Since Norse, Germanic and French words in English are too many to
recount, I’ll explore the more exotic arrivals that have insinuated their way
into the English lexicon. Let’s start with something divinely heavenly. We may
believe that paradise is a place called Eden
but, etymologically, it is a Persian walled garden.
Britain’s ‘cushy’ (from Urdu) colonial
experience in India
left a lasting impact on the English language. Apparently mundane words abound
which originally came from the subcontinent. These include bungalow, caravan,
shampoo, cot, jungle, and even loot and thug.
The title of this article contains the word
almanac which is derived from the Arabic for ‘climate’. In addition to terms
referring to Islam, Arabic words that have migrated into common English usage
fall into a number of major groups: science, mathematics, medicine, astronomy,
sea-faring, trade, food and drink.
They include magazine (as in a storehouse of,
in this case, knowledge), algebra (and logarithms named after the Persian
founder of Algebra, al-Khawarizmi), zero, cipher, chemistry, alcohol,
manoeuvre, massage, hazard, sugar, soda, sofa, safari, cotton, racket, zenith,
nadir, mattress, jar, ghoul, calibre, amalgam, aubergine, lemon and coffee.
Likewise, a lot of English and other European
words have entered into Arabic, particularly for modern sciences and
technologies. Egyptian slang contains a lot of English words, re-tailored to
suit the Egyptian tongue. These include the ‘street’ equivalent of ‘guv’ or ‘squire’, ‘cabten’ or ‘brince’ (captain or prince); fashion items like jenz (jeans), blovar (pullover)
and trenin (from training, i.e. tracksuit); food and
drink like cacola (Coca Cola), sefin
(Seven Up), betsa (pizza) and estek
(steak).
One of Egypt’s most popular national
dishes is koshari, a delicious mix of rice, lentils and
various pastas, sprinkled with fried onions and topped with a generous serving
of red-hot chilli sauce and vinaigrette. The dish’s name had long stumped me
and I had developed an elaborate theory that its name might derive from the
Hebrew ‘kasher’ (or kosher) because it somehow ticked
all the boxes of what may be eaten.
But the probable explanation lies much further afield. Once, over a plate of koshari
at a specialised spit-and-saw-dust eatery in Cairo, a British-Indian friend suggested that
the name came from the Indian dish kitchari.
But foreign influence is not confined to modern
Arabic. Classical Arabic – which is regarded as the purest form of the language
– is replete with loan words from Greek, Latin, Persian, as well as other
Semitic tongues. The common Arabic word for language, ‘lougha’,
derives from the Greek logos, which means word, speech, discourse and reason,
and from which we derive the modern ‘logo’ and ‘logic’.
Other loan words include ‘jens’
which has the same meaning as the Latin ‘genus’, i.e. kind, stock, or race, but
has also evolved to mean gender or sex in the 19th century. The
Arabic word genie, made popular by the Arabian Nights, probably comes from the
Latin word ‘genius’ which refers to a guardian deity or spirit.
Despite the ancient tradition of borrowing,
Arabs, like the French, have set up modern institutes to preserve the ‘purity’
of their tongue. Scholars have laboured to find Arabic equivalents – which few
actually use – for modern inventions: telephone (el-hatif),
computer (el-hasib el-aly),
radio (el-mezya’a), etc.
Place names are an intriguing world in their
own right. Africa, the term the Romans used to
refer to the north of the continent, derives from ‘Afri’
(from the Phoenician ‘affar’ meaning dust) and the
Latin suffix ‘ca’ or ‘land’. Andalusia may
have witnessed the zenith of its prestige during Muslim rule, but it owes its
name to a much-maligned Nordic tribe. It was the land of the Vandals, and I’m
not talking about British hooligans on the Spanish Costas!
‘Egypt’
probably stems from a Greek bastardisation of the Hat-ka-Ptah temple in the heart of ancient Memphis. Ancient Egyptians called their own
land Kemet (or the fertile black lands). This is in
contrast to the ‘deshret’ (red lands) of the
surrounding desert (notice the etymological link?). Contemporary Egyptians call
their land Masr which derives from a Semitic
reference to the ancient dynastic separation of northern and southern Egypt.
The word ‘Gypsy’ also derives from ‘Egypt’ and stems from the mistaken belief that
these roaming peoples originated in Egypt,
not India,
as anthropologists currently believe. The Spanish, being much closer to Egypt, believe that the Roma originated in Flanders and call them ‘Flamenco’.
For a while, the French believed that the Roma
came from Bohemia, i.e. the Czech Republic.
In the 19th century, French artists and poets took to calling
themselves bohemian. But
this is actually not a compliment to the high cultural achievements of the
Czech people. This stems from the romantic idea that artists are
unconventional, poor, marginalised, cultural nomads.
The opposite, philistine, or a petit-bourgeois
materialist who is ignorant of art and worship kitsch, dismisses a highly
accomplished ancient people as uncultured. This may originate in the Biblical
belief that the Philistines were the ‘enemies of God’.
Language is a comfortable melting pot where
local and foreign words live side by side in relative harmony. Perhaps its time
our societies followed this example and turned over a new leaf.
This column appeared in The
Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 31 January
2008. Read the related discussion.
ã2008 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website is the copyright
of Khaled Diab.