November 17, 2000
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A walk through Midtown Manhattan reveals a spectrum of sights and sounds. Today I was fixated on the various headwear: winter hats, random head coverings, and especially the religious caps, worn by both Jews and Muslims. I don’t know what they are called in English; I only refer to them by the Bengali word I learned while growing up: “Topee”. It then dawned on me that this was probably the root for the English word “toupee”. In fact, many words of Indian ancestry have crept into the English language. For example, cumberbund comes from the Indian words “cumber” (meaning “waist”) and “bund” (meaning “to tie”).
But I was wrong! According to Merriam-Webster, the word “toupee” comes from French. I find it a rather amazing coincidence that two similar words with similar meanings could have two different roots.
Its possible that the word crept into Bengali from Europe, which is a more common occurrence than one would think. There are no Bengali words for “table” and “chair”; we just call them “table” and “chair”. These words crept into the language after hundreds of years of British rule. But it makes you wonder what these words were before the British arrived.
Though certain words have leap-frogged across languages, it is very rare to see one language fully integrated into another. This is the case for Vietnamese, which has an Asian sound but French letters. I’m baffled as to how this evolved. Rather than fully adopting French, the French language had to be adapted to Vietnamese; an arduous and complicated task. I was once told a French monk introduced this system, but I don’t know why. A simple Internet search and a trip to Britannica.com didn’t elucidate the issue.
However one interesting fact from the Britannica article is that of the 150 or so languages spoken in Southeast Asia, Vietnamese has one of the longest recorded history. Although this only raises more questions then it answers, like how a language with such a long history could be so easily altered…
This all makes you wonder about the nature of human language and its development, a field I’ve never explored but would now like to. Maybe this is a good place to start… This site also has a comprehensive list of English words borrowed from other languages.
Comments (1)
The jewish “caps” (I’m assuming you refer to the little ones that hug the skull rather than those scary Amish looking ones worn by the strict orthodox jews) are called “yamukas” (I spelt that phonetically). My father has several. The word is, I believe, yiddish.