The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  The increase in people travelling for pleasure created a market for books offering basic guidance about foreign languages. The Traveller’s Interpreter (1728) was one such publication, containing ‘A Vocabulary of select and necessary Words’ in English, Dutch, French and Italian, and ‘Rules for pronouncing each Language’. Intrepid Britons were usefully informed how to refer when abroad to a ‘silly fellow’ or a trollop, and how to name such everyday essentials as sundials, turpentine and muffs. Different reasons for needing to be competent in other tongues are implicit in James Willson’s The Soldier’s Pocket Dictionary, Or Friend in Need (1794), which provides guidance on words ‘In General Use, and most likely to occur in Military Service’ in English, German, Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish, including such phrases as ‘Are there any marshes in the way?’, ‘My wound bleeds afresh’ and – a wonderful solution when all else fails – ‘Look into this little book.’

  Travel literature shows the broadening horizons of English-speakers’ authority. Soon after the accession of George III, John Duncombe could salute the new king with the mock-Horatian assurance that ‘Britain’s righteous laws’ and ‘Exulting commerce’ encompassed giant tracts of land:

  The faithless Cherokee obeys,

  Rich Senegal her tribute pays,

  And Ganges’ tyrant shakes with fear,

  For vengeance whispers, ‘Clive is near.’37

  One prolific source of new terms connected with abroad was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She was an accomplished networker, who brought to Britain the practice of inoculation against smallpox and started a magazine entitled the Nonsense of Common-Sense. Above all, she travelled: to Florence, Geneva, Avignon, Brescia and Venice, and through Hungary, Bohemia and Germany. She spent seventeen months in Turkey, with her husband, Edward, who was the British ambassador in Constantinople. A prodigious letter-writer, Lady Mary penned ‘highly polished bulletins’. Yet what look to be ‘the epistolary equivalent of vers de société, products of a decorative, brittle sensibility’, are sustained by both ‘the strong undertow of melancholy’ and a gift for embellishment.38 Her imports are wide-ranging: she can ask for a letter to be directed chez an aristocratic friend, or refer to a fracas breaking out in polite company, in addition to adopting words like cicisbeo (a married woman’s approved bit on the side) and feridgi (a Turkish garment, not unlike a nightgown). She may well be the first British author to use née to introduce a married woman’s maiden name, to refer to the pleasurable condition of volupté (although voluptee, meaning ‘lust’, can be found in Wyclif ’s translation of the Bible), and to mention an homme d’affaires – explaining, ‘Every pasha has his Jew, who is his homme d’affaires.’

  Montagu’s writings were an antidote to the often ill-informed works of her contemporaries. For instance, John Campbell and Charles Thompson both managed to produce accounts of the Levant without ever going there. There was, moreover, a fashion for imaginative and sometimes moralistic forays into the Islamic world, which can be dated to the Antoine Galland’s 1704 translation of the Arabian Nights. Their subject matter includes caravans, elephants and camels, flowers and jewels, and a common trope is the impenetrability of the East, its religions and mysteries.39 Thus in Samuel Johnson’s play Irene, which was written in the 1730s, we hear of the nymph known as a houri, in William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) of a ghoul (from the Arabic), in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) of a kanoon (a type of zither), and in Felicia Hemans’s unfinished poem ‘Superstition and Revelation’ (c.1820) of ‘the glistening serab’ – that is, a mirage.

  Although trade with the Near and Middle East shrivelled in the eighteenth century, the distribution of traders was wider than ever. Syria exported to London mohair yarn, raw silk and galls for use in the production of dyes, while indigo and spices from British India and woollens from England were sent to the markets at Aleppo.40 Robert Wood’s The Ruins of Palmyra (1753) and The Ruins of Balbec (1757) heightened interest in Islamic architecture, while Richard Pococke’s Description of the East (1743-5) provided for nonspecialists an account of Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Cyprus. Pococke affords us a first sighting of the word fellah, a term for Egyptian peasants – commonly encountered in the plural fellahin. In the next century the challenge of understanding the Middle East would be taken up by A. W. Kinglake and Sir Richard Burton, among others.

  The literature of exploration contained a multitude of different voices. Italy and France remained the most popular destinations for tourists, but a few more serious travellers made for the Low Countries and the Balkans. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) promoted the image of a romantically moonlit Scandinavia, complete with castles, waterfalls and vast wildernesses. William Tooke’s View of the Russian Empire (1799), the fruit of more than twenty years as chaplain to the British trading station at St Petersburg, included such novelties as kibitka, a circular tent covered with felt, the sleeveless cloak called a sarafan, a fish known as sudak, and a type of leather called yuft. African travel offered a more dangerous romance: the quest for Timbuktu or a route through the Niger valley, and later David Livingstone’s opening of ‘God’s Highway’ along the Zambezi River. Livingstone would discover the soko, an ape that lived in the area around Lake Tanganyika, and would introduce tampan, a bloodsucking tick, and lechwe, the Sesuto name for a water antelope. Long before him his fellow Scot the explorer Mungo Park had noted in his bestselling Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799) the koonting, a kind of guitar, and the kora, a stringed instrument much like a cross between a harp and a guitar. These words presage outlandishness, not utility.

  The North and South Poles were also keenly sought. It was on Constantine Phipps’s mission to the North Pole in 1773 that a young Horatio Nelson narrowly evaded the clutches of a polar bear. That same year James Cook became the first man to cross the Antarctic Circle – though the continent itself would not be sighted until 1820. But it is for other pioneering journeys that Cook is known. Between 1768 and 1779 he led three expeditions to the Pacific. In October 1769 the crew of Cook’s Endeavour made the first of several contacts with New Zealand Maoris. The following month his party’s chief naturalist, Joseph Banks, could note in his journal that he had seen a Maori stockade and that it was known as a pa. Cook’s crew were in an unfamiliar zone; there was a world of wonders in each new landfall.

  In July 1770 Cook encountered aboriginal Australians speaking Guugu Yimidhirr, a language in which there is a whole special vocabulary for talking to one’s brother-in-law.41 One of these natives ‘had a hole through the Bridge of his nose in which he stuck a piece of bone as thick as my finger’.42 There were further surprises: flying foxes, hundreds of new species of plant, and the kangaroo – two were shot and eaten by members of Cook’s party, who reported that they tasted just like venison. It has been charmingly alleged that the word kangaroo resulted from a misunderstanding – that the explorers asked what the animal was, received in the local language the answer ‘I don’t know,’ and interpreted this as the creature’s name – but in fact it was a corruption of the Guugu Yimidhirr gangurru, the word for a large black male roo. As it would turn out, the native languages were even more vulnerable than this creature. Within seventy-five years of contact with Europeans, the Aboriginal peoples of Tasmania were wiped out, and with them disappeared their speech.43 When an authoritative history of the Australian language family was published in 1980, the author could report that of the approximately 200 languages spoken in Australia before Europeans set foot there, at least a quarter had become extinct. Another 100 were ‘on the path towards extinction’.44

  Cook devoted nine years to his voyages, acutely aware that he was charting previously unknown territories. In his journals he notes local words: the Tahitian girdle known as a maro, the woven cloak called a kakahu, the Tongan tomb known as a fa’itoka. These terms have hardly imprinted themselves on English, but in his papers we also find the first mentions of not just the kangaroo, but
also taboo. The word was used among the so-called Friendly Islanders – as an adjective – of items set aside for the use of priests and potentates. Cook had no grasp of the subtleties of the Tongan language, and in importing the word he gave it a more general purpose, claiming it ‘has a very comprehensive meaning; but, in general, signifies that a thing is forbidden’. He wrote as well of the practice of ‘tattowing’ – the first sighting of the word we know as tattoo. (The other kind of tattoo, the military display, comes from the Dutch taptoe, meaning ‘Close off the tap,’ a cry accompanied by a drum beat as tippling soldiers were summoned back to their garrison.) In 1774, when Fanny Burney met Omai, she noted that his hands were liberally covered with tattooed designs, and the Gentleman’s Magazine displayed an image of a native New Zealander ‘curiously Tataowed’, which showed ‘the manner in which … [they] both paint and ornament themselves … different from anything of the like kind hitherto discovered’.45

  In the eyes of the British public, Cook was a hero. By increasing their knowledge of science and geography without doing obvious damage, he made Britons proud of their technology (he used new instruments to help him makes his charts) and allowed them to feel comfortable about their country’s imperial role. Modern Australia began as a penal colony, to which around 160,000 convicts were deported, and until 1830 convicts outnumbered free settlers by at least four to one. Beginning in 1787, it was populated – in the words of Robert Hughes – ‘to defend English property not from the frog-eating invader across the Channel but from the marauder within’. This colonial experiment transformed the unexplored continent into a giant jail: ‘The space around it, the very air and sea, the whole transparent labyrinth of the South Pacific, would become a wall 14,000 miles thick.’ The landscape pulsated with oddities – ‘koalas clambered through the gum-tree branches or sprawled sedately in the comfortable forks munching their bunches of leaves’, and then there were wombats, bandicoots, spiny anteaters.46 Borrowings from the native languages consisted largely of words for the island’s bizarre fauna, and included the boomerang (from bumarin in the Dharuk language of New South Wales) used in hunting them, but the often awkward relationship between the Aboriginal peoples and the incomers kept these verbal infusions to a minimum.

  Writing to his aunt in 1793, the artist Thomas Watling, sentenced to fourteen years in Australia for forging a banknote, depicted the colony as a ‘luxuriant museum’, full of birds and plants ‘that must baffle the happiest efforts of the pencil’. Yet of the natives he remarked, ‘Irascibility, ferocity, cunning, treachery, revenge, filth, and immodesty, are strikingly their dark characteristics – their virtues are so far from conspicuous, that I have not, as yet, been able to discern them.’47 Watling’s attitude was representative. His peers took little interest in the language of the island’s long-standing inhabitants. The Aborigines had been there for about forty millennia; the sudden surge of European-style civilization barely touched them. When the newcomers did pick up words used by the indigenous peoples, their motives were pragmatic. For this reason Aboriginal words have gained almost no hold beyond Australia. An English-speaker in Alice Springs may have some use for the words pitchi and cooliman (types of vessel used for carrying, respectively, food and water), but they are hardly a help to a Chicagoan or a Glaswegian. Corroboree, a term for a ceremonial dance, is typical of the type of Aboriginal word that has made a small impression on Australian English, but has hardly become important beyond Australia. In the same class are billabong and quokka. More familiar is cooee, which the OED defines as ‘the call or cry used as a signal by the Australian aborigines, and adopted by the colonists in the bush’.

  Only a handful of other widely circulated English words have originated in Australia. Some will be familiar to anyone who has seen Barry Humphries’s comic creations Barry McKenzie, Sir Les Patterson and Dame Edna Everage – and indeed to anyone who has spent much time socializing with Australians, who are on the whole both gregarious and addicted to foreign travel. Thus larrikin, dinkum and plonk (cheap wine). Despite concessions to multiculturalism, the character of modern Australia is prosperous, coastal, urban and white. The country’s deep history of linguistic diversity has barely been registered by the rest of the world, or indeed by the majority of Australians. Its proud independence notwithstanding, Australia is powerfully affected by the influence of America, and, culturally at least, little travels in the opposite direction.

  Not long after Cook discovered New South Wales, the first British settlement in South Africa was established when an expeditionary force invaded. A larger, more secure, settlement was founded on the Eastern Cape in the 1820s. The Portuguese, Huguenots and Dutch had all preceded the British in colonizing the region, as had the Bushmen and Khoikhoi, and the positions inherited by English as it became the official language of the region were riddled with ethnic and linguistic tensions. English in South Africa has absorbed huge numbers of words from the black languages and also many from Afrikaans, the language seeded there by the Dutch settlers who began to arrive in the seventeenth century. Yet only a few South African words have become well known, and the matters with which they deal are plainly African: trek, biltong, wildebeest, veldt and meerkat. Kraal, derived from the Portuguese curral, meaning ‘farmyard’, has been confined to South and Central Africa, whereas its sister corral has travelled more widely.

  In 1840, the year the transportation of convicts to eastern Australia was ended, the Treaty of Waitangi provided for New Zealand to become yet another British colony. Kiwi, tutu and haka are the Maori words most familiar to English-speakers, while foreign visitors to New Zealand cite kumara, a sweet potato, and paua, a kind of shell used for making jewellery, and English-speaking New Zealanders may consider as part of their own word-stock items such as tui, a parrot-like bird, and totara, an indigenous species of girthy tree. Samoan terms, however, have made a negligible impact outside New Zealand’s own Samoan community.

  In Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, then, the contributions of the indigenous languages to the English word-stock have been modest. But in another colony – older than any of these three, more deeply explored, and also more responsive – the story could not have been more different.

  11. Teapot

  A vessel in which tea is made and brought to the table

  A compound of tea – a word probably learnt from Dutch merchants, who had acquired it via Malay from the Amoy dialect of Chinese – and pot, a word found occasionally in Old English (its source unclear) and reinforced in Middle English by the influence of French

  The narrator of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) sums up the Western enthusiasm for India. ‘Pepper’, he says, ‘brought Vasco da Gama’s tall ships across the ocean, from Lisbon’s Tower of Belém to the Malabar Coast: first to Calicut and later, for its lagoony harbour, to Cochin. English and French sailed in the wake of that first-arrived Portugee.’ Then, for extra frisson, he quotes an observation of his mother’s: ‘From the beginning, what the world wanted from bloody mother India was daylight-clear. They came for the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart.’1

  As we have seen, the European appetite for spices was a significant driver of imperial expansionism, and in European lore India was often presented as a sort of exotic pantry, stocked with condiments and elixirs. The fate of imperial Rome served as a warning of how costly the lust for such delicacies could be. Decadent Roman appetites had necessitated a succession of wildly expensive forays into the Indian market: pepper, cinnamon, saffron and cardamom were especially valued, and of these cinnamon was the most sought after and the most expensive. Spices were used not only in cooking, but also in the manufacture of perfumes. The Romans had little to trade with the Indians – except their silver and gold.2 It seems appropriate that Petronius’s gaudy Trimalchio, whose dinner menu includes dormice sprinkled with poppyseed and honey, considers sending to India just for some mushroom seed. Such extravagance steadily depleted Roman reserves of currency, and the large caches
of Roman coins found in modern Kerala (and as far afield as Vietnam) suggest where much of it ended up. A craving for ‘the hot stuff’ cost the Romans dear.

  Da Gama’s Portuguese were thus renewing an old connection. The risks were high – in the early voyages, they lost half their ships – but the rewards were believed to justify them. Trade was always a higher priority for them than conquest, and to facilitate it they set up feitorias – possibly the immediate source of the English word factory – on the coasts of Africa and Asia. In 1445 they positioned the first of these fortified bases at Arguin off the coast of modern Mauritania; their first in India was built at Cochin in 1503, followed a couple of years later by another at Cannanore. In 1518 a fort was established at Colombo. With their presence in Brazil to boot, Portugal’s power spanned four continents. Their national poet Luis de Camões conceived his epic The Lusiads while soldiering in India. An apostle of empire, he boasted of his country’s mission ‘por mares nunca dantes navegados’ – that is, ‘for seas no one had sailed before’.

  The Portuguese spread their language, which became a lingua franca of African and Asian commerce, and with it their Catholic faith. In India their stronghold was Goa, a position created when Afonso de Albuquerque grappled it from the Sultan of Bijapur in 1510, and formalized two decades later. Control of Goa, Ormuz and Malacca ensured their dominance of the key spice routes in the Indian Ocean. While they were about it, they muscled in on the trade in Arabian horses, but cloves and cinnamon were their real business.3 The Portuguese presence in India gave English the words monsoon, betel, mango and tamarind, and it was in India that they first saw the coconut, which took its name from its base’s supposed resemblance to a grinning face – in Portuguese, coco signifies a grin or a grimace. Amah, the Anglo-Indian name for a wet nurse, derives from this language too, and it appears that an encounter with Portuguese adventurers in Mauritius in 1628 alerted English-speakers to the existence of the dodo, so called after the Portuguese doudo, ‘a simpleton’, and once known to scientists by the sad name Didus ineptus.