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Sanskrit Much of English is made up of words from other languages, and Sanskrit, an ancient language of South Asia, is an important contributor in this respect. Sanskrit is the ancestor of modern languages including Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Sinhalese, Punjabi, Bangla (formerly called Bengali), and Romany, but it also survives as the language of classical literary and religious texts. Trade brought Europeans into contact with South Asia early, but scholarly interest in Sanskrit blossomed from the late 18th century, especially with the development of comparative and historical linguistics during the 19th, and most words of direct Sanskrit origin are recognizably émigrés and arrived in or after this period. However migrants that took a circuitous route are often fully naturalized.
The familiar foodstuffs pepper, sugar, and the orange, for example, are ultimately from Sanskrit. Pepper existed in Old English as piper, and comes from a prehistoric West Germanic word itself ultimately, through Latin and Greek, from Sanskrit pippalī "berry, peppercorn." Sugar arrived in the 13th century, via French, medieval Latin, and Arabic from Sanskrit śarkarā "grit, ground sugar." Orange is from the same century, having reached English from Sanskrit through Old French, Italian, Arabic, and Persian.
Some well-established words also arrived through Sanskrit's descendants - via Hindi, for example, cheetah, chit ("official note"), jungle, pundit, and thug; via Bangla jute; and via English Romany pal (ultimately from Sanskrit bhrātṛ "brother").
Nevertheless words of Eastern religion, philosophy, scholarship, and society dominate the Sanskritic émigré community. Religious migrants include: Hindu deities such as Kali, Krishna, Shiva, and Vishnu; texts, for example, Bhagavadgita, Veda, and Upanishad; terms of the practice of Hinduism, including ashram, avatar (now also transformed into a computer game persona), and saddhu; terms of Buddhism, including its forms Hinayana and Mahayana, the name Buddha itself, and the sacred syllable Om; terms of Sikhism, including Sikh itself and its principal scripture the Adi Granth; terms of Jainism, including Jain and Tirthankara ("traditional holy man"); and terms shared by several of the subcontinent's religions, for example, ahimsa ("the philosophy of revering all life"), dharma, guru, karma, mantra, nirvana, and sutra. Closely associated with Hindu philosophy is yoga, with its various forms, for example, hatha yoga (literally "force yoga"); yoga terms used in English include asana ("a posture"), chakra ("a center of spiritual power"), and prana ("inhaling, holding the breath, and exhaling"). Sanskrit also provided names for the four great Hindu castes: Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaisya, and Sudra, with the untouchables below these (Dalit, which came via Hindi, with the alternative name Harijan directly from Sanskrit). Sanskrit scholarship has given linguists bahuvrihi (a type of compound word) and sandhi ("modification of a word under the influence of a preceding or following sound"), the Devanagari alphabet, and Sanskrit itself (Sanskrit saṃskṛṭa- "perfected").
In the 20th century Sanskrit emerged in social movements in South Asia, where Mahatma Gandhi (mahatma is from Sanskrit, literally "great soul") and his followers sought a new social order (Sarvodaya) through the doctrine of nonviolent resistance (satyagraha). It also emerged, in a totally different way, in Europe, where the ancient religious symbol the swastika (Sanskrit svastikaḥ "good-luck sign") was appropriated by the German Nazi party, with its perverted ideal of Aryan (from Sanskrit ārya "of good family") superiority.
Other terms that have traveled through Sanskrit's descendants include, for example, in social and cultural life rajah, rupee, sari, and wallah from Hindi; trees, deodar and pipal from Hindi, the bo tree from Sinhalese, the banyan from Gujarati (via Portuguese); animals, cheetah, langur, nilgai, and sambar from Hindi. However a few words of Sanskrit origin - again mostly with a spiritual or religious theme - have migrated to English by less expected routes, for example, shaman (via Russian and Tungus), wat ("Buddhist monastery or temple," via Thai), and Zen (via Japanese and Chinese).
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