One of my Christmas presents was a book by the agreeable Dominican, Fr Timothy Radcliffe, called Why Go to Church? On page 61 I found the assertion that ‘in Persian there is a word, nakhur, for a camel that will not give its milk unless its nostrils are tickled’.
One of my Christmas presents was a book by the agreeable Dominican, Fr Timothy Radcliffe, called Why Go to Church? On page 61 I found the assertion that ‘in Persian there is a word, nakhur, for a camel that will not give its milk unless its nostrils are tickled’. A likely story, I thought.
My doubts were not entirely dispelled when I found that the scholarly friar had given the source for this snippet as Adam Jacot de Boinod’s The Meaning of Tingo, which sometimes errs on the side of entertainment rather than accuracy. But I took my Christmas hat (with a red ribbon) off to Mr de Boinod when I found in Francis Steingass’s Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary just such a claim for the word. Dr Steingass had quite a thing for camels, or perhaps it is just the Persians. So, mas is ‘sprinkling with cold water (the dugs of a camel)’, and sirdr is ‘a string for tying up the dugs of camels to prevent the young from sucking’. Adin is ‘a camel feeding continually on the salsuginous herbage hamz’, whereas azib means ‘a camel which feeds abroad all night’, or simply ‘unmarried’ (not a camel). There are plenty more cameline words if you look.
Dr Steingass had an antiquated cast of English even for 1892, when his dictionary was published. He does not figure in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, although he has more connection with Britain and importance for British studies than many a figure clapped between the ODNB’s hospitable covers.
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