There is an effect familiar to everyone: take an interest in some subject, and it promptly begins following you about. The world seems to wink and say, “here’s another one for your collection.”
On holiday in the old country, we looked in—how could we not?—at our own Hermitage. It did not disappoint. This time, in the most literal corner of the ground floor (room 65, for the record), an exhibition of the weapon-craft of the Near East, fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, was lying in wait. Several cases of arms with Turkic roots.
The Sahara Desert problem
Before we begin, a word about a habit English has.
We say the Sahara Desert, which is “the Desert Desert,” ṣaḥrāʾ being Arabic for desert. We order a chai tea, which is tea tea. We eat naan bread, bread bread, and we picnic beside the River Avon, which is the River River. There is a hill in Cumbria called Torpenhow, and if you add “Hill” to it—as people do—you have said “hill” four times in four languages.
Linguists call this a tautological place name; the rest of us call it not knowing what we just said. And a museum of Ottoman weapons is very nearly a private gallery of the phenomenon.
The exhibits
Here, for instance, is a balta axe. A charming tautology: an axe-axe, since Turkish balta simply means “axe.”
And here is the kılıç sabre—which is to say, once again, sabre-sabre. Push on and you meet the pala, broader and shorter, very nearly a machete. The word came into Ottoman from Italian, and travelled onwards through Hungarian (pallos, hello) into Polish and Russian. It got about.
Then there are the special kılıçes. The ateş kılıç, the fire-sword—ateş being “fire.” And the zülfikar, a replica of the legendary forked blade of the Prophet, inherited by the caliph Ali.
Blades that changed passports
Meet the konchar, a long straight thrusting sword. It shows up in the Russian chronicles for the battle of Kulikovo in 1380, and it comes, as it turns out, from Persia: khanjar → Tatar xänjär → Russian konchar. The Poles called it koncerz, and the winged hussars were devoted to it.
The entertaining part is that the same khanjar also produced the Russian kinzhal—the Caucasian dagger, which English borrowed too—only it entered by a different door, through Nogai. One blade, two immigration routes, two words.
The yatağan is refreshingly transparent: from Old Turkic yat-, “to lie down, to bend.” Anyone who has seen the shape of a yatagan will nod.
The kama dagger: Turkish kama means both “wedge” and “blade.” English does the same trick from the other end—our cleaver is simply the thing that cleaves. Though the two words got there by different logic: Turkish kama is thought to derive from kakmak, “to drive in,” whereas English cleaving is splitting apart.
And finally my own favourites, the jerid—elegant Arab throwing javelins, which arrived in Eastern Europe with the Mongols and made themselves so thoroughly at home that they displaced the native Slavic word for the same thing.
Which is a fate English knows well. Our own ancestral word for a spear was gār, and French javelin pushed it out so completely that it survives in exactly one everyday word: garlic, Old English gārlēac, the spear-leek—named for the shape of its shoots. The weapon is gone; the vegetable remembers it.
So a few cases in a single room laid on an express tour of linguistic Eurasia: from Mesopotamia to Hungary, from the Volga to Anatolia. And that is one solitary corner of the Hermitage. How is one not to love the place?
