In the museum today I came upon the term for the eastern Turkish jeweller’s craft of filigree: telkâri. And of course another jeweller’s term surfaced at once—the Georgian minankari, cloisonné enamel. Two neighbouring traditions, two exotic words. Was there anything between them?
There was, and it was standing in plain sight.
Both of them are “work”
Minankari is transparent enough: Persian mīnā, “enamel, glaze,” plus kār, “work.” Enamel-work.
Telkâri turns out to be built on exactly the same plan: Turkish tel, “wire, thread,” plus the same Persian kâr. Wire-work—which is precisely what filigree is: silver drawn out to the thickness of a hair, then bent, coiled and soldered into patterns.
English does this constantly and thinks nothing of it: ironwork, metalwork, needlework, brickwork. Take the material, add the labour, and you have named the craft. Georgian and Turkish did the same thing with a borrowed Persian suffix, a few hundred miles apart.
So the connection I had gone looking for was not hiding at all. The two crafts are named by the same formula, and the shared element is the word for work.
(You will find it said that telkâri comes from a village of that name in Iranian Azerbaijan. There is indeed such a village—population 132 at the last count—but the arrow almost certainly points the other way: craft terms do not descend from hamlets of a hundred souls, whereas hamlets are named after their trade all the time. Somewhere in Jolfa County there was presumably a family of wire-workers, and the map has been quietly commemorating them ever since.)
And now the interesting part
Which leaves the Persian kār itself, and here the ground opens up.
It goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *kʷer-, “to make, to do, to form”—and that root has scattered itself across the languages in the most unexpected shapes.
Karma. Sanskrit kárman is simply “that which has been done.” The whole moral architecture of an entire civilisation rests on a past participle.
Charms and cauldrons. Slavic took the root twice over. Russian chary, “spells, enchantment,” is the making-root in its magical sense—what a sorcerer does is make. And Russian chara, a drinking-cup, belongs with a different derivative of the same family: Sanskrit carú-, “kettle, cooking-pot,” Old Norse hverr, and Old Irish coire, “cauldron.”
The cauldron people. That Celtic cauldron is where it gets entertaining. One long-standing proposal derives the name of the Gaulish tribe of the Parisii—and therefore of Paris—from precisely that word: the cauldron-folk. (It is one theory among several, and the tribe has also been read as “the commanders” and half a dozen other things. But it is the theory one would rather were true.)
And Britain. The Celtic self-designation behind Greek Πρεττανία and Latin Britannia is generally reconstructed as *Priteni or *Pritanī, from a Celtic *kʷritu-, “shape, form”—compare Welsh pryd, “appearance”—and that, in turn, goes back to our *kʷer-, “to make.” The islanders were, by this reading, “the shaped ones,” or “the painted ones,” which is what the Romans meant by Picti as well.
(The p and the b, incidentally, are not one sound gradually softening into another. Greek heard the Celtic word one way and Latin another, and English inherited the Latin version. Two routes, not one slope.)
The jeweller’s summary
So there it is, an etymology fit for a display case:
- in Persia, work;
- among the Celts, a cauldron;
- and the finished pieces: Georgian enamel, Turkish filigree, and—in the finest traditions of our shared Indo-European heritage—the perpetual squabble between the English and the French.
