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Your Regular Armenian-Hindi Update

Because you are all dying to know what other words Armenian and Hindi share, I will tell you another one.  Reading Namus (yes, I’m still reading Namus ever so slowly), I came across the colloquial expression ghalat chari, which is apparently still used in Armenia today and which is basically an imperative phrase that means, “Don’t do […]

Because you are all dying to know what other words Armenian and Hindi share, I will tell you another one.  Reading Namus (yes, I’m still reading Namus ever so slowly), I came across the colloquial expression ghalat chari, which is apparently still used in Armenia today and which is basically an imperative phrase that means, “Don’t do something wrong/bad.”  The word sounded familiar to my Bollywood-trained ears, and sure enough my first intuition that ghalat was the same as galat in Hindi was confirmed when I checked my Hindi dictionary.  To someone hearing it pronounced in Hindi for the first (or even the fifth or sixth) time, it sounds an awful lot like ghaland, but that is not actually what they’re saying, much as zarur (of course) comes out sounding to English-speakers (or at least to me) as zerul

Language bleg: Does anyone happen to know which language galat originally comes from?  Arabic, maybe? 

Update: Yes, it does come originally from Arabic.

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