Following on from yesterday's thread on parallel language, something interesting I learnt while learning Malay was that their word for cheese is "keju".

This might not mean much to to a lot of people, but Sinhalese speakers will recognize it since it's the same word in Sinahala 🙂

The etymology here was a bit clearer though. I was certain that this was from Portuguese "queijo" (Spanish queso) since Sinhalese has a bunch of borrowed words from Portuguese.

I didn't know that the Portuguese got to that region though. I knew the Dutch did since Batavia was held by them (I remember because of a "Phantom" comic 😛) but apparently the Portuguese were there before the Dutch moved in.

Interesting how language moves and flows, right?

It's even more interesting when you consider that the Spanish "queso" comes from Latin and the root word for the Latin term was probably a Proto-Indo-European word meaning "to ferment".

So the word went all the way (possibly) from India to Europe and then came back to East Asia and Sri Lanka 😛

#Language