1878.—"The Competition-Wallah, at home on leave or retirement, dins perpetually into our ears the greatness of India.... We are asked to feel awestruck and humbled at the fact that Bengal alone has 66 millions of inhabitants. We are invited to experience an awful thrill of sublimity when we learn that the area of Madras far exceeds that of the United Kingdom."—Sat. Rev., June 15, p. 750.
COMPOUND, s. The enclosed ground, whether garden or waste, which surrounds an Anglo-Indian house. Various derivations have been suggested for this word, but its history is very obscure. The following are the principal suggestions that have been made:—[[83]]
(a.) That it is a corruption of some supposed Portuguese word.
(b.) That it is a corruption of the French campagne.
(c.) That it is a corruption of the Malay word kampung, as first (we believe) indicated by Mr. John Crawfurd.
(a.) The Portuguese origin is assumed by Bishop Heber in passages quoted below. In one he derives it from campaña (for which, in modern Portuguese at least, we should read campanha); but campanha is not used in such a sense. It seems to be used only for 'a campaign,' or for the Roman Campagna. In the other passage he derives it from campao (sic), but there is no such word.
It is also alleged by Sir Emerson Tennent (infra), who suggests campinho; but this, meaning 'a small plain,' is not used for compound. Neither is the latter word, nor any word suggestive of it, used among the Indo-Portuguese.
In the early Portuguese histories of India (e.g. Castanheda, iii. 436, 442; vi. 3) the words used for what we term compound, are jardim, patio, horta. An examination of all the passages of the Indo-Portuguese Bible, where the word might be expected to occur, affords only horta.
There is a use of campo by the Italian Capuchin P. Vincenzo Maria (Roma, 1672), which we thought at first to be analogous: "Gionti alla porta della città (Aleppo) ... arrivati al Campo de' Francesi; doue è la Dogana...." (p. 475). We find also in Rauwolff's Travels (c. 1573), as published in English by the famous John Ray: "Each of these nations (at Aleppo) have their peculiar Champ to themselves, commonly named after the Master that built it...."; and again: "When ... the Turks have washed and cleansed themselves, they go into their Chappells, which are in the Middle of their great Camps or Carvatschars...." (p. 84 and p. 259 of Ray's 2nd edition). This use of Campo, and Champ, has a curious kind of analogy to compound, but it is probably only a translation of Maidān or some such Oriental word.
(b.) As regards campagne, which once commended itself as probable, it must be observed that nothing like the required sense is found among the seven or eight classes of meaning assigned to the word in Littré.