Originally posted by Walosi
SO...is the Khukuri Historical Research Society a legitimate group, good to go, or should we split up and watch out for the unmarked white vans (that aren't really trying to deliver free TVs, won in contests we never entered).
While people are puzzling over my prior message
though I probably should have let it sit longer
Uncle Bill wrote:
I can hear the kamis chuckling and saying, "why do you want to give yourself all these problems over a word. It's just a knife that's called a khukuri."
N2S wrote:
I suspect the word "Khukuri" means the same thing as the words "Kinjar" and "Qama". It simply means "knife". Notice that the item is locally called a "khukuri" and not a "khukuri knife".
This is dead on, in a sense. In the end your know what 'khukuri' means. It means 'khukuri'. Imagine you reaction if someone asked you what 'knife' means. It's the same thing. With all of the knife-collectors here, I bet there aren't many who know the etymology of 'knife', which is what we're trying to figure out for 'khukuri'. (I'm not entirely sure of the ety. of 'knife', it goes back to Old English 'knif' (but you have to pronounce the K), and there are some cognates in Germanic languages, but I don't know any further than that
.would guess it goes back to a base word for 'to cut' ultimately, but I don't know).
Walosi wrote:
Ben's "loan word" sounds like a feasible supposition. If we're not high in the clouds, and 10,000 years too late, is there any credible way to connect "kopis" or a derivative, and Khukuri? The knife has (A) had the name, in some form or other, since its' beginning. It is the same over Nepal (at this late date) but somewhere, a name must have come with the knife. (B) Or is "Khukuri" the name which won out over several, and became general usage? If so, what other names might it have carried, and from what tribes? If Pala and the kamis all say "It has always been "Khukuri", that could well take us back 400-500 years.
Walosi's actually hit the most likely scenario right on the head, so to speak. Who knows if 'khukuri' is actually connected to 'kopis' or not; but names tend to travel with technology, e.g. guess what the word for 'train' is in Hindi, &c.
A fascinating example of this (if you'll excuse me for going off topic to something I actually do know the answer to) is the word
alcohol, which is the same word in quite a number of languages (most European languages at least have some variant). The first thing you might notice is the
-al prefix, which, not surprisingly, is Arabic. Arabs, you have to remember, were the enterprising merchants of days gone by, and many 'oriental' goods made their way into Europe via Arab 'travelling salesmen'.
But '-cohol' is
not Arabic. It belongs to the language of the people who came up with the idea of fermenting grain (i.e. making beer) -any guesses? (while you're pondering
converting grain into alcohol was originally just a practical thing, because if you try to store grain for the winter in grain-form, mice, rats and other things will eat it, but if you convert it into alcohol (which still retains caloric value) no-one but human will consume it.) In any case, '-cohol' comes from the
Sumerian word
'cohos' which means something like 'beer' (I took a semester of Sumerian once--funny old language, it was being studied as a dead language in 2000BC when Latin & ancient Greek were fully living languages; it's not related to any other languages and it has no 'daughter' languages--anyway, apparently some Sumerian scholars for their conference one year had tried making 'Sumerian beer' from what they could glean from the 'recipes' left on the Sumerian clay tablets
.it didn't turn out too well
). Point being: names travel with objects in the case of 'new' technology, so we may be chasing a phantom if 'khukuri' isn't native to Nepali, unless someone recorded where it came from, or we can find a plausible derivation from KOPIS>KHUKUREE.
Johann van Zyl wrote:
I remember someone (was it Uncle?) saying that the Nepalese lay accent on the KHUK- part of the name. You don't really hear the -URI, 'cause it's totally suppressed.
That makes sense, I'm thinking, despite the Nepali cigarette spelling, that the original form was probably something like 'khukri'. If it is, then the last element is plausibly '-kri', probably from 'kr' (which the R is a vowel, if you're American and don't live too far south or in New England, if you say the word 'builder', the last syllable '-der' has a vocalic R). KR in sanskrit means 'to act; action', &c. ('karma' is from this root, meaning literally 'action'). If the first element means 'to cut' or something like that, then this would make a lot of sense being 'cut-er' > 'cutter', 'thing that cuts'.
N2S wrote:
These are obvious english words approximating the pronunciation of the local word. So it is clearly a two syllable word with no accent.
Yes, probably originally a 2-syllable word, and Indo-Aryan languages don't really have 'stress' (what you're calling an accent) like English or German. They work in terms of 'syllable-weight'. But generally 'stress' in Hindi, for instance, falls on the first syllable, or, at least, not on the last syllable, so it's the KHU- part what should be 'accented' when you say KHUKURI, or that's my guess.
My guess is that it ultimately should go back to a root meaning 'to cut' or something like that. Unless it's a 'nonsense' word borrowed from another language and the original form has 'degenerated' beyond any hope of tracing. I posted this as a question to Historical Linguistics LIST-SERVER to which many of the leading historical linguists subscribe, so if someone knows the answer, it'll most likely be one of them.
But, in the meantime, another interesting linguistic fact to stick in your pocket (and you can pull it out to divert attention and confuse people when they try to question you too closely on the meaning of 'khukuree') is that 'shear', 'scissors', 'schism' all come from the same Proto-Indo-European root, which means 'to divide'. What's interesting about this is that the word 'science' also derives from the same root (the relation being, I suppose, that science divides the natural world up into parts [in a metaphorical sense] by labelling things). And the word 'sh*t' also derives from the same root! I'll let you work out the relation between that and 'dividing' for yourself (and please, don't let's bring charpis into this thread
). I'm dead serious about this one.
But, though we still don't know the origin of 'khukuree', at least you now know that you know a Sumerian word (al-COHOL) and that 'science' and 'sh*t' ultimately derive from the same root
cheers, Ben.
). There's a related word khuralee which means 'military exercise or practice of arms'.
