Even the most ordinary, everyday words can have an interesting story to tell. कमरा is one of the
first Hindi nouns a learner encounters, and many course-books use it to introduce the ‘oblique
case with postposition’ construction: कम% & 'या ) ?Asian Studie

Snell, Rupert

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!कमरा  room !Even the most ordinary, everyday words can have an interesting story to tell. कमरा is one of the first Hindi nouns a learner encounters, and many course-books use it to introduce the ‘oblique case with postposition’ construction: कम% & 'या ) ?  कमरा belongs to a group of common Hindi words deriving from Portuguese. As Masica (1991:73) puts it, ‘Portuguese was the first European language with which South Asia came in contact and it was accordingly the primary mediator of terms for the products, artifacts, and institutions of pre-industrial Europe (e.g., Western Christianity)’. What is the background to this? In the early seventeenth century, the Portuguese had strong trading interests in India, and were ambitious rivals of the British in fostering profitable connections with the Mughal empire. Sir Thomas Roe, King James’ representative at Jahangir’s court, was loftily disdainful of them: ‘one Portugall to three Moors, one Englishman to three Portugalls’. But these ‘Portugalls’ were intrepid sailors who endured perilous journeys by ship round the Cape Horn and across the Arabian Sea to the western seaboard of India, where they built their ‘factories’ or trading-posts at Surat in Gujarat.  Portugal refused to yield control of Goa to the new republic of India in 1947; finally in 1961, India annexed Goa by military force. Many words such as कमरा had long since become naturalised citizens in the world of Hindi. Such Portuguese words crept inland from Portugal’s presence on India’s western seaboard, eventually influencing languages as far inland as the land-locked Hindi belt. Examples, with their Portuguese etymons, are: कमरा < camara, चाबी < chave, -ज़ < mez, तौिलया < toalha, गोभी < couve, and अलमारी < armario (itself from Latin armarium, a place for keeping arms and military equipment.) Month-names such as iसत9बर owe their dental consonants to Portuguese (setembro etc.), though English has also played its part in these derivations. Portuguese camara is from Latin camera, itself from Greek καμάρα kamára, ‘vaulted enclosure’; thus camera is cognate with English chamber, French chambre, and other variants within the European linguistic union. The sense in which Latin camera is best known today is of course the photographic one, an abbreviation of camera obscura ‘darkened box’ (itself coined in contrast to camera lucida, a ‘box of light’ in which prisms produce visual images); क:मरा and कमरा exist side-by-side in Hindi as ‘doublets’ — linguistic siblings from the same parent.   A further English cognate for कमरा is the word comrade, reflecting old French camarade (> French/ English camaraderie) and Spanish camarada, meaning chamber-mate, room-mate.  !!— HINDI URDU FLAGSHIP —Being a non-Sanskritic word, कमरा is denied access to the higher registers of Hindi, where it is typically replaced by the more formal and prestigious word क; — as in अiतiथ क; guest-room, गहन िचiक?सा क; intensive care unit, शयन क; bedroom, iनय9Aण क; control room, Cती;ा क; waiting room, iहDदी क; Hindi room (in a library for example). The original sense of Sanskrit क; was a lurking place, a hiding place, and one of its extended meanings was armpit as a ‘hidden’ place in the body; from this derives the Hindi noun काख armpit. कम% & 'या ) ? बGत सारी चीज़e ! — HINDI URDU FLAGSHIP —

कमरा room

https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/2152/45680/2/room.pdf

कमरा room

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