I was looking for something else on the Web and came up with this link from Wikipedia on English words of Persian origin. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I thought our new poster from Iran might enjoy it.

This is very interesting. It makes me wonder how we think about where words come from. A lot of these words came into English from Hindi or another language, not from Persian directly. The page says that these words have their roots in Persian, but we could just as easily say that many of them are from Indo-European. For instance, pajamas is from Indo-European *ped- and is cognate with foot, Panjabi is from IE *penkʷe and is cognate with five. Pointing to a source for a word is always a bit arbitrary.

"Persian was the lingua franca in India before British rule." Really?

I think carcass and cash might be wrong, AHD says they're from Latin.

I didn't know about magic - that's cool.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

I wondered about the accuracy of the list, Goofy. One never knows about Wikipedia (though there were 315 references), and it did seem like a big list. I just don't have the expertise to be able to judge how accurate the list is..

I like bazaar: from from Urdu bāzār, from Persian bāzār, from the PIE root *wes- "to sell", cognate with vend and vile.

and paradise: from the PIE root *dheigh "to build" (as in dough), becoming Avestan daēzō "wall", which combined with pairi "around" to form pairidaēza "park", borrowed into Greek as paradeisos "garden", then borrowed into Latin as paradīsus , which because Old French paradis, borrowed into English.

Thanks dear Kalleh and I'm terribly sorry for the long absence. I had to cram for a vital exam.

@goofy:
That page is about words of Persian ORIGIN but it doesn't mean that those words have directly passed to English thru Persian. They are Hindi, Greek, Latin, etc. loanwords. Unfortunately, some people when see a word of language X origin, take it as a language X loanword but in doing so, the cultural, etc. role of the mediating language(s) (Hindi, Latin, Greek, etc.) is ignored. And this not right. As a side note, we have also such thing in Turkish, Hindi, Urdu, etc. All of the words of Arabic origin found in these languages are considered Arabic loanwords by the majority, whereas they have been directly taken from Persian and thus they're Persian loanwords in their language. Persian was for a long time the lingua franca of the western parts of Islamic world and of the Indian subcontinent. It was the official, court, or literary language of many places ranging from Turkey through India (this is one of the reasons that Persian is sometimes called "the French of the East"). By seeing them as Arabic, this historical fact and the role of Persian is simply ignored resulting in Arabic to be overestimated.

@goofy: page says that these words have their roots in Persian, but we could just as easily say that many of them are from Indo-European. For instance, pajamas is from Indo-European *ped- and is cognate with foot, Panjabi is from IE *penkÊ·e and is cognate with five.

Well, Persian is also an Indo-European language just like Latin, Greek, English, and Hindi.

pâjâma is a compound from pâ (foot + leg) and jâma (garment). yes, pâ is the Persian form of Indo-European *ped- but we can't say so for the compound pâjâma. So it's a (Bengali) loanword and not a cognate.

Panjâb is another compound apparently from Persian panj (five) and âb (water).

I also like "paradise". It has opened its way into many languages. It's even found in Quran (-> Arabic) in the form of ferdaws (Arabic doesn't have p sound and they used to replace it with f).

That's it for now but in a later opportunity, I'd like to ask about the practical usage of some words mentioned in the Wiki page.

- Regards

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Alijsh,

quote:

Originally posted by Alijsh:
pâjâma is a compound from pâ (foot + leg) and jâma (garment). yes, pâ is the Persian form of Indo-European *ped- but we can't say so for the compound pâjâma. So it's a (Bengali) loanword and not a cognate.

This seems a bit limiting. I don't see why we can't consider "pajama" to be cognate with "foot" - both words have a common ancestor.

Well, Persian is still spoken in India among some surviving noble families -- in Bengal for example. And the royal court of Chitral (now part of Pakistan, adjacent to Afghanistan and China) until the mid-1930s operated in Farsi.

And the Persian legacy remains enormous, not just in Punjab (panch = 5, ab = water, for its five great rivers).

My favourite Persianism comes through the 18th C Anglo-Bengali cotton trade, where Persian was used at least by the nobility. The Raj corrupted 'sheer o sukar,' milk and sugar -- referring to candy stripes -- into seersucker.