WORDS wander with us; carried in the knapsacks of soldiers and wanderers, entwined in the chains of slaves or stowed on the ships and caravans of traders. Travel and time tend to transform, and often we find these words return home as strangers and yet strangely familiar.
Take the orange which, juicy and vitamin-C packed as it is, has also travelled around the world; stemming from the Dravidian and Sanskrit ‘naranga’, it went west into Persia and Arabia as ‘naranj’, riding the trade routes into Italy as ‘arancia’ before crossing the channel from France into England and ending up as the ‘orange’ in the mid-1300s, denoting both the fruit and colour. This raises an interesting question: what did the English call the colour orange when they hadn’t yet seen the fruit? The answer is ‘ġeolurēad’, meaning yellow-red.
Ever wonder why we call cinnamon ‘darcheeni’ in this part of the world? Take that word apart, and you have ‘dar’, meaning bark, and ‘cheeni’, meaning (you guessed it) Chinese. And this is because this was a bark that came from China! And why do we call sugar ‘cheeni’? Simply because, while the granulated and unrefined shakkar was always used in the subcontinent, when the sugar-making process travelled West to China, they refined it (pun intended) into the crystalline white sugar we know, which took the name ‘cheeni’ when it returned to the subcontinent.
Speaking of China, have you ever wondered why some of the world calls tea tea (or a variant like ‘te’ or ‘thee’), and the rest call it ‘cha’ (‘chai’ in our case), or some variant thereof? That’s because in Mandarin and inland dialects, the Chinese character for this drink is pronounced ‘cha’, and it is from these regions that the Silk Route brought chai overland to Persia, India, and the Middle East. The name stuck. But in the coastal Fujian province, while the character remained the same, it was pronounced ‘te’, and since the tea leaves reached Europe largely through seaborne trade carried on by the Dutch East India Company, we get the French ‘thé’, the German ‘tee’, and the English ‘tea’.
The quest to discover humanity’s ‘natural’ language has led to abuses.
Here’s one you may not have heard of: I’m hoping most of you have been to a desi barber for champi — the traditional head massage with oil – and, of course, I’m also hoping most of you have used shampoo at some point. But did you know that the words are related? Around 1814, a Bengali entrepreneur, Deen Muhammad, took the age-old champi to England, where he rechristened the process ‘shampooing’, while opening England’s first-ever shampoo parlour, setting himself up as a ‘Shampooing Surgeon’ in true Victorian style.
And if you’re a fan of kebabs, it may delight you to know that you are the proud inheritor of a truly ancient culinary legacy, because the root of this word is the Akkadian ‘kababu’, which means to ‘roast over a fire’. Given that the Akkadian Empire ruled over 4,000 years ago, know that when you stare longingly at your latest bun kabab, millennia stare back at you approvingly.
Now, while we know that Sumerian is the oldest identified written language, we have no idea what the first human languages sounded like, but it’s theorised that they would sound similar to the language of the San Bushmen of southern Africa with its clicking sounds or — if you subscribe to the ‘bow-wow theory’ — were inspired by animal calls and the sounds of nature.
But the quest to discover humanity’s ‘natural’ language has led to terrible abuses throughout history in the form of language deprivation experiments. The theory was that if babies were deprived of language, they would spontaneously begin speaking a ‘natural’ or ‘divine’ language, which would thus reveal humanity’s first language. The idea is fascinating; the execution was incredibly cruel: Pharaoh Psamtik I is said to have handed over newborns to a shepherd with instructions never to speak to them, and while Herodotus claims the babies started speaking Phrygian, it’s unlikely the experiment was conducted with true scientific rigour.
Motivated by his personal religious theory that the first language of man was Hebrew, the 15th-century King James of Scotland also supposedly isolated newborns on an island with a deaf-mute nurse to see if his theory held water. Mughal Emperor Akbar did the same, though the motivations were reportedly twofold: one, to see if the children would begin to speak a ‘divine’ language or the native language of their parents, and two, to see if the ability to speak was innate and not dependent on hearing. Akbar isolated newborns in a custom-built ‘gang mehal’ (‘house of the mute’) with caretakers who lacked the ability to speak. Unsurprisingly, by the time the unfortunate children were four years old, they could only vocalise grunts and basic guttural sounds. History does not record what became of them.
The writer is a journalist.
Published in Dawn, October 5th, 2026
