It is not immediately obvious that the three words ketchup, bamboo, and caddy have anything in common with each other, but in fact it is rather likely that they have. The common factor is that they are all fairly everyday English words which were, or at least may well have been, borrowed into our language from Malay, a language which not many of us in this part of the world know much about.
Malay is one of the world’s major languages, and is probably among the top 10 in terms of numbers of native and second-language speakers. It forms the basis of two different, even if very similar, standard languages – Indonesian and Standard Malay, also known as Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu or Bahasa Malaysia (Bahasa simply means “language”). The two varieties are fairly readily mutually intelligible, although there are differences in pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and spelling, which may cause difficulties.
These languages are both members of the very large and geographically widespread Austronesian language family, which had its origins in Taiwan thousands of years ago; it includes languages spoken around the globe, ranging from New Zealand Maori to Malagasy in Madagascar, and from Hawai’ian to Cham in Vietnam (see TNE #301).
Malay probably has about 300 million speakers, depending on who you count. It is an official language in Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore, as well as in Indonesia. Malay is also spoken as a regional language in the south-eastern Philippines and in the southern part of Thailand.
Suggested Reading
Seven degrees of separation: The curious origins of musical pitch
Going back to the three words mentioned at the start of this column, ketchup probably began life as the Hokkien Chinese word kê-chiap “brine of pickled fish”, but it seems to have arrived in English via the Malay word kicap or kecap “soy sauce”. This first appeared in English in the 17th century with reference to a type of sauce which had been encountered by British travellers, traders, and colonists in south-east Asia and which they then brought back to Britain.
Sauces referred to as ketchups started being manufactured over here from the 1700s onwards, and consisted of a variety of ingredients such as anchovies, mushrooms, walnuts, and oysters. From the late 19th century onwards, tomato ketchup became the most popular version, and these days the term still most usually applies to a thick red sauce made mainly from tomatoes, vinegar and sugar.
The word bamboo comes from Malay mambu, but some philologists have argued that it originated outside Malaya in the South Indian Dravidian language Kannada, where the form was banbu or bamwu, and only later made its way across the Bay of Bengal to the Malay peninsula.
The English word caddy in the sense of “small box for holding tea” is from Malay kati, which was a traditional unit of weight used for food and other commodities. It was adopted as a standard measure by the British in the Far East and fixed at the weight of one and a third imperial pounds. This term, as applied to a measure of tea, was then transferred to the type of small box which the tea was typically kept in. (Caddy in the golfing sense of a person who carries a golfer’s clubs has a very different origin, descending from French cadet “a younger son or brother”.)
Amok
Amok was originally a Malay word for a violent or murderous frenzy, as well as for a person (typically male) who is in this kind of frenzied and possibly suicidal state. The word is now mainly used in the phrase “running amok”. It has also occurred with the spellings “amuck” and “a muck”, as in the works of Lord Byron.
