Dear George and all,

the list I composed was based on several sources, which are largely reliable on many other matters. I should have checked each word before listing it for the group, but I was probably overwhelmed by the fact that "India may had a great influence on English vocabulary".

In Singapore, there are Indian (northern and southern styles), Chinese and Malay curries, and also Thai and Indonesian curries you can find in restaurants and food courts. When I first came to Australia, it surprised me there is Japanese curry! There word curry is very much an umbrella term for a particular culinary style, to the consumer, today.

As Piya pointed out, the Online Etymology Dictionary may be a good source to begin with if you like to research further. The entry for curry mentions Tamil kari as the word's origin.

The entries for father and mother indicate a common Indoeuropean origin. With my limited skills (no previous formal training) in etymology, I gather from the site this information on father:

^ Proto-Indo-European: *p@...

> Proto-Germanic: *fader
> Old English: fæder (der changed to ther during Middle English)
> Modern English: father

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=father

However, cultures influences each other all the other, for better or worse. And, I agree the list I provided did not clearly indicate whether a word used in the English medium today has a common Indoeuropean origin or was borrowed from latter Indian languages. It was for the latter that the list was originally drafted. So, several words (like father, mother) should not be on the list at all.

Here's the list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Pali/message/13472


metta,
Yong Peng.

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, gdbedell wrote:

Normally, to say that an English word (like 'curry') has an Indian origin (or has 'roots' in India) would mean that this word was borrowed into English from an Indian language, probably but not necessarily during the colonial period. That is no doubt the case with 'curry' and most of the other words listed by Yong Peng in his original post. (Of course it might sometimes be difficult to identify the source word or language precisely.)

As has been pointed out, there are words on the list which do not meet this definition, for example 'father'. This word existed in English (with varying pronunciation) long before English had any contact with Indian languages. It is related to words in many Indian languages due to their common Indo-European origin, but it is simply a mistake to imagine that therefore 'father' has an Indian origin. Using this definition, one could equally well say that the Pali word 'pitu' (and hundreds or thousands of others) has an English origin.

The list presented by Yong Peng is a good example of muddled or misinformed thinking about language. Apparently the problem is not so much with Yong Peng himself, as with the uncited sources where he got his list.