चाबी / چابي / ਚਾਬੀ chaabee "key"
कुंजी / کنجی / ਕੁੰਜੀ kuMjee "key"
Again, I'm left with intriguing questions about distribution of variants and no obvious place to seek answers. My dictionaries all list both words, but my grammar books list only one each--चाबी / چابي
chaabee for Hindi/Urdu and ਕੁੰਜੀ
kuMjee for Panjabi--so I can only assume from this that these are the more common variants in each language.
When I learned चाबी, my first reaction was
That looks suspiciously like Portuguese, so I was quite chuffed to see that Platts agrees with me in deriving it from
chave. That derivation would also explain the earlier Hindustani variant चाभी
chaabhee, as I can't think of any other word that shows this sort of variation in medials.
Since, as mentioned before, Panjabi preserved the inherited contrast between /v/ and /b/, this would indicate that ਚਾਬੀ must be a borrowing from Hindustani. Still, that doesn't stop it from entering into a number of idioms. ਚਾਬੀ ਘੁਮਾਉਣਾ
caabee ghumaauuNaa "turn[*] the key" means "tutor" and ਚਾਬੀ ਦੇਣਾ "give key" is to wind a watch or clock. (In Hindi, the latter is चाबी भरना
chaabee bharnaa "fill key".)
Panjabi ਕੁੰਜੀ has the extended sense of "note, annotation" whereas its Hindi counterpart कुंजी is mapped to English "key" in its computer terminological uses, e.g. कुंजीपटल
kuMjeepaTal "keyboard"[**] (with पटल "covering" apparently used as a kind of collective suffix) or आंकड़ा गूढ़लेखन कुंजी
aaMkRaa guRhalekhan kuMjee "data encryption key". Again, if Platts is to be believed, the ultimate etymological root is the surprising कुञ्च
kuñja "elephant tusk". I suppose we have a working hypothesis on what early Indian keys are made from!
[*] Causative of ਘੁੰਮਣਾ
ghuMNaa "rotate".
[**] Beside borrwed कीबोर्ड
keeborD, of course.
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