There is a lot of chest-thumping about English stealing words from Indian languages. There is no point in any triumphalism about the presence of Indian language words in English. This always happens in situations involving contact between languages. Languages in contact freely give and take words from one another. Lexical borrowing is not a sign of superiority of the language borrowed from or of the inferiority of the language that borrows. Once integrated into the borrowing language, the words become the property of anyone who uses that language. besides, unlike human borrowing of money, lexical borrowing only leads to the enrichment of both the languages. English has more than a million words today only because it freely borrowed words from various languages of the world.
There are uncanny similarities between Magna Carta and Indian Constitution. No doubt Britain stole it from India even though Magna Carta precedes Indian constitution by several centuries.
More people watch cricket in India than rest of the world combined. Therefore, no doubt Britain stole cricket from India as well.
The author mentioned only few of Hindi words. There are many more words taken from Sanskrit and other Indian languages. In fact English is an amalgam of many languages as Britishers traveled many countries and even occupied them for many years and hence many new words were added to English vocabulary. That is why English is called a bastard language. West has not only stole our words, they have even stole our literature like Panchtantra which they call it as Aeshop's Fables. They have stole our aircraft technology, the atomic energy technology and even our mythology, you will find many uncanny similarities between Bible and Gita.
It is so silly to call it stolen...it should be called borrowing... the word Button has come form tamil pothan.. the word sugar has come from sakkarai ...to shakkar in hindi...to english.. the word sir itself has tamil origin...avar,ivar,thiruvaaluvar adding r to respectfully address.. there are many many...
Not only the words were stolen from us but also various items like yoga and meditation,various herbals grown in our country; in short even before the II world war many scientific particulars (like atom bomb etc) written by our ancient seers in Sanskrit were stolen by the westerners (the Germans first) and are now claiming authority to them .
Does anyone of us are aware of these and many more things that were lost by us through our indifference?
