Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive c6.30

c6.30

The Dutch language has not contributed much to our store. The Dutch and the English arrived in the Indies contemporaneously, and though both inherited from the Portuguese, we have not been the heirs of the Dutch to any great extent, except in Ceylon, and even there Portuguese vocables had already occupied the colloquial ground. Petersilly, the word in general use in English families for ‘parsley,’ appears to be Dutch. An example from Ceylon that occurs to memory is burgher. The Dutch admitted people of mixt descent to a kind of citizenship, and these were distinguished from the pure natives by this term, which survives. Burgher in Bengal means ‘a rafter,’ properly bargā. A word spelt and pronounced in the same way had again a curiously different application in Madras, where it was a corruption of Vadagar, the name given to a tribe in the Nilgherry hills;—to say nothing of Scotland, where Burghers and Antiburghers were Northern tribes (veluti Gog et Magog!) which have long been condensed into elements of the United Presbyterian Church—!