Etymology Blog

DEsERTED JUNGLE

5/23/2021

When the word jungle was first used in English in 1776, it referred exclusively to the swampy areas at the base of the Himalaya mountains. However, by 1849, the term was extended to any sort of place with overgrown vegetation. Interestingly enough, the word comes from the Hindi and Marathi noun jangal, which meant "desert"! That later developed a sense of "wasteland" and came to be extended to marshlands like the ones the British encountered in India, with the meaning gradually changing to be more associated with densely packed forests. Jangal comes from Sanskrit jangala, meaning "arid", and that has unknown, possibly Dravidian origins. The phrase jungle gym is from a company that was established in 1921 and jungle fever in reference to the disease is from 1803.

5 Comments

Vinayak

7/24/2021 02:17:48 am

Hmmm... A native Hindi Speaker, who knows Sanskrit. Jangala, does refer to an arid area, comparable to grasslands in Sanskrit. However, in Hindi, jangala refers to a forest only. Not a desert. Not even the slightest.

Adam Aleksic link

7/25/2021 02:17:07 am

The Oxford English Dictionary, Etymonline, and Wiktionary all say it meant "desert" in Hindi. Perhaps that's an old meaning of the word that's no longer around?

Vinayak

7/25/2021 08:05:59 am

Ok, at least according to me, they aren't the best place to check out meanings for Sanskrit words, though they may be very good for English words and their etymology. I checked with Vaman Apte's Sanskrit English Dictionary (1890). It defines जङ्गल (jangala) as waste, wasteland, secluded or unfrequented place, a forest, a desert. So, desert is a valid meaning of the word in Sanskrit and may have carried on into Hindi/Marathi with the same meaning. But it is to be noted that it wasn't the only meaning of the word. As far as I can see, the word covers a broad meaning of "wild place / place with no humans" etc..

Sanskrit usually defines words with qualities of the thing being described. For example, among many-many words for a tree, one is padapa, which actually means "[he who] drinks with [its] feet", as a tree does so. Hence, that might also be the case with this word, but the roots here are a bit un-obvious and it might be a Dravidian borrowing.

james22grigg link

11/9/2022 06:00:31 am

Desert… Forest is too wet, cold also, lots of insects biting… In the JUngle are lots of poisonous things lots of rain. The desert isnt what you think. There are many oasis and mountains. The desert is anything but flat or dry. If you study where your going. I live near Moab Utah. <a href='https://wordmaker.info/how-many/deserted.html'>deserted</a>

عُثمان

1/31/2023 02:34:14 pm

There is an interesting explanation for this - as noted in the comment above, it is true that "jangal" only means forest in Hindi. It did mean desert in the precursor to the northern Indic languages, Prakrit, which is where the vowel got shortened from the long one in Sanskrit.

The meaning change from desert to forest happened when the word was borrowed from Prakrit into Persian: https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/steingass_query.py?qs=%D8%AC%D9%86%DA%AF%D9%84&searchhws=yes&matchtype=exact

(The dictionary link here labels it as Sanskrit, but with context from this comparative dictionary we can see the vowel shortening in Prakrit [Pk.] must have happened before entering Persian: https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/soas_query.py?qs=j%C4%81%E1%B9%85gala&searchhws=yes&matchtype=exact)

Then from Persian it was reborrowed into Punjabi, when the Punjab was ruled by Persia for an extended period of time. Punjabi did inherit jangal with the meaning "desert," but this meaning became replaced with "forest." Then it was borrowed from Punjabi into Hindi and other languages.

We know it started in Punjabi because the short vowel + "ng" sequence is not found in inherited Hindi words which would have tended to lengthen the vowel and/or assimilate the "ng" sound. Most Hindi words with this sequence are Punjabi in origin. (This rule is documented in "A Comparative Phonology of Hindi and Punjabi.")

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Most English dictionaries will tend to list words and meanings which came from Indic languages other than Hindi or Urdu as being Hindi/Urdu. In Punjab, the British colonial administration officialized Hindi/Urdu instead of Punjab as they viewed Punjabi as unsuited for administration even though it was the native tongue of the region. So consequently when Anglo-Indian words were adopted into English, they tended to be labeled as Hindi since this was chosen by the British as the "preferred" language in British India.

DEsERTED JUNGLE

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