WORDS wander with us; carried in the knapsacks of soldiers and wanderers, entwined in the chains of slaves or stowed on the ships and caravans of traders. Travel and time tend to transform, and often we find these words return home as strangers and yet strangely familiar.

Take the orange which, juicy and vitamin-C packed as it is, has also travelled around the world; stemming from the Dravidian and Sanskrit ‘naranga’, it went west into Persia and Arabia as ‘naranj’, riding the trade routes into Italy as ‘arancia’ before crossing the channel from France into England and ending up as the ‘orange’ in the mid-1300s, denoting both the fruit and colour. This raises an interesting question: what did the English call the colour orange when they hadn’t yet seen the fruit? The answer is ‘ġeolurēad’, meaning yellow-red.

Ever wonder why we call cinnamon ‘darcheeni’ in this part of the world? Take that word apart, and you have ‘dar’, meaning bark, and ‘cheeni’, meaning (you guessed it) Chinese. And this is because this was a bark that came from China! And why do we call sugar ‘cheeni’? Simply because, while the granulated and unrefined shakkar was always used in the subcontinent, when the sugar-making process travelled West to China, they........

© Dawn