Lakh

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lakh ( Hindi लाख lākh [ lɑːkʰ ]; from Sanskrit लक्ष lakṣa [ ˈlʌkʂʌ ]; English also lac (k) ) is the South Asian numeral for “one hundred thousand”, also for “an indefinite large amount”. Variants of the word occur in all Indian languages as well as in Indian English .

application

In the Indian number system, first the three lowest digits and then two digits each are grouped . 1 lakh, or 100,000, is expressed as 1,00,000. A city with 11.4 million inhabitants like Bangalore has “114 lakh people”, numerically “114.00,000 people”. Lakhs are also used as a plural form .

The abbreviation is L . Compressed forms such as ₹ 5L for 5 lakh rupees are common. 100 lakh, equivalent to ten million units, is 1 crore .

Distribution of Indo-Aryan majority languages

distribution

Variants of the numeral Lakh occur in several language families in South Asia and East Africa .

Indo-Aryan languages
Assamese লাখ lakh - Bengali লাখ lakh , লক্ষ lokkho - Dhivehi lakka - Gujarati લાખ lakh - Hindi लाख lakh - Kashmiri laughing - Konkani लाख lakh , ಲಕ್ಷ Laksa - Marathi लाख lakh , लक्ष Laksa -  Nepali लाख lakh - Oriya ଲକ୍ଷ lôkhyô - Panjabi ਲੱਖ, لکھ lakkh - Romani लाख lakh - Sanskrit लक्ष lakṣá - Sindhi لک lakhu - Sinhala ලක්ෂ laksha - Urdu لاکھ lākh
Iranian languages
Pashtun لاکھ lakh
Distribution of Dravidian majority languages
Dravidian languages
Kannada ಲಕ್ಷ laksha - Malayalam ലക്ഷം laksham - Tamil லட்சம் laṭcham - Telugu లక్ష lakṣha - Tulu ಲಕ್ಷ laksha
Indian English
Even in an early printed source, the Pilgrimage by Samuel Purchas published in 1613 , it says in contemporary writing: "Euery Crow is a hundred leaks, and euery licks a hundred thousand rupias "; German: "Each crore is one hundred lakh, and each lakh one hundred thousand rupees". In 1975 the Bangladesh Times wrote : "The Finance Minister said that the government had already increased the ceiling of private investment for setting up industries from Tk 25 lakh to Taka three crore"; German: "The finance minister said that the government had already raised the maximum limit for private investments for the establishment of industrial companies from Tk 25 lakh to Taka three crore."
Swahili
In Tanzania, with its traditional presence of Indian merchants, 100,000 shillings are referred to as 1 lakh, laki or lakhi.

Lakh acquired his own spellings and pronunciations as a foreign word in East Asia , for example in Japanese with 洛 叉 ( Kanji ), ら く し ゃ ( Hiragana ), rakusha ( Romaji ), ラ ー クrāku ( Katakana ) or in Standard Chinese with 洛 叉luòchā .

A Lak Müang (city pillar) in the Thai provincial city of Udon Thani

In the language of Thailand, which is shaped by the Indian Theravada Buddhism, ลักขะlakkha from the Central Indian Pali or ลักษะlaksa from Sanskrit has expired as a numerical word. However, หลักlak remained as a designation for the value in the Thai numeric script , e.g. B. หลัก หน่วยlak nuai "one", two-digit หลัก สิบlak sip "tens", three-digit หลัก ร้อยlak roi "hundreds". Lakh is preserved in the related sense of “marking”, also “stake in gambling”, in หลักเมือง, Lak Müang , the name for the ritually revered city pillars, as well as in the designation for milestones as in หลักสี่, Lak Si .

origin

The etymology of the word is not certain. Lakh is probably widely with the also in the Indo-European proto-language rooted German words salmon and place related, but not with paint .

In search of the linguistic root for the German word salmon , the linguist Paul Thieme proposed three approaches in the 1950s. The first referred to lākh : The word comes from the ancient Indian lakṣā from Ur-Indo-European * loḱs- "salmon" and initially meant "immense amount" because of the huge schools of fish, from which "100,000" arose. Thieme saw a second possibility in the noun lakṣá " stake ", which could initially have been used among fishermen for a valuable lot of the catch. For this, according to the Germanist Willy Krogmann , the Indo-European root * legh “to put” comes into consideration, which suggests an original meaning “deposit” for lakṣá . Thiemes third suggestion to also use lākṣā “red lacquer” was also rejected. With the consent of his specialist colleagues, Manfred Mayrhofer traced the etymology of lākṣā back to the Indo-European color designation * reg- “to dye, to redden”.

Also because of some parallels in other languages, Thieme's proposal to combine lakh with salmon met with approval. In ancient Egyptian , "100,000" is denoted by the hieroglyph of the tadpole ; her name hfn also means “innumerable”. In Chinese , the character for ant also stands for “10,000”, in Semitic the word for beef also means “1000”. Only the Italian Indo-Europeanist Vittore Pisani found the approach out of the question. Clever Etymological Dictionary of the German Language led in its article Salmon the reference to the numeral from the 17th edition (1957) to the 21st edition (1975), most recently "without etymological certainty" .

In 1953, Thieme founded his first proposal to add an adjective * lākṣa "salmon, red" to lākṣā "red lacquer " , semantically with the reddish salmon meat. The philologist Karl Lokotsch , on the other hand, had the Sanskrit word lākṣā in 1927 with “brand, spot; hundred thousand ”translated and lacquer added,“ after the innumerable insects Cocca ilicis , which cause the resinous secretion through their sting on Quercus coccifera ”; from this lākh "a hundred thousand" arose. Kluges Etymological Dictionary of the German Language adopted this explanation from the 11th edition (1934) to the 17th edition (1957), but since the 18th edition (1960) follows Mayrhofer's derivation from * reg- " färben, röten " and ancient Indian ráyjati "Changes color, reddens". This did not prevent Lokotsch's interpretation from spreading in more recent publications.

The root * loḱs- did not originally refer to salmon ( Salmo salar ), which does not occur in India. Meant were subspecies of the sea ​​trout ( Salmo trutta trutta ), which gave their name to the previously unknown fish Salmo salar in the course of Indo-European migrations to northeastern Europe . The origin of the ancient Indian lakṣā was part of the debate about the salmon argument and thus about the Indo-European original home .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Oxford English Dictionary , 2nd edition 1989, sv
  2. ↑ quoted from the Oxford English Dictionary , 2nd edition 1989, sv
  3. ↑ about Nina Grube: The Indian Diaspora in Tanzania between transnationalism and locality. Hamburg 2008
  4. ^ Pat Caplan: African Voices, African Lives. Personal narratives from a Swahili village. London, New York 1997, pp. 3, 214, digitized . - Jan Blommaert: State Ideology and Language in Tanzania. Second and Revised Edition. Edinburgh 2014, p. 127, digitized
  5. ^ Paul Thieme: The salmon in India. In: Journal for Comparative Linguistics , Volume 69, 1951, pp. 209-216. Ders .: The home of the Indo-European common language. In: Academy of Sciences and Literature, treatises of the humanities and social sciences class , 1953, No. 11, Wiesbaden 1954, pp. 535–614, digitized version . Ders .: The Indo-European Language. In: Scientific American , October 1958, p. 74
  6. ↑ Willy Krogmann: The salmon argument. In: Journal for Comparative Linguistics , Volume 76, 1960, p. 173
  7. ↑ Manfred Mayrhofer: Old Indian lakṣā. The methods of an etymology . In: Journal of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft , Volume 105, 1955, pp. 175-183. For semantic reasons, Thiemes’s proposal is undoubtedly acceptable, “undoubtedly acceptable”, but not for etymological reasons, said Vacláv Blažek et al. a .: Old Prussian Fish-names. In: Baltistica , Volume 39, 2004, pp. 112-114. Thiemes' lacquer hypothesis is mentioned in Thomas W. Gamkrelidse, Wjatscheslaw W. Iwanow: The early history of the Indo-European languages. In: Spectrum of Science, Dossier: Languages, 2006, pp. 50–57, online . Walter Porzig also rejects the lacquer hypothesis: The structure of the Indo-European language area. Heidelberg 1954, p. 184
  8. ↑ Willy Krogmann: The salmon argument. In: Journal for Comparative Linguistics , Volume 76, 1960, pp. 173f. Vacláv Blažek u. a .: Old Prussian Fish-names. In: Baltistica , Volume 39, 2004, pp. 112-114. Karl Menninger: number and number. A cultural history of numbers, 3rd edition, Göttingen 1979, p. 132, digitized .
  9. ↑ "non […] nemmeno da discutere", Vittore Pisani, in: Paideia , Volume 6, 1951, p. 184, quoted from Paul Thieme: The home of the Indo-European common language. In: Academy of Sciences and Literature, treatises of the humanities and social science class , 1953, No. 11, Wiesbaden 1954, p. 553, note 4
  10. ↑ Friedrich Kluge: Etymological Dictionary of the German Language , 17th edition 1957 to 21st edition 1975, all sv Lachs
  11. ^ Karl Lokotsch: Etymological Dictionary of European Words of Oriental Origin , Heidelberg 1927, No. 1295, digitized version
  12. ↑ Friedrich Kluge: Etymological Dictionary of the German Language , 11th edition 1934 to 25th edition 2011, all sv Lack
  13. ↑ for example Kay Dohnke: The paint story. 100 years of color between protection, beauty and the environment. Munich, Hamburg 2000, p. 82
  14. ^ A. Richard Diebold jr .: The Evolution of Indo-European Nomenclature for Salmonid Fish: The Case of 'Huchen' (Hucho spp.) . Washington 1985, ISBN 0-941694-24-0 (= Journal of Indo-European Studies, Monograph Series 5)