114 



An Essay on Early lielations [No. 37, 



mangga. and mampallum applied to the mango, (if not of recent 

 use) are decisive as far as they go, for uitriki&irHj. Mangga, is the 

 unripe mango and unr&ui.p& mampallum the fruit fully ripe : both 

 names seem still more exactly expressed in the Telugu. Jambu is 

 also the name of the rose-apple in India ; from a legend connected 

 with one of these fruits comes the title Jambukesvara (vulgarly 

 Jambu kistna) in the island of Srirangham at Trichinopoly : nanus 

 is nearly the common Tamil name of the pine-apple. Siri Hay a, ap- 

 proaches very closely to the name of the custard-apple (annona 

 squamosa) in Tamil. Blimbingand the Tamil bilimbi, as the name 

 of a sour fruit, are clearly the same. The champaka is the flower 

 known by the same name, and highly celebrated all over India. 

 The name of the horse Kuda is @ $®ntr in Tamil ; of the elephant 

 gaja in Sanscrit, every where understood in India. Mina (i£e§r) 

 is a fish ; and gaja mina, the elephant fish, or whale, is clearly a 

 compound Hindu term. The angsa or amsa, usually considered to 

 be a kind of swan, is in India a bird of fable and poetry : it is the 

 bird which is supposed to possess the power of separating milk 

 from water, leaving the latter entire. The term gadong is the Ta- 

 mil, £}'_iEJ(a; gidangu corruptly " godown ;" the name of camphor in 

 Sanscrit, and I believe, all Hindu languages is karpura. The term 

 lahh or lac for the number often thousand is every where become 

 familiar. The terms for father and mother are common to most 

 languages, Indian as well as others ; but Mr. Marsden. has put 

 abu for wife in Batta, giving no name for father, while the other 

 term ammah enables me to say, he must be wrong : this last is 

 one of the Tamil words for mother, denoting also, lady; and I feel as- 

 sured, from the same analogy, that abu is the Batta word for father : 

 it is a primitive word common to many languages, among them 

 being Appa, Telugu ; and Jppen, Tamil. In the Batta word, for 

 the Sun, it may be noted that Hari is a name of Vishnu ; by me- 

 tonymy, God ; and to me it seems that the term is rather a 

 compound epithet than the simple name,* mahtak hari that 

 which is the great God. Daibattah, differs only dialectically 

 from Devata. Dahand, as the name for rice, appears to me a dialec- 

 tical variation of Daniyam, a Sanscrit word, running through all 

 other dialects, meaning grain, or corn in general ; but very fre- 



* The poet Leyden 1 Mahtak Hari,' signifies the eye of day." - 



