Intriguing origins

A MULTILINGUAL situation develops when, for example, a South Indian family visits a Punjabi home and meets a Maharashtrian visitor there. A kind of common language emerges from a mixture of the little Hindi the people from South know, the little Punjabi the Maharashtrian knows, the little Hindi the Punjabis speak and the English they all know. A few words from Marathi and the South Indian language can also creep in. This language would be known as lingua franca. Often, the expression is interpreted as free language or French language. Lingua Franca is in fact an international language. A mixture of Italian, French, German, Spanish, Arabic and other languages, it was mainly spoken in the Middle East by merchants, seamen and others who needed to communicate.

Tribulation is commonly said to bring maturity, ripeness. What is not commonly known is the metaphor implicit in this word. The word tribulation comes from the Latin tribulare (to afflict) which is based on tribulum (threshing board). The metaphor is that just as the corn is separated from the husk, similarly a person’s sorrows and distresses are threshed out from the wholesome or acceptable side of his life. To carry the metaphor further, facing this chaff means getting rid of it and emerging as a stronger person.

An intriguing story of origins is the tale of the word silhouette, meaning a portrait or profile, usually all dark or black against a white or light background. The word comes from the name of the French politician, Etienne de Silhouette, who lived in the eighteenth century. There are three versions to why this style of painting is named after him. One, as they are ‘partial’ portraits and he had a brief career as controller-general. Two, the word is a reference (a pun!) to to his policy as a minister of finance. It refers to his petty economies as the portraits are slight and executed cheaply. Three, he enjoyed decorating his home with designs made by tracing round the shadow of a face. If asked to choose the most plausible, which would you choose? Never can etymology be called the bone-dry study of word skeletons!

Tap-root

There is another group of words within the tatsam class which were not a part of the borrowings from Sanskrit but were created due to the demands of changing times. To fulfil the administrative and technological demands of our age, words like aakashvani, abhiyanta (engineer), nideshak, lipik (clerk) nagarpalika and vayuyan came into being.

— Deepti

This feature was published on July 17, 1999