A strange word on wedding cards

Readers must have come across that mysterious word ‘na-kat-khuda’ on a wedding card? What does it mean? It is a way of referring to the bride, to say that she is virgin. ‘Na’ means ‘without’, ‘kat’ means ‘home’, and ‘khuda’ means ‘master’.

First focus on the sense of home. One way of referring to home in English is domestic, which comes from a Latin root ‘domus’, meaning ‘home’. Russians call their home ‘dom’, which is the same as Hindi ‘dhaam’. Urdu uses it in ‘naam’ and ‘dhaam’ together. ‘Dheema’ means ‘soft’.

Our more familiar Urdu word ‘ghar’ is from the sense of enclosure. Sanskrit has dozens of names for home and most of them convey the sense of enclosure. The Urdu word ‘gher’ or ‘ghera’ is a cognate, meaning ‘circle’.

When you make an enclosure you use walls. And what do walls do? They cut you off from the outside world. It is this sense of being cut off that has given us so many words for home, or other enclosures like castle, palace and city.

The Urdu Hindi root would be ‘kt’ becoming ‘kd’ in Persian. Down in Sindh a cottage is ‘keti’, but Hindi has ‘kaitan’ and ‘nikaitan’ as in Tagore’s university called ‘Shantinikaitan’. The cutting part is apparent in ‘ketan’ (home) and ‘ketan’ (flag). Urdu has a diminutive in ‘kutiya’, (cottage). The Urdu ‘kothi’ and ‘kotha’ are cognates.

If you have a castle in mind, you say ‘kot’ and many cities have a ‘-kot’ ending, like Sialkot and Shahkot. Another diminutive appears in ‘kotal’ in Pashto.

The cutting sense in English word is ‘castra’ as in castrate. The early word in Spanish was ‘castra’ which became ‘castella’ and entered English as ‘castle’. So if we have our ‘kot’, the English have their castle. City names like Lancaster carry it.

In Persian the word we know most is ‘kada’ because it is used in ‘butt-kada’ (home of idols) and ‘mai-kada’ (home of wine) and ‘kad-khuda’ (master of home). The ‘kd’ root becomes ‘kt’ and an unmarried girl is called ‘na-kat-khuda’ (without a master of home) on wedding cards.

Caesar is said to have his name derived from the way he was born: after being cut from his mother’s womb. The Latin for cut is ‘caedare’; hence the ‘kd’ root. Today a Caesarian operation means just that.

Caesar of course is pronounced ‘Kaesar’ in Latin. In German it is written ‘Kaiser’. In Urdu an emperor is often written as ‘Qaiser’ because Caesar (Julius) was the first emperor. We have the doublet ‘Qaisar-o-Qisra’ because ‘Qisra’ is Arabic for Khusro the Persian King Xerxes.

What happens next in Arabic is quite astounding. The Arabic ‘Qaisar’ is clearly not really Arabic but what does the root ‘qsr’ mean? It means to ‘shorten’; and can you shorten anything without cutting it? The idea of cutting resurfaces in the Arabic word for palace: ‘qasr’.

Being short or falling short gives us English shortcoming, which in Arabic is ‘qasur’, meaning ‘falling short’. Anyone not capable is ‘qasir’. But when you go for hajj and have to get your hair shortened, that is ‘qasar’ which is a Quranic word.

Zia Mohyeddin once rang me about the name of the city near Lahore called Qasur. In Arabic, it should mean palaces as plural of ‘qasr’. In Egypt, Luxor is actually just that! But he told me it was from Kush, the son of Ram. ‘Kush’ means (holy) grass.

Maulavi Muhammad Hussain Azad in his book Sukhandan-e-Fars says it is the same as Persian ‘khas’ that we use in ‘khas-o-khashak’.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 5^th, 2011.