Persian on Kannada ground
Delhi is the famous half of the Persian story. The other half happened in Kalaburagi, Bidar, and Vijayapura, which is why Kannada settles a bill in kharchu and waits for a javaabu. Also: the vowel that hides a loanword.
Settle a bill in Kannada and you are talking about kharchu ಖರ್ಚು. Wait for a reply and you are waiting for a javaabu ಜವಾಬು. Put a date on a document and it is a taareekhu ತಾರೀಖು. None of the three began as a Kannada word. Kharchu goes back to Arabic kharj, expenditure. Javaabu is Arabic jawāb, an answer. Taareekhu is Arabic tārīkh, a date. All three traveled through Persian, and all three entered Kannada through courts that stood on Kannada ground.
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 southern half is told less often, and for Kannada it is not a story about a distant frontier at all. The Bahmani sultanate, founded in the middle of the fourteenth century, ruled much of the Deccan from Kalaburagi and then, from the 1420s, from Bidar. When it broke apart around 1500 the Adil Shahis took Bijapur, today Vijayapura, and held it until the Mughals annexed it in 1686. Kalaburagi, Bidar, Vijayapura: all three are in modern Karnataka, and the buildings are still standing.
Persian was the language of those courts, their revenue offices, and their paperwork, and Dakhni, the Deccan’s own form of Urdu, was the everyday speech of their cities. Dakhni did not leave when the sultans did. It is still spoken across North Karnataka. So Kannada did not receive its Perso-Arabic vocabulary secondhand from the north, the way a borrowing usually reaches a distant language. It received it from the next street.
You can still read the old files in the vocabulary. Government is sarkaara ಸರ್ಕಾರ, from Persian sarkār. A lawyer is vakeela ವಕೀಲ, from Arabic wakīl, an agent or representative. Paper is kaagada ಕಾಗದ, from Persian kāghaz. The market is bajaaru ಬಜಾರು, a pocket is jebu ಜೇಬು, a chair is kurchi ಕುರ್ಚಿ, and a place is jaaga ಜಾಗ, from Persian jāgah. Administrative and commercial vocabulary crossed in bulk, which is exactly the profile you expect when the lender is not a literature but an office.
The remarkable part is not that the words came in. Every language borrows. The remarkable part is how invisible they became, and the disguise is often a single vowel. Kannada prefers words to end in a vowel, so a consonant-final borrowing routinely picks one up: kharch becomes kharchu, jawāb becomes javaabu, tārīkh becomes taareekhu, bāzār becomes bajaaru. But the ending is not an origin test, and this needs saying firmly, because it is the easiest wrong inference in the language. Native Dravidian words form the largest -u group in Kannada. Neeru ನೀರು, haalu ಹಾಲು, kannu ಕಣ್ಣು, and haavu ಹಾವು are all native and all end in -u. The -u does not mark a word as foreign. It is precisely what stops it from looking foreign.
The pattern has honest exceptions, and they are worth showing rather than tidying away. A loan that already ended in a vowel needed nothing added: Persian kursi came in as kurchi. And -u is not the only vowel on offer. Sarkār, wakīl, and kāghaz all end in a consonant and all took a plain final -a rather than -u, giving sarkaara, vakeela, and kaagada, so the rule is that Kannada supplies a vowel, not that it always supplies the same one. Some words, meanwhile, arrived by a road nobody can now identify. Saaboonu ಸಾಬೂನು, soap, could have come inland through Dakhni or up from the coast with the Portuguese, since the Persian and the Portuguese words carry the same original between them. The word is certainly borrowed. The route is not settled, and this dictionary flags the doubt rather than picking the tidier story.
Hold the two languages side by side and the doorway becomes a bridge. Hindi has kharch, jawaab, sarkaar, bazaar, kursi, and jeb, 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. Every pair that crossed this way is a shared borrowing and never a shared ancestor, which is the argument Unrelated languages, familiar words makes in full.
The doorway never really closed; only the lender changed. The same instinct that turned kharch into kharchu now turns bus into bassu ಬಸ್ಸು and car into kaaru ಕಾರು. English words walk in, collect their -u, and settle down as though they had always lived there. And sometimes Kannada declines the loan altogether: school is usually shaale ಶಾಲೆ, a Sanskrit word wearing Kannada’s own -e ending, a rule The grammarian who named the layers takes apart. The Bahmani courts are long gone. The naturalization office they helped open is still stamping papers.
