24450239 - 24 June 2007 11:20 PM

Max

A giveaway (assuming the Subcontinental person wasn’t speaking to you on the phone or in front of you) was the use of a certain kind of ‘Matric’ English: ‘purchase’ was favoured over ‘buy’, ‘residence’ over ‘home’ and ‘plantain’ over ‘banana’.

Brinjal was what he’d been taught, but he was prepared to call it whatever was necessary to lay his hands on one. Getting some mustard oil to fry it was another tale!

Thanks, this is the sort of the thing I was after. Your Dad’s heritage was Anglo-Indian, too? Or was he like Kipling, an Anglo from India, but not mestizo?

Max
Neither nor - native subcontinental!

24450239 - 24 June 2007 11:46 PM

Max
Neither nor - native subcontinental!

I’m thinking I should resent the implication therein. :-)

Anglo-Indians are by definition “native to the subcontinent”, na? I’ve had Indian friends mistake photos of my grandfather for those of a “real” desi, and my Dad thought that a photo of the late Ismail Merchant was one of his own older brother.

When with Punjabi friends..... I drink “cha”

On Merseyside, among the natives, one drinks a cooppa chaa. I don’t know, though, of any particular historical connection between Merseyside and the Punjab.........;-)

BTW: a propos “barnshoot”: in my part of the world, the Arabic for “your sister’s pudenda” (or alternatively, “your mother’s pudenda") is an extremely offensive insult, warranting a violent (in past times, even a lethal) response.

I call aubergines brinjals, as do all South Africans. (edit) I believe the South African word’s derived from a Malay word rather than Anglo-Indian.

My family has also used cuppa chah for cup of tea.

maxqnz - 24 June 2007 11:25 PM

Or was he like Kipling, an Anglo from India, but not mestizo?

As a USan, I’m not up on all the languages of the subcontinent, but I do know some Spanish…

The OED may call brinjal “Anglo-Indian”, but it is, of course the standard UK curry house menu word for the aubergine/eggplant.

Which reminds me of one of my favourite jokes:
What’s the difference between ordinary dhal and tarka dhal?
Tarka dhal’s a little ‘otter ...

On the subject of tea/cha/char/chai, as the OED says, “The Portuguese brought the form cha (which is Cantonese as well as Mandarin) from Macao. This form also passed overland into Russia ... The form te (thé) was brought into Europe by the Dutch, prob. from the Malay at Bantam (if not from Formosa, where the Fuhkien or Amoy form was used).”

In India, presumably, the word arrived either directly from mainland China or via the Portuguese, and was thus cha (still the modern Portuguese word for the drink).

Cha, of course, is reflected in the English expression “char lady”, the cleaner-cum-teatrolley woman, who is, curiously, traditionally depicted wearing a floral turban ... her name, presumably comes from British Army usage.

In England “tea” was originally pronounced “tay”, and an echo of that can be seen in the nursery rhyme Polly Put the Kettle On:

Polly put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea/
Sukie take it off again, they’ve all gone away

where “tea” would have originally rhymed with “away” but not any more ... in Irish it’s still pronounced “tay” (and if you want to see “tea” in another 80 or so languages, and hear it in many of them as well, click here)

maxqnz - 24 June 2007 05:09 PM

In fact, it’s a corruption of “sister-f*cker”. Not sure how mild or light that would be in English, at least outside the Appalachians.

You may know the Appalachians to be nothing more than the setting for the movie Deliverance, but many people live near them. I am one such person, and I do not fuck my sister.