आज का शब्द / آج كا شبد / ਅੱਜ ਦਾ ਸ਼ਬਦ

[muckefuck]

प्याज़ / پياز / ਪਿਆਜ਼ pyaaz "onion"

A quick one today, inspired by wwidsith. Not much to say about this term, since it's a straightforward loan from Persian. It does however spawn the nisbah adjective प्याज़ी / پيازي / प्याज़ी pyaazee which in addition to meaning "oniony" has the extended meaning "of reddish colour". (For Hindi, Platts gives "crimson" whereas my Panjabi sources agree on "pinkish". Anyone have an opinion on how to describe the hue of Indian onions?)

Another term (which may well be more common in Panjabi) is गण्डा gaNDaa / ਗੰਢਾ gaMDhaa, which looks tadbhava, but I'm unsure of the exact origin. The Panjabi diminutive ਗੰਢੀ gaMDhee has among its meanings "clove [of garlic]" (i.e. ਥੋਮ ਦੀ ਗੰਢੀ). Garlic also has an assortment of names in NIA--so many in fact, they're probably best explored in another post.

Comments

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

OK, I just went and looked up Koine and Persian, and decided to delete my previous comment. I am curious about the "from Persian" designation for Indian languages, though: the histories of the Mughals that I've read seem to suggest that Persian influence became important in India during/because of the Mughal regime, but that's clearly not the case, and I wonder just how one draws a line between the Hindi-Urdu that emerged following Babur's invasion and the Persian-influenced languages that came before it - whether one can, actually, come up with a neat origin story for Hindi-Urdu that gives it two parents: one Persian, the other "Indian."

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Persian influence greatly increased with the Mughals, but the pronounced Persian element in Hindavi (the ancestor of Hindi) dates back to at least the Dehli Sultanate, as demonstrated by the surviving poetry of Amīr Khusrow Dehlawī.

As I was just telling a friend over the weekend, there are no neat dividing lines in the histories of languages. Moreover, modern narratives tend to adopt a telistic fallacy, framing the entire linguistic history of India as if the ultimate goal was to create and adopt native vernaculars and the near-millennium of Persian's presence as a prestige variety was some sort of intrusive anomaly.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

bingo. Now what about that strange and eternal tiger, Persian, prowling through the linguistic underbrush of Central and South Asia...? I still can't quite let it go, you see.