Today’s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast

When Pervez Musharraf resigned as Pakistan’s president he gave his speech in Urdu with a sprinkling of English.

I mention this not because there are hordes of people in Pakistan—although there seem to be—but because there is an etymological connection between the name of the language Pervez Musharraf used and today’s podictionary word.

The roots of Urdu as a name for a language represent a rare mashup of languages.

Notably Urdu doesn’t come from Urdu.

This is one of those cases of one group of people applying a word to another group of people.

In this case the “namers” encountered on the fringes of their empire groups of nomadic peoples wandering around with their animals.  These nomads lived in camps and so when the namers figured out how to communicate with the nomads, they named their language “the language of the camps.”

In Persian that comes out something like zaban i urdu.

The word zaban is actually the word that meant “languge.” Urdu was a word that seems to have meant “camp.”

Like so many other phrases through history zaban i urdu got worn down with use and abbreviated to urdu.

So etymologically the name we use for the language of Pakistan actually means “camp.”

There is some discrepancy between dictionaries as to the ultimate source of the word urdu so I guess it’s safe to say it moved around from language to language like the nomads.  A look at several dictionaries yields the following list of languages implicated in the travels of the word to English:

• Persian
• Hindustani
• Turkish
• Russian
• Polish
• German
• Danish
• Swedish
• Italian
• Spanish
• French
• Mongolian
• and Kalmuck (which I’d never heard of)

The word horde—as in “there was a horde of shoppers at the mall”—is reported to have come to English from similar roots.

No dictionaries actually say so but I’m interpreting that while Urdu means “language of the camps” horde must have evolved from “people of the camps” or “those who live in camps.”

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines horde as

“chiefly derogatory, a large group of people.”

I think “derogatory” is a bit too strong.  “Impersonal” is more like it.

Notably the homonym hoard—as in “I have a hoard of candy to give out at Halloween”—is not a related word.

The nomads had to travel light and so left hoarding to Germanic speakers who gave the word to Old English meaning “treasure” and “hiding place.”