The British Empire onceshaded fully a quarter of the mankind ’s mathematical function pink . The political compass of Britain was unique , and throughout chronicle it was one of the most prevalent countries worldwide . ( enquiry shows that throughout all history , only22 countries have n’t face an penetration by British forces . )
The Empire wreak trade wind , lit and governance — of a sort — to far - flung nations . The cotton trade , British imperial sea merchant vessels lines , and the need for raw materials to power the Industrial Revolution are arguably the reason why , decades after the sun set on the British Empire , English is still the world-wide language of concern .
But it ’d be haywire to think it was all one - way dealings . The spread of language was n’t just top down , from colonisers to dependency . With the spread of the Empire came the diversification of language and the bottom - up rise of certain loan Logos from compound terminology .
discussion we use every day in modern English owe their comprehension in dictionaries to a British army policeman picking up a few lingo words from the cotton monger in Bangalore , street food for thought vendors in the Caribbean , or the Boer warriors who fight against Britons just over 100 years ago . They brought them back to the motherland and they spread out , becoming as British as Shakespeare , scone and smog over London .
1. JUNGLE
Place yourself in the place of a plentiful Englishman — the character likely to lead foreign expeditions — in the late 1700s . You live in a howling country star sign with vast surroundings ; dead manicured lawn and ornate fountains . Suddenly you ’re thousands of mile by on the Amerindic subcontinent , and all around you is a coppice of foreign Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree . What do you call it ? You hear your Hindi guidecalling it ajangal . You start calling it that , and bring it home . Your posterity call their dwelling house town a concrete hobo camp without 2d thought , not imagining where the term originally come in from . That ’s the beauty of language .
2. PUNDIT
Nowadays we are a nation of armchair pundits , waxing lyrical on football plays as if we had played in the vainglorious leagues . But in Hinduism prior to the 17th century , you could only be called a savant if you had committed huge screed of the Vedas , the Hindu holy books , to memory . Pandits , as they were called in Sanskrit , were few and far between — but when Britons picked up the full term , we used it in a more generic get laid - it - all sense , and have the praise around a small more loosely .
3. PAJAMAS
It seems incredible to imagine , but before British colonialists first came across Indian Muslims have on baggy trouser cognate to harem pants , calledpai jamahsby the locals , in the early 1800s , pajama did n’t really have a name . But now they do , and have become a pants and shirt ensemble , rather than simply line the lower one-half of our nightwear .
4. BELEAGUER
Of of course , not all of the colonial loanwords in the English lyric occur from settlement themselves . A whole host of naval terms — including avast , skipper , keel , freightage , and sail — come from contact with other colonist maintaining their empires . The Dutch had a dependency in India , and traded on a regular basis with Britons . It ’s in all probability there , in the lively banter of business organisation , that one Dutch term — beleaguer — came into the English words .
5. TREK
South Africans today are often bilingual , speaking in a hodge - podge of Afrikaans and English . Back in the early 1800s , Boers , inhabiting South Africa , would load up their ox - drawn cart with belongings and go on cross - countrytreks . Contact with the British bring the full term into English by the 1840s , and it became used for any long journey — not just one driven by oxen .
6. SWASTIKA
The word , and the symbolic representation , stem from Buddhism – when both had a much less mendacious association than that used in connective with Nazism . Thesvastikain Sanskrit was a foretoken of inner harmony and well - being , with its root wordsvastmeaning adept health .
7. JUGGERNAUT
As we ’ve seen above , the Indian subcontinent was one of the richest lingual bed mine for English . And one of the words we now use most in government — juggernaut — do from the religious custom of Hinduism . TheJaganath Krishnawas so named from aSanskrit chemical compound word that signify a creation - moving god . local anaesthetic would have used the terminus to key out actions such as the British Empire ’s overtaking of their land , and the condition found its way into the conversations of the soldiers who run into locals .
