Ploughshares into Swords.

No, this isn’t some Neo-con polemic from an ex-military man: this is about words. Words, and the routes they take across continents; the roots they make in other languages. Take ‘karandash’ in Russian, for example; КАРАНДАШЬ in the exotically ornate Cyrillic script. It means pencil. It comes from the French; but not the French for ‘pencil’. It comes from ‘Caran d’Âche’, which the artists among you will recognise. Effectively it’s like calling a vacuum cleaner a ‘Hoover’, I suppose.

Or take ‘Bunduqiya’. This is Arabic, or my transliteration of it. I wish you could see the sinuous flow of the word across your screen; or enjoy the widdershins thrill of reading it right to left. As usual I am more than beside the point: I am waving at it from the other side of the road. This word, ‘Bunduqiya’, is unusual, I intuitively feel, in that it has been ‘reverse-engineered’ from a plural coinage.

Picture it; two centuries or so ago: new technological marvels arriving on the dockside in Tyre or Agra or Latakia. Wooden crates with a word stencilled on the sides; this word is transliterated into Arabic as ‘Bunadiq’. There is no ‘v’ sound in Arabic - or strictly speaking the ‘g’ sound of ‘gun.’ So it’s as close as some harbour master can get to the ‘Venedig’ written on the sides of the wooden boxes. Besides, it must refer to the contents, mustn’t it? Well, ‘bunadiq’ does, but ‘Venedig’ doesn’t: it’s the German name for the port of origin: ‘Venice.’ So the Arab-speaking world has a brand new word for a load of whatever’s in the boxes: but what do you call one of them? A Caliph’s scholar ponders it - no doubt diligently and long. He comes up with ‘Bunduqiya’: it means rifle.

By the way, if you happen to overhear an edgy, Middle Eastern accent asking a blocky hard-faced Slav in an expensive suit for a ‘karandash’ – he’s trying to buy a surface-to-air missile.