The Deccan doorway
Golconda and Hyderabad ran on Persian for centuries, and Telugu quietly pocketed the vocabulary. How kharchu, javaabu, and kaburu got in, and how a single vowel made them look native.
Settle a bill in Telugu and you are talking about kharchu. Send word of a wedding and you have sent kaburu. Wait for a reply and you are waiting for a javaabu. None of the three began as a Telugu word. Kharchu goes back to Arabic kharj, expenditure. Kaburu is Arabic khabar, news. Javaabu is Arabic jawaab, an answer. All three travelled through Persian, and all three entered Telugu through the same doorway: the Deccan.
The northern half of this story is the famous one. Persian arrived in Delhi with the sultanate, stayed through the Mughals, and soaked into Hindi and Urdu through centuries of administration and poetry. The Telugu country's Persian came by another road. From the fourteenth century the Bahmani sultanate ruled much of the Deccan. From the early sixteenth, the Qutb Shahi kings governed the Telugu heartland from Golconda. From the eighteenth century until the middle of the twentieth, the Nizams ruled from Hyderabad. Persian was the language of their courts and revenue offices for most of that stretch, with Urdu taking over the Hyderabad administration late in the nineteenth century, and Deccani Urdu was the everyday speech of their cities. Telugu lived beside that world for some six hundred years, and the words of money, law, and paperwork crossed over.
You can still read the old files in the vocabulary. Government is sarkaaru, from Persian sarkaar. A date on a document is taareekhu, from Arabic taareekh. A lawyer is vakeelu, from Arabic wakiil, an agent or representative, and a prisoner is khaidee, resting on Arabic qayd, a fetter. The market is bajaaru, a chair is kurchi, a pocket is jebu, and the ordinary word for a day is roju, from Persian roz. The dictionary's entry for sarkaaru says it directly: "Administrative vocabulary crossed into Telugu wholesale under the Deccan sultanates and the Nizams."
The remarkable part is not that the words came in. Every language borrows. The remarkable part is how invisible they became, and the disguise often involves one vowel. Telugu nouns characteristically end in vowels, very often in -u, so many Persian and Arabic loans were fitted with that ending: kharch became kharchu, jawaab became javaabu, bazaar became bajaaru, saamaan became saamaanu, and toofaan became tufaanu. The entry for javaabu states the direction carefully: "Many Perso-Arabic loans take -u, but the ending is not an origin test. Native Dravidian words form the largest -u group in this dictionary." The ending is not a foreign marker. It is precisely what stops the word from looking foreign. The entry for roju draws the conclusion: the word is "so thoroughly settled in Telugu that most speakers would not guess it was borrowed."
The pattern has honest exceptions, and they are worth showing. Kaagitam, paper, from Persian kaaghaz, took the -am ending instead, the ending that otherwise gathers Sanskrit borrowings; the entry calls a Persian word wearing it "a genuine oddity", and dukaanam, shop, from Arabic dukkaan, did the same thing. Masjid was reshaped more heavily than most, breaking its consonant cluster to give maseedu. And sabbu, soap, is a live uncertainty: the same soap word could have come inland through Deccani Urdu or up from the coast through Portuguese sabao, since both carry the same Latin original, and the entry flags the doubt rather than hiding it. The word is certainly borrowed. The road it took is not certain, and saying so is better than a tidy guess.
Hold the two languages side by side and the doorway becomes a bridge. Hindi has kharch, khabar, jawab, sarkaar, bazaar, roz, all from the same Persian and Arabic sources, borrowed at the northern courts rather than the southern ones. So when a Hindi speaker hears kharchu and feels at home, the feeling is legitimate. But it is the familiarity of two people who once stood in the same rain, not of two branches on one tree. 94 pairs in this dictionary crossed through this doorway, and every one of them is a shared borrowing, not a shared ancestor. Read Two unrelated languages, a thousand shared words for the full argument.
The doorway never really closed; only the lender changed. The same instinct that turned kharch into kharchu now turns bus into bassu, school into skoolu, and car into kaaru. English words walk in, receive their -u, and settle down as if they had always lived there. Golconda's courts are long gone, but the naturalisation office they set up is still stamping papers.
