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My doubts were not entirely dispelled when I found that the scholarly friar had given the source for this snippet as Adam Jacot de Boinod’s The Meaning of Tingo, which sometimes errs on the side of entertainment rather than accuracy. But I took my Christmas hat (with a red ribbon) off to Mr de Boinod when I found in Francis Steingass’s Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary just such a claim for the word. Dr Steingass had quite a thing for camels, or perhaps it is just the Persians. So, mas is ‘sprinkling with cold water (the dugs of a camel)’, and sirdr is ‘a string for tying up the dugs of camels to prevent the young from sucking’. Adin is ‘a camel feeding continually on the salsuginous herbage hamz’, whereas azib means ‘a camel which feeds abroad all night’, or simply ‘unmarried’ (not a camel). There are plenty more cameline words if you look.
Dr Steingass had an antiquated cast of English even for 1892, when his dictionary was published. He does not figure in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, although he has more connection with Britain and importance for British studies than many a figure clapped between the ODNB’s hospitable covers.
So I did what passes for research and looked up Dr Steingass’s very short obituary in the Times (13 January 1903). The self-taught linguist spoke at least 14 languages. His Arabic Dictionary came out in 1884, and he was of great help to Sir Richard Burton in the translation of the Arabian Nights.
Steingass had been was born on 16 March 1825. Munich doctored him and England welcomed him in the 1870s as a ‘professor’ at the Wakefield Grammar School, Birmingham. He then joined the Oriental Institute, Woking. This had been founded in 1883 by the extraordinary linguist Gottlieb Leitner, credited with speaking 50 languages. He had married in Frankfurt am Main in 1869, when Steingass, who came from that city, was on the brink of moving to England.
Leitner was responsible for building the mosque at Woking and, to be even-handed, a synagogue, temple and church as well. His Oriental Institute, at which Steingass taught Arabic, barely survived his death in 1899. The mosque remains; and Steingass’s dictionary is still in print.
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