English Language to Have One Million Words by April

In its references to Anglo-Indian vocabulary, The Economist makes passing reference to a phrase that may be unfamiliar to some but is worth knowing about: Hobson-Jobson. As Dictionary.com puts it, it's "the alteration of a word or phrase borrowed from a foreign language to accord more closely with the ... patterns of the borrowing language, as in English hoosegow from Spanish juzgado." You hear a foreign phrase and try to fit it into the language you know, in other words.

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The phrase Hobson-Jobson goes back to 1634, to the early years of the British presence in India, as a mangled Anglicization of what British soldiers thought they were hearing during processions by Muslims during Muharram, an important period of mourning.

The soldiers misheard "Ya Hasan! Ya Husayn!" ("O Hassan! O Husain!"), a call of mourning for two grandsons of the prophet Muhammad who died fighting for the faith. "This," says the Online Etymology Dictionary, "led to the linguists' law of Hobson-Jobson, describing the effort to bring a new and strange word into harmony with the language."

The authors of a late 19th-century dictionary of Anglo-Indian vocabulary knew what they were doing when they picked "Hobson-Jobson" as its title. And the story behind the phrase gives a glimpse of how many layers of understanding human language involves.