"REAL," "TRUE," OR "GENUINE," IN INDIAN
LANGUAGES
When we desire to convey the impression that such a man is a typical Frenchman in body and mind, in manners and language, that is, an embodiment of all that is French, we mean that he is a true son of his country. There is nothing uncommon in this, no more than there is in the fact that the continental Greeks once called the inhabitants of eastern Crete the Eteocretes, or true, genuine Cretans, which meant that they had remained free from admixture with the Carian or with any other race. The same idea is expressed by the Germans when they call the Czechian, or Slavic-speaking population of Bohemia, Stockböhmen, for these, who form three-fifths of all Bohemians, are thereby regarded as belonging to the old and original stock of the population. The designation, however, sounds like a nickname, through its intimate analogy with terms like stockblind, stocken, stockig, Stocknarr. In the same way the application of the term "Hibernian" to a typical Irishman would sometimes be regarded as banter.
Similar designations have been found to a considerable extent in the languages of more primitive peoples, referring to persons and other animate beings as well as to inanimate objects, which bear nothing of the jocose or bantering in themselves, but are applied seriously. Some of the terms are so quaint, curious, idiomatic, and attractive, that I resolved to collect a number and subject them to careful study, regarding them as true and palpable products of the aboriginal mind.
The terms for "true" or "genuine" in most of the idioms to be mentioned are simultaneously adjectives and adverbs, and,
155
