Abstract
A renewed interested in Indian Ocean studies has underlined possibilities of the transnational. This study highlights lexical borrowing as an analytical tool to deepen our understanding of cultural exchanges between Indian Ocean ports during the long nineteenth century, comparing loanwords from several Asian and African languages and demonstrating how doing so can re-establish severed links between communities. In this comparative analysis, four research avenues come to the fore as specifically useful to explore the dynamics of non-elite contact in this part of the world: (1) nautical jargon, (2) textile terms, (3) culinary terms, and (4) slang associated with society’s lower strata. These domains give prominence to a spectrum of cultural brokers frequently overlooked in the wider literature. It is demonstrated through concrete examples that an analysis of lexical borrowing can add depth and substance to existing scholarship on interethnic contact in the Indian Ocean, providing methodological inspiration to examine lesser studied connections. This study reveals no unified linguistic landscape, but several key individual connections between the ports of the Indian Ocean frequented by Persian, Hindustani, and Malay-speaking communities.
Highlights
Cultural vocabulary tends to overstep ethno-linguistic boundaries with relative ease.In the case of the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean, it is thanks mostly to AmitavGhosh’s best-selling novel Sea of Poppies that this fascinating story of lexical crossfertilisation “from below” has not yet sunk into the depths of oblivion.[1]
The diverse cadre of sailors at the core of such treatises have influenced the linguistic landscape of the Indian Ocean more significantly than any writer, and has given them credit for
What neither the author nor those using his dictionary appear to have realised is that the entire “Malay” sentence was taken over verbatim from Laskarī, South Asia’s once prevalent nautical slang with a grammatical core from Hindustani[3] and loanwords from several other languages: chor de āgil būlin yāhom parvān (“let go the head bowlines, square the yards”)
Summary
Cultural vocabulary tends to overstep ethno-linguistic boundaries with relative ease. In this realm, the Persian language was of key importance from at least medieval times (see Table 4), when nautical vocabulary from that language first found its way into Arabic texts and presumably into the languages of East Africa, South Asia, and the Malay World.[35] The word for “captain” is a case in point; it comes from the Persian compound nāv-khudā “ship-master” and is found across the Indian Ocean. All terms originate from the Persian noodle dish lākhsha.[89] The triangular-shaped fried snacks known in Macau as chamuças reveal an interesting transoceanic journey They already feature in medieval Arabic cookbooks as sanbūsaj, reflecting Middle-Persian sambōsag.[90] The fritters occur as Swahili sambusa, semusa, Somali sambuusa, Hindustani sambūsa, samosa, Sinhala samosā, Tamil camōcā, Malay samosa, sambosa, Burmese samuhsa, and Turkish samsa. Its chief novel contribution is the assertion that lexical borrowing is a powerful and effective tool to approach, quantify, and qualify these contact-induced exchanges
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