INDIA has very old links with the Arab world, and with Persia. For hundreds of years starting in the 11th century, large parts of northern India were ruled by dynasties with roots in that part of the world; the language of the Mughal court was Persian, and so on. This is all well-known, as is the existence of many loan-words from Farsi, Arabic and Turkish in Hindi/Urdu, the lingua franca of much of northern India and Pakistan.

But as a Hindi-speaker, even though you know, in theory, that Hindi is full of words borrowed from Arabic and Farsi, you don't always know which words they are; and you tend not to think of a word's provenance when you use it. There are words I was aware of, like kanun (law, from the Arabic qanuun, itself borrowed from the Greco-Latin "canon"), siyasai or siyasat (politics), akhbar (newspaper; in Arabic, it means "news"); jumuriyat ("democracy" in Urdu; in Arabic, a jumhuriya is a republic and the jumhur is the citizenry or polis); but these are "big" words, which I knew were borrowed in much the same way that an English-speaker knows that big words like "democracy" and "republic" are Greek or Latin in origin.

So it is still always a jolt to suddenly hear a word you recognise from everyday speech in the middle of a speech or monologue in a language you otherwise don't understand at all. Lately, I've been having this feeling as I watch coverage of the protests in Egypt. I've never thought about the etymology of the Hindi word bas (pronounced, roughly, like “bus”), which means something like “that's all”, or “enough”. I do, however, hear a lot of protestors using it in exactly the same way. It's intriguing to think that this, one of the most common words of everyday Hindi, might have come to us from Arab traders, soldiers or conquerors nearly a millennium ago. It seems likely; I cannot think of a Sanskrit root.

My favourite discovery so far involves the two main agricultural seasons in South Asia; these are known as the Kharif (post-monsoon sowing, autumn harvest) and Rabi (winter sowing, spring harvest). These terms are constantly used in discussions about agriculture and the economy. Yet somehow, I had never asked myself their origin. Looking for the meaning of another word, I stumbled across a basic Arabic vocabulary list. And that is where I discovered that the Arabic words for autumn and spring are khareef and rabee', respectively. Which, of course, makes perfect sense, now that I know.

It happens the other way around too. I was once with a Palestinian friend who had recently arrived in Delhi. At one point, in the middle of a characteristically heated exchange with an auto-rickshaw driver over the condition of his meter, she turned to me and said “Is he speaking Arabic half the time? I feel like I understand every fifth word.”