It may from these remarks be easily understood how a large number of our Anglo-Indian colloquialisms, even if eventually traceable to native sources (and especially to Mahratti, or Dravidian originals) have come to us through a Portuguese medium, and often bear traces of having passed through that alembic. Not a few of these are familiar all over India, but the number current in the South is larger still. Some other Portuguese words also, though they can hardly be said to be recognized elements in the Anglo-Indian colloquial, have been introduced either into Hindustani generally, or into that shade of it which is in use among natives in habitual contact with Europeans. Of words which are essentially Portuguese, among Anglo-Indian colloquialisms, persistent or obsolete, we may quote goglet, gram, plantain, muster, caste, peon, padre, mistry or maistry, almyra, aya, cobra, mosquito, pomfret, cameez, palmyra, still in general use; picotta, rolong, pial, fogass, margosa, preserved in the South; batel, brab, foras, oart, vellard in Bombay; joss, compradore, linguist in the ports of China; and among more or less obsolete terms, Moor, for a Mahommedan, still surviving under the modified form Moorman, in Madras and Ceylon; Gentoo, still partially kept up, I believe, at Madras in application to the Telugu language, mustees, castees, bandeja ('a tray'), Kittysol ('an umbrella,' and this survived ten years ago in the Calcutta customs tariff), cuspadore ('a spittoon'), and covid ('a cubit or ell'). Words of native origin which bear the mark of having come to us through the Portuguese may be illustrated by such as palanquin, mandarin, mangelin (a small weight for pearls, &c.), monsoon, typhoon, mango, mangosteen, jack-fruit, batta, curry, chop, congee, coir, cutch, catamaran, cassanar, nabob, avadavat, betel, areca, benzoin, corge, copra.[[14]] A few examples of Hindustani words borrowed from the Portuguese are chābī ('a key'), bāola ('a portmanteau'), bāltī ('a bucket'), martol ('a hammer'), tauliya ('a towel,' Port. toalha), sābūn ('soap'), bāsan ('plate' from Port. bacia), līlām and nīlām ('an auction'), besides a number of terms used by Lascars on board ship.
The Dutch language has not contributed much to our store. The Dutch and the English arrived in the Indies contemporaneously, and though both inherited from the Portuguese, we have not been the heirs of the Dutch to any great extent, except in Ceylon, and even there Portuguese vocables had already occupied the colloquial ground. Petersilly, the word in general use in English families for 'parsley,' appears to be Dutch. An example from Ceylon that occurs to memory is burgher. The Dutch admitted people of mixt descent to a kind of citizenship, and these were distinguished from the pure natives by this term, which survives. Burgher in Bengal means 'a rafter,' properly bargā. A word spelt and pronounced in the same way had again a curiously different application in Madras, where it was a corruption of Vaḍagar, the name given to a tribe in the Nilgherry hills;—to say nothing of Scotland, where Burghers and Antiburghers were Northern tribes (veluti Gog et Magog!) which have long been condensed into elements of the United Presbyterian Church——!
Southern India has contributed to the Anglo-Indian stock words that are in hourly use also from Calcutta to Peshawur (some of them already noted under another cleavage), e.g. betel, mango, jack, cheroot, mungoose, pariah, bandicoot, teak, patcharee, chatty, catechu, tope ('a grove'), curry, mulligatawny, congee. Mamooty (a digging tool) is familiar in certain branches of the service, owing to its having long had a place in the nomenclature of the Ordnance department. It is Tamil, manvĕtti, 'earth-cutter.' Of some very familiar words the origin remains either dubious, or matter only for conjecture. Examples are hackery (which arose apparently in Bombay), florican, topaz.
As to Hindustani words adopted into the Anglo-Indian colloquial the subject is almost too wide and loose for much remark. The habit of introducing these in English conversation and writing seems to prevail more largely in the Bengal Presidency than in any other, and especially more than in Madras, where the variety of different vernaculars in use has tended to make their acquisition by the English less universal than is in the north that of Hindustani, which is so much easier to learn, and also to make the use in former days of Portuguese, and now of English, by natives in contact with foreigners, and of French about the French settlements, very much more common than it is elsewhere. It is this bad habit of interlarding English with Hindustani phrases which has so often excited the just wrath of high English officials, not accustomed to it from their youth, and which (e.g.) drew forth in orders the humorous indignation of Sir Charles Napier.
One peculiarity in this use we may notice, which doubtless exemplifies some obscure linguistic law. Hindustani verbs which are thus used are habitually adopted into the quasi-English by converting the imperative into an infinitive. Thus to bunow, to lugow, to foozilow, to puckarow, to dumbcow, to sumjow, and so on, almost ad libitum, are formed as we have indicated.[[15]]
It is curious to note that several of our most common adoptions are due to what may be most especially called the Oordoo (Urdū) or 'Camp' language, being terms which the hosts of Chinghiz brought from the steppes of North Eastern Asia—e.g. "The old Bukshee is an awful bahadur, but he keeps a first-rate bobachee." That is a sentence which might easily have passed without remark at an Anglo-Indian mess-table thirty years ago—perhaps might be heard still. Each of the outlandish terms embraced in it came from the depths of Mongolia in the thirteenth century. Chick (in the sense of a cane-blind), daroga, oordoo itself, are other examples.
With the gradual assumption of administration after the middle of last century, we adopted into partial colloquial use an immense number of terms, very many of them Persian or Arabic, belonging to technicalities of revenue and other departments, and largely borrowed from our Mahommedan predecessors. Malay has contributed some of our most familiar expressions, owing partly to the ceaseless rovings among the Eastern coasts of the Portuguese, through whom a part of these reached us, and partly doubtless to the fact that our early dealings and the sites of our early factories lay much more on the shores of the Eastern Archipelago than on those of Continental India. Paddy, godown, compound, bankshall, rattan, durian, a-muck, prow, and cadjan, junk, crease, are some of these. It is true that several of them may be traced eventually to Indian originals, but it seems not the less certain that we got them through the Malay, just as we got words already indicated through the Portuguese.
We used to have a very few words in French form, such as boutique and mort-de-chien. But these two are really distortions of Portuguese words.
A few words from China have settled on the Indian shores and been adopted by Anglo-India, but most of them are, I think, names of fruits or other products which have been imported, such as loquot, leechee, chow-chow, cumquat, ginseng, &c. and (recently) jinrickshaw. For it must be noted that a considerable proportion of words much used in Chinese ports, and often ascribed to a Chinese origin, such as mandarin, junk, chop, pagoda, and (as I believe) typhoon (though this is a word much debated) are not Chinese at all, but words of Indian languages, or of Malay, which have been precipitated in Chinese waters during the flux and reflux of foreign trade.
Within my own earliest memory Spanish dollars were current in England at a specified value if they bore a stamp from the English mint. And similarly there are certain English words, often obsolete in Europe, which have received in India currency with a special stamp of meaning; whilst in other cases our language has formed in India new compounds applicable to new objects or shades of meaning. To one or other of these classes belong outcry, buggy, home, interloper, rogue (-elephant), tiffin, furlough, elk, roundel ('an umbrella,' obsolete), pish-pash, earth-oil, hog-deer, flying-fox, garden-house, musk-rat, nor-wester, iron-wood, long-drawers, barking-deer, custard-apple, grass-cutter, &c.