Dictionary Etymologies of South Asian Loanwords into English: Some Suggestions for Improvement

mat the English language contains many loanwords of South Asian origin is hardly a well-kept secret. R. E. Hawkins, in Common Indian Words in English (1984), a publication compiled as a supplement to the Indian edition of the Little OxfordDictionary, and which mines the OED, Yule and Burnell's Hobson-Jobson (1886, 1903), and Whitworth's Anglo-Indian Dictionary (1885) for material, contains some two thousand lexical entries, not all of which, however, if the truth be told, can be thought of as "common" English words (e.g., husbulhookum 'official order, passport' or tindal 'boatswain'). The Indian words in English are of diverse etymology, comprising words from Old1 (dharma, avatar, yoga), Middle (Theravada), and New IndoAryan (NIA) (shampoo, mongoose, thug), Dravidian (catamaran, pariah, cheroot), and Tibeto-Burman (polo, lama). In many cases South Asian languages have been the conduits through which words ultimately of non-South Asian pedigree (particularly of Turkic [Urdu, begum (?)], Persian [khaki, purdah] or Arabic [sahib] origin) have made their way into English. Conversely, some words ultimately of South Asian origin have been borrowed into English via non-South Asian intermediaries (mandarin [fr. Sanskrit mantrin/mantri 'minister of state, advisor' via 1In this paper the designation "Old Indo-Aryan" is used interchangeably with "Sanskrit," the most well-known exemplar of the Old Indo-Aryan stage of development of Indo-Aryan as a whole.